Note 19 — Chapter V · PEACEFUL PENETRATION PROGRESSES

The principal bank in Turkey before the War was the Imperial Ottoman Bank. This institution was owned by French and British capitalists, the French interest being predominant and in control. It was a quasi-public bank, founded in 1863, and enjoying since then a monopoly of bank-note issues. Its central office was at Constantinople, but it maintained a branch in practically every important city of Asiatic Turkey, including Smyrna, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Aleppo, Alexandretta, Beirut, Damascus, Basra, Bagdad, and Mosul. The capital stock of the Imperial Ottoman Bank was £10,000,000 sterling. A British bank of some importance was The Eastern Bank, Ltd., of which the Right Honorable Lord Balfour of Burleigh was chairman—the same Lord Balfour who was Secretary for Scotland in the ministry of his namesake, Arthur J. Balfour, in 1903, when the British Government quashed the participation of English capitalists in the Bagdad Railway. The head office of the Eastern Bank was in London, and it maintained branches in Basra and Bagdad, although its principal sphere of activity was India. Sir Ernest Cassell’s National Bank of Turkey was not established until 1909. Cf. Caillard, loc. cit., p. 439; weekly advertisements of these banks in The Near East; Parliamentary Debates, Index for 1903, p. v; Turkey in Europe, p. 36.