By the late 1890s, foreign investors from France were also gaining
wealth from people in Syria and special influence in the economy of Greater
Syria. As Philip Khoury’s Syria and the French Mandate observed:
“By 1900, French financial investments in Syria were
firmly established…The bulk of European investments in Syrian industries
were…French. Financiers were primarily concerned with providing home industries
with processed raw materials…”
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, “the end of
the 19th century” also “saw a considerable decline in the economic conditions”
of the Syrians of Jewish religious background “in Damascus” because “local
industries were ruined due to the growing importation of European goods and the
opening of the Suez Canal, in particular, which dealt a severe blow to the
trade with Persia through the Syrian Desert;” and, as a result, many people of
Jewish religious background from Damascus either immigrated to the United
States or moved to Beirut, “which became a large town and a commercial center.”
So by the 1890s some Syrian people began to express
politically their dissatisfaction with the political and economic set-up in
Greater Syria prior to World War I. According to Michael Provence’s The
Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, for example,
“there were two major uprisings against the Turkish Ottoman State by Syrians of
Druse background between 1896 and 1910; and to suppress the 1910 uprising in
Syria, 30 battalions of Ottoman troops were required.”
Yet despite these two major pre-World War I uprisings in
Syria against Ottoman Turkish political control of Syria, France-based banks
and investors continued to invest their money heavily in the economy of Syria,
in other parts of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire and in Turkey itself right up to the
beginning of World War I in 1914. As Syria and the French Mandate observed:
“Between 1890 and 1914 France
was by far the largest investor in the Ottoman Empire .
On the eve of World War I, her investments were more than double that of her
nearest rival, Germany…In 1913, French capitalists controlled 63 percent of the
Ottoman Public Debt; they, along with their British counterparts, owned and
directed the Imperial Ottoman Bank which controlled the tobacco monopoly,
several utilities, railway and industrial issues, and other business ramifications…
“…The Imperial Ottoman Bank, which issued the Ottoman
currency…had active branches in Damascus…By 1914, French companies…owned all
but one of the railroads that crisscrossed Syria…On the eve of World War I,
France was the largest single investor in Syria…It is estimated that by 1914
the French had invested some 200 million francs in the region, mainly in public
utilities, railroads, and silk and tobacco production…”
But nationalist Syrian activists who opposed continued Turkish government political control of Greater Syria organized a large
demonstration in Damascus in early 1913 and then
held an Arab Congress in Paris
in June 1913. And, in response, the French government’s consul in Damascus
apparently promised the Syrian nationalist activists that a large French
government loan to their Turkish rulers would only be given if the Turkish
government agreed to implement the democratic reform program for Syria that the
nationalist Syrians were demanding.
Yet when the Turkish government signed a formal
agreement in April 1914 to give French investors exclusive railroad concessions
in Syria ,
in exchange for the large French government loan, “there was no mention of a
Syrian reform program,” according to Syria and The French Mandate. So, not
surprisingly, as the same book recalled:
“…In the four months before the war broke out, the
sentiments of the Syrian reformers became…blatantly anti-French…France was
accused of abandoning the Syrian-Arab reform movement for an exclusive sphere
of economic influence.
“The French decision to withdraw support from the reform
program was in line with France ’s
imperialist logic…”
(end of part 2)
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