IOR/L/PS/10/301

The volume is a chronological continuation of File 3877/1912 Pt 1 ‘Turkey in Asia: oil concessions’ (IOR/L/PS/300), and comprises papers concerning ongoing negotiations over oil concessions for the Mesopotamian vilayets of Mosul and Baghdad, in which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), Deutsche Bank, the British-backed National Bank of Turkey, and the Anglo-Saxon Oil Company (ASOC, a division of Royal Dutch Shell) are the principal claimants.

The papers largely deal with the British Government’s concern that APOC achieve a predominant position in any final concession, at the cost of ASOC and the National Bank of Turkey, the latter holding a stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company. The principal correspondents in the volume are: the president of the National Bank of Turkey (Sir Henry Babington Smith); the Managing Director of APOC (Charles Greenway); Foreign Office representatives (Alwyn Parker; Sir Eyre Alexander Barby Wichart Crowe); Deutsche Bank board member Emil Georg von Stauß.

The correspondence covers:

• the withdrawal of the National Bank of Turkey from concessions negotiations;
• negotiations between officials representing the British Government and Deutsche Bank over the form of any concession agreement;
• arrangements for the division of Turkish petroleum concession interests between the British and German Governments, the Deutsche Bank, National Bank of Turkey, the ASOC and APOC.

The volume includes a divider which gives the subject (Turkey in Asia: oil concessions) and part number (2), the year the subject file was opened (1912), and a list of correspondence references contained in that part by year. This is placed at the back of the correspondence (f 1).