The Oriental Question in German Foreign Policy from the Founding of the Reich to the First World War

After 1878, German industry and finance opened up the Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire as a sales market. Bismarck succeeded in integrating this commitment into his equilibrium policy, while at the same time using the region as a laboratory for his search for foreign policy options. Under his successors, Germany's economic supremacy led to growing alienation from the Empire. The study shows that these political-economic conflicts of interest in the Middle East have so far been insufficiently appreciated in German-language historiography.