On the brink of war

[British Foreign Office]. Correspondence Respecting the Turco-Egyptian Frontier in the Sinai Peninsula.

€ 650.00

Official correspondence of the British Foreign Office relating to the 1906 conflict on the Sinai border, which brought the British and the Ottoman empires to the verge of war. After nine months of intensive diplomatic activity the confrontation was resolved in the Egyptian-Ottoman Boundary Agreement, an agreement signed between the Ottoman Empire and British-controlled Egypt in Rafah on 1 October 1906, establishing the border between the Egyptian Sinai and the Ottoman provinces of Hejaz and Jerusalem.

The present correspondence covers the events of April and May 1906, comprising documents prepared by Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer (1841-1917), Consul-General of Egypt, and Sir Nicholas O'Conor (1843-1908), British Ambassador to Turkey. In a letter to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1862-1933), O'Conor discusses a recent note from the British Government to the Sublime Porte demanding the evacuation of Taba and the delimitation of the frontier, a request provoking the Ottoman Empire to a degree that he worries "the matter may pass out of the sphere of diplomatic negotiations" (p. 6).

The correspondence concludes with an anonymous letter reflecting the attitude of the Muslim population of Egypt towards Great Britain in connection with the Turco-Egyptian frontier question, stressing that they will side with the Sultan in the event of war, given that they are brothers in faith.

Slightly creased, otherwise very well preserved. Title-page bears the stamp of ownership of the American historian George Louis Beer (1872-1920), an expert on the colonial period and advisor to President Woodrow Wilson's American Commission of Inquiry during World War I. Stamp of the Institute of Historical Research to reverse of the title-page, marked "withdrawn".