In 1886, a French engineer named Emile Eude proposed an ambitious plan for expanding commerce and agriculture in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, a region then under Ottoman rule. He envisioned the digging of a canal that would connect the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, thereby reorienting global steamship commerce away from the Suez Canal and toward the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The Indo-European Canal,as Eude dubbed his project, was one of several existing schemes aiming to revive what in previous centuries had been a heavily trafficked overland trade route connecting Europe and Asia by applying industrial technology such as steamships and railways. However, Eude's proposed canal would have a distinguishing feature: it would also expand irrigation throughout the Tigris-Euphrates valley by requiring the Ottoman government to cede uncultivated lands along the canal's path to a company that would develop them in exchange for a concession for the canal's completion. As Eude argued, this dual-purpose canal would ensure that "life would be reborn in these regions," which were "formerly the richest of the world" but had since been "struck by sterility because they lack water." Among such regions, Eude counted the vast alluvial plains stretching from Baghdad to Basra in the southern reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, a geographic region that the Ottomans often referred to as Iraq. He also lamented that this region, which he believed to have once prospered under the stewardship of the ancient Babylonians and their superior water management skills, had become "nothing but an uncultivated desert, despite the amazing fertility of its soil."
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