From the Ottoman perspective the international order in 1913 looked bleak. At the height of European imperialism, the Powers, great and small, all sought to expand their strategic and financial control in the Ottoman Empire. This international rivalry, of course, was part of a much bigger game that stretched from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean across Central Asia and the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. The territorial losses and land seizures began in 1878, when Britain and Russia seized Ottoman territory in ways that resembled a tightening noose from Istanbul. Russia annexed large parts of the Caucasus for itself and supported openly the nationalist independence movements in the Ottoman Balkans. Britain first took direct control over Cyprus, then occupied Egypt, and later concluded several independent treaties in the Gulf with local rulers who at least nominally were subjects of the Ottoman state. The British also challenged Ottoman authority in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria and bumped up against Russian interests in Persia, the Ottomans' eastern frontier. In Syria, the London government was aided by its French ally, the leading investor in the empire and its principal creditor. German investments were concentrated along the Baghdad Railway, although the line remained incomplete in several critical sections by 1914. Italy, too, sought to carve out its slice of the Ottoman pie, both through commercial investments and through a bid for colonial empire in North Africa.