Mandates & the Middle East

In the spring of 1916, while hundreds of thousands of men bled out in the mud of Verdun and the Somme, two diplomats sat in offices far from any front line and divided up a region they had never governed. Sir Mark Sykes was British, from a Yorkshire landed family. François Georges-Picot was French, a career diplomat with experience in Beirut. Together, with a map spread between them, they drew lines across the Ottoman Middle East. Sykes reportedly took a chinagraph pencil and swept a line from the "e" in Acre on the Mediterranean coast to the last "k" in Kirkuk near the Persian border. Everything north would be French. Everything south would be British.

This was not unusual. European powers had been carving up distant territories for centuries. What made Sykes-Picot distinctive was the sheer density of contradictions it created. Britain and France were simultaneously making promises to Arab leaders, Zionist organizations, and each other, promises that could not all be honored, promises that would shape the political geography of the Middle East for the next century and beyond.

To understand how two European diplomats came to divide the Middle East, you have to understand what they were dividing. The Ottoman Empire had ruled the region for four centuries. By 1914, it was weakened but far from dead. The phrase "Sick Man of Europe," coined in the 1850s, was as much wishful thinking by European rivals as it was an accurate diagnosis.