The exchange of letters of May 1916 between a Conservative MP and a French diplomat, with Russian assent (1916)
Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot; Russia consented through the Sazonov–Paléologue understanding.
History · The 20th century
The Sykes–Picot Agreement
1916
Secret Anglo-French wartime partition of the Ottoman Arab provinces
A secret understanding reached in 1916 between Britain and France, with Russian assent, on how the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire should be divided once the empire was defeated. It was negotiated by the British Conservative MP Sir Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, and set out in an exchange of letters in May 1916. France was to control or influence coastal Syria, Lebanon and Cilicia; Britain was to take southern Mesopotamia, including Baghdad and Basra, with the ports of Haifa and Acre; Palestine was to be placed under an international administration. Its terms sat badly with British promises to Sharif Hussein of Mecca, and the Bolsheviks published it in November 1917.
How to spot them
- ▸Two negotiators, a British baronet and a French consul, and a map drawn in coloured zones
- ▸Blue for one power, red for another, with areas A and B for an Arab state under influence
- ▸A deal contradicted by letters to the Sharif of Mecca and by a declaration of November 1917
- ▸A secret published to the world by the Bolsheviks after they seized the Russian archives
- ▸Terms reworked at San Remo in 1920 into League of Nations mandates
What happened
The wartime correspondence of 1915–16 promising Arab independence to the Sharif of Mecca (1915–16)
The McMahon–Hussein correspondence, whose promises the secret partition cut across.
The letter of 2 November 1917 from a British foreign secretary to Lord Rothschild (1917)
The Balfour Declaration, favouring a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
The Bolshevik publication of the tsarist archives in November 1917, which exposed the deal (1917)
Printed in Izvestia and Pravda, and reported by the Manchester Guardian, to Allied embarrassment.
The 1920 conference on the Italian Riviera that converted the wartime zones into League mandates (1920)
The San Remo conference: Britain took Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia; France Syria and Lebanon.
The bulldozing of the Iraq–Syria border berm in 2014, filmed and presented as the undoing of a colonial map (2014)
Islamic State propaganda made the 1916 partition a slogan a century later.
Quick-fire facts
- •Sykes was a Yorkshire baronet and MP; he died in the influenza pandemic in Paris in February 1919, aged 39
- •Georges-Picot had been French consul-general in Beirut before the war
- •The agreement gave France a blue zone of direct rule on the Syrian coast and in Cilicia, and Britain a red zone in southern Mesopotamia
- •Areas A and B were earmarked for an independent Arab state or confederation under French and British influence respectively
- •Palestine, apart from Haifa and Acre, was to be an international administration, marked brown on the map
- •Russia was to receive Constantinople, the Straits and parts of eastern Anatolia; the Bolsheviks renounced the claim
- •Italy was brought in later by the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in 1917
- •The Ottoman settlement was first attempted at Sèvres in 1920 and finally fixed at Lausanne in 1923
- •The phrase "a line in the sand" is often used of it, and gives the title of James Barr's history of the Anglo-French rivalry
Drill it — 9 cards
1 / 9new card
Sources
- James Barr — A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East
- David Fromkin — A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East