The Middle East – The Sykes-Picot Agreement 1916
When you first read this document, which was drawn up quickly and the map of the Middle East divided equally quickly by the use of a simple straight-edge ruler, it appears innocuous. But it is not.
It specifies the division of what was, at the time, the Ottoman Turkish empire with the intent to give both France and the United Kingdom complete authority in the area, with Italy to have access to an area it had previously claimed.
The full text of Sykes-Picot is here: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/sykes.asp
The objective was to end the rule of the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East, and give all oil rights and access to Britain and France. Mechanized warfare had just begun with the development of the British armored tank and troop carriers, as well as the mounted mobile artillery that replaced outdated cannons on gun carriages. The new artillery was still hauled by horses; the horse cavalry was still employed by the armies; and troops still marched long distances carrying heavy loads and surviving on short shrift. But artillery had improved drastically as had rifles, and the munitions that were used by both of those war weapons, and the airplane as a war machine came into use in the field for the first time, with bombardiers dropping handheld bombs from the seat behind the pilot. The development of an aircraft-mounted machine gun, synchronizing firing the machine with the propeller blade rotation, came out of this war.
It was not just the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian-Bosnian extremist that caused World War I to come to life. That raised the grumbling in European and UK governments. In 1908, Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed by the Austro-Hungary Empire. There were other influences besides that. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm, the grandson of England’s Queen Victoria, found himself at loose ends and decided to invade the rest of Europe. Apparently, he had to prove himself. At that time, Poland was part of the German demesne. To show how much things changed with the Treaty of Versailles, Poland separated from Germany, only to later become part of the USSR, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ended. But the objective of both France and the UK was to take control of the Middle East and its oil-rich resources, and that was done through the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
This is where T.E. Lawrence comes in. He was an officer in British Military Intelligence. The movie “Lawrence of Arabia” romanticizes and inflates what he did, but his job was to bring the Arab tribes together to revolt against the Turks, who held sway over what was then Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, Armenia and Turkey. He most likely knew about Sykes-Picot, although the movie shows him as being surprised by that revelation when he brought Faisal to meet with Dryden and Allenby, when in fact, as an Intel officer, he’d already have known about Sykes-Picot. It was his “job”, if you will, to prod the Arabs into revolting against the Turks, but he was only one of many people involved in that.
The outcome of World War I was the end of Ottoman Empire and the beginning of control of the Middle East by the Brits and French; the establishment of Palestine (later Israel) as a destination and home for the Jews, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the separation of Poland and Germany; the establishment of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), recognition for Georgia and Armenia; appropriation of management of Arabian petroleum by the British and French; and the opportunity that Stalin had waited for, the appropriation of Eastern Europe and Central Asia by the nascent Soviet Union, all through the Treaty of Versailles at Paris, in 1919.
To be clear, Sykes-Picot was dismissed and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which was subsequently replaced by the Treaty of Versailles. This is a quick edition of what happened. If you have a few weeks to spend on a long, involved history of this business that evolved into the things going on with Iran today, get a copy of Paris: 1919, and settle in for a very, very long ride.
Category: Foreign Policy, Historical
Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated 28 June 1914, not 1908.
I’m telling you, there is not enough caffeine in the world…. 1908 is when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sheesh! Sorry!!!
Fixed it. I mixed two sentences together. My bad! Thanks for catching that!
There really is NOT enough caffeine in the world these days.
Ex:
It shows that 11B-Mailclerk read your post. 😊
As Bob Ross always said “We don’t make mistakes. We have happy, little accidents.” 😉
I enjoyed your post. History Lesson. Thank you for sharing!
You are very welcome.
If my history teachers had done more than just mention these things in passing, we might all have a better understanding of why the Middle East is the mess it is now.
Don’t leave out the Balfour Declaration when examining this era of History
Thanks for the heads up on that.
Nov 1917 British Foreign Secretary Balfour “Balfour Declaration”
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. ”
Published in the press a couple day after the release
Land Sykes alive Ex-PH2, a BZ on your Mid East post.
Thank you. Considering everything that happened in that short timeframe, compressing it into a few paragraphs that would bring people in rather than send them out the door, it was simply ‘keep it simple’. If Sykes-Picto did not set up the events that have happened since WWI, then what did? (It wasn’t just Sykes-Picot, either.)
There were a few more crucial events that followed as well. One of them was combining the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Kurdistan into a single country called “Iraq” Why did the British do this? There was oil in the north (Kurdistan) and in the south (Basra), so they created a single country that controlled all the oil, and made that country part of the British Empire.
Second crucial event was the Balfour Declaration. Jews had been clamoring for a return to their original homeland for 2000 years, and now that Palestine was part of the British mandate, British Jews pressured their government to officially allow this piece of real estate to again become their homeland. Their Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, made this promise official. After the conclusion of World War Two, the British actually made good on their promise. It wasn’t quite as simple as all that, but those are the broad strokes.
mostly because “Iraq’ predates WW1 by about 500 years. The ethnic mixing was a result of continuous imperial conquest.
From the earliest recorded history the region from the Indus to the Nile was in constant flux as empires rose, conquered and fell.
The concept of creating nations along random borders did not usher in a new era of problems to be solved by anyone in the middle east.
Socialists and western leftists did that.
The British Empire post-WW1 was hardly comprised of “Socialists and Western Leftists.” They created Iraq in 1921, for reasons I mentioned previously. They partitioned their colony, India, into India and Pakistan in 1947, along religious lines, Muslims on one side of the border, Hindus on the other side. Similarly the French partitioned Syria into Syria and Lebanon, again, to separate two warring religious groups.
Read a History book, or just look it up on Wikipedia.
A very good quick synopsis as to why we are STILL bogged down in this armpitted sh^tholed part of the world. It’s always about the power, the money, or the cooter kitty.
If someone really wanted to see what was the cause of WWII, look no further than that particular Paris Treaty. Therein lie the seeds.
Tanks Ex! I like history class.
You get them cookies a’baking, I’ll bring the coffee you need.
Thank you!
The cookies – do you want a bodacious cookie recipe next time? I think it’s time to pony up the desserts, like that upside down pecan cake I posted a while back.
YES!!!!!!!! I LOVE COOKIES. A cookie in each hand is a balanced diet. I am low and the temp is supposed to drop into the low 80s next week. I may be able to have a makeout session with my oven then. Sister made me the pecan cake recipe and that puppy was off the chain.
Oil was increasingly being used in capital ships.
HMS Dreadnought, for example, was coal fired, but she had an oil spray system to increase the coal burn rate, thus adding more available steam for her then rather new turbines. Oil fired boilers soon became common.
As stated elsewhere, we are still cleaning up the mess of “the Great War”.
There’s more to come on this subject, but this was really the start of it.
All kinds of worm-cans opened from this.
The Great War gave us the plague called “Marxism” and it’s bastard child Socialism. The key item was a desperate Germany sending an obscure but evil schemer Lenin to act as a kind of cultural AIDS in Russia. And the plague persists still, metastasizing endlessly.
T.E. Lawrence might have faded into obscurity except that in 1926 he had published an autobiography, called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about his time among the Arabs in World War I. My own view is that Lawrence’s bio might have gotten less notice if not for the fact that, in 1899, Joseph Conrad had written a fictional account, Heart of Darkness, about a character in the Belgian Congo called Kurtz who had set himself up as the potentate of a tribe of savages.
So along came T.E. Lawrence a few years later, and he had also “gone native” but was the real deal.
An additional aspect was the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. It marked an end to Ottoman control of Egypt, and set up a strategic asset in the form of an easier trade route to support the British Raj in India. It’s very unlikely the British would have wanted the area of the Suez to fall back into Ottoman hands.
Still another aspect, sorry for the shameless digression, was that the engineering for the Suez Canal was done by a French firm, and amounted to a relative slam dunk. It’s arguable that such ease in completion gave the French unrealistic expectations when they decided to dig in Panama in 1881. Although the French effort to complete a Panama Canal failed, they were able to salvage some benefit in being able to make significant strides in tropical medicine such as treating malaria. This would later prove useful in their colonial development in Indochina.
To complete the full circle, the film Apocalypse Now was an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from 80 years earlier.
“… the shameless digression” – No, not a digression at all. What you added to the discussion is the details that would have made this too long and wouldn’t get people to engage in discussing this part of history. Thanks for adding that!
Sykes-Picot gave France the entire Ottoman province of Syria. But there was constant conflict in this part of the French Mandate due to the large number of Syrian Christians in the province, and an even larger number of Muslims, who wanted the Christians out.
The French temporarily solved this problem by creating a separate country for the Christians, called “Lebanon.” For a number of decades now, the Muslims have been again trying to push the Christians out in order to make Lebanon a wholly Muslim nation, which has led to constant wars and bloodshed, and to incursions by Israel to assist the Lebanese Christians, who are known as “Falangists.” The Muslim extremists in Lebanon are “Hezbollah,” and for decades they’ve been receiving aid from the Iranians.
This is admittedly a very simplified explanation of what is yet another consequence of Sykes-Picot, which is still impacting the Middle East and the world today.
Thanks for adding that, Firebase!
Thanks to you for starting a relevant topic that has nothing to do with current U.S. politics.
There’s more to come. This was the start, and what it leads into later puts us where we are today. It was too much for one article, so I thought it best to split it into separate parts.
Looking forward to it. History instead of politics, that’s refreshing.
I maintain that the current world geo political problems can be traced back to the failure of centuries of European Colonialization
The Tracy of Versailles was hardly a case of “let’s make sure this never happens again”.
It very much became “Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch”. On steroids.
But even if it had been something more lofty, defeat is usually humiliating, thus resented, thus to be avenged.
The Marshal Plan, I think, was a good attempt to break that chain. It did greatly hamper Communist efforts in Europe and Japan, but did not ultimately prevent the resentment of defeat.
Gah. “Treaty” not “Tracy”.
The Treaty of Versailles gave Stalin what he wanted, an opportunity to find a way to confiscate Eastern Europe and the Balkans, among other things. He didn’t do it all at once, but it was a start.
I loved that history lesson!
Please do more.
Everyone may note that Gavril Princep used a .380 pistol to assasinate the Archduke and his wife.
Starting world war 1.
So it could be said that the lowly .380 killed literally millions of people with 2 hits.
Who says it is not an effective caliber?
Thank you, and there is definitely more to come!
Poland in 1914 was occupied by Russia.