Post–World War I Division
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
While the Hussein-McMahon correspondence took place, Britain and France in
November 1915 began negotiating a division of the Middle East once World War I
ended. François Georges Picot represented France, and starting in December 1915,
Mark Sykes, an official of the British War Office who had come to view the Middle
East as central to the war effort, acted as the chief British negotiator. In January 1916,
they reached what came to be known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It was then for-
mally laid out in an exchange of letters among British, French, and Russian diplomats
in April and May 1916. The core of the agreement called for the Arabic-speaking areas
of the Ottoman Empire to be divided into five zones as illustrated in a map incorpo-
rated into the agreement:
- a section of southeastern Asia Minor (or Anatolia, present-day Turkey) and most
of the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean Sea south of Asia Minor (the
present-day Syrian coast and Lebanon), to be under direct French control; - the interior regions of present-day Syria and much of northern Iraq (including
the city of Mosul), to be an independent Arab state or confederation under indi-
rect French control; - Palestine (present-day Israel, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Gaza
Strip), to be under an undefined international administration, but with Britain
controlling the ports of Acre (Akka) and Haifa; - most of present-day Jordan, western Iraq, inland portions of Kuwait, and eastern
Saudi Arabia, to be an independent Arab state or confederation under indirect
British control; and - the southern half of Iraq (including Baghdad and Basra), along with the rest of
Kuwait, to be under direct British control.
Other provisions protected each power’s commercial interests in the Middle East. For
example, British goods could be shipped duty-free to and from the port of Alexan-
dretta (present-day Iskenderun on the Turkish coast), and the same held for French
goods passing through the port of Haifa.
In effect, the agreement allowed Britain and France to control the parts of the
Middle East that each country wanted to control for reasons of its own. Britain sought
to protect its interests in the Suez Canal and the principal land route between Europe
and British-held India, while France wanted to assert its longstanding trade and other
interests in Lebanon and coastal Syria.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was kept secret at the time, but became public knowl-
edge nearly two years later, after the new Bolshevik leaders in Russia discovered a copy
in foreign ministry files and decided to renounce it, along with other wartime pledges
of the czarist regime. The agreement, once revealed, angered key constituencies affected
by it: Sharif Hussein of Mecca and other Arab leaders believed the agreement contra-
vened the British promise of an “independent” Arab state; some Zionist leaders
FOUNDATIONS OF THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST 13