Destiny Disrupted

INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 297

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• French Rule


• Russian Rule
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The Sykes-Picot Agreement

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PERSIA

British to take Damascus and Baghdad. From there, the British could put
pressure on the Ottomans.
At the very time that British agents were making promises to the two
Arab families, however, two European diplomats, Mark Sykes and Francois
George-Picot, were meeting secretly with a map and a pencil, over a civi-
lized cup of tea, to decide how the region should be carved up among the
victorious European powers after the war. They agreed which part should
go to Sykes's Britain, which part to Picot's France, and where a nod to
Russian interests might be appropriate. Which part the Arabs should get
went curiously unmentioned.
All these ingredients portended trouble enough, but wait, as they say
on late-night-TV infomercials, there was more! Arab nationalism was
starting to bubble in Palestine and adjacent Arab-inhabited territories, in-
cluding Egypt, and this had nothing to do with the dynastic aspirations of
the Hashimites and Saudis. It was the secular modernists who embraced
this new nationalism, all those professionals, government workers, and
emerging urban bourgeoisie for whom constitutionalism and industrialism
also had great appeal. In Palestine and Syria, these Arab nationalists not