The Sykes-Picot Agreement’s Regional Moment: Drawing Lines of Development in a New and Open Space

Karin Loevy

doi:10.1017/s2398772300002920

Abstract

What was the geopolitical scale of the Sykes-Picot agreement (May 1916)? What did the British and French mid-level officials who drew lines on its maps imagine as the territorial scope of their negotiations? This essay claims that the Sykes-Picot agreement cannot be understood strictly as the beginning of a story about territorial division in the Middle East, but also as an end of a story of perceived regional potency. Rather than a blueprint for what would later become the postwar division of the region into artificially created independent states, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still based on a powerful vision of a broad region that is open for a range of developmental possibilities. This forgotten regional aspect of the Middle East’s colonial history should be revisited today in view of the disintegration of its more obvious legacies. Perhaps the significance of the Sykes Picot agreement is not strictly the enduring impact of its “lines in the sand” but rather the light it sheds on the roots of a more regional oriented system.

Highlights

What was the geopolitical scale of the Sykes-Picot agreement (May 1916)? What did the British and French mid-level officials who drew lines on its maps imagine as the territorial scope of their negotiations? This essay claims that the Sykes-Picot agreement cannot be understood strictly as the beginning of a story about territorial division in the Middle East, and as an end of a story of perceived regional potency
Rather than a blueprint for what would later become the postwar division of the region into artificially created independent states, the Sykes-Picot agreement was still based on a powerful vision of a broad region that is open for a range of developmental possibilities
On Thursday, December 17, 1915 a meeting was held at 10 Downing Street where Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Mark Sykes was called to give evidence on the Arab Question before the War Committee:1 “You have been very recently in this part of the world: where have you been?” asked the Prime Minister; Mark Sykes replied laying out a vast tour of the region’s distances: I went to Sofia for a short time, to the Headquarters at the Dardanelles

Summary

Introduction

This essay claims that the Sykes-Picot agreement cannot be understood strictly as the beginning of a story about territorial division in the Middle East, and as an end of a story of perceived regional potency.

Results

Conclusion