Sykes-Picot Agreement partitions the Ottoman Middle East
- Date
- 16 May 1916
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Middle East
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret wartime convention concluded on 16 May 1916 between Britain and France, with the assent of Imperial Russia, to define their respective spheres of influence and control in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire should the Allies prevail in the First World War.
Negotiated principally by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and the French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot, and formalised through an exchange of letters between Foreign Secretary Edward Grey and Ambassador Paul Cambon, it allotted France a sphere across Syria, Lebanon, and southeastern Anatolia and Britain a sphere across Mesopotamia and the area of present-day Jordan, while Palestine was earmarked for international administration. The arrangement directly contradicted earlier British promises of Arab independence made in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and later complicated the 1917 Balfour Declaration. When the Bolsheviks published the secret texts in November 1917, the disclosure fuelled lasting Arab resentment of European imperial duplicity. The agreement's framework substantially shaped the post-war mandate system and the modern state boundaries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine, leaving a contested legacy that endures in the region's politics.
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Empires active in 16 May 1916
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- German Empire1871 CE – 1918 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
Related politics & governance events
- Russian Revolutions of 1917March & November 1917 (February & October Revolutions, O.S.)
- Treaty of Versailles and the founding of the League of Nations28 June 1919 (in force 10 January 1920)
- The Xinhai Revolution and the fall of the Qing1911–1912 (Wuchang Uprising 10 October 1911; abdication 12 February 1912)
- Hitler's appointment and Nazi consolidation of power30 January 1933 – August 1934
- Stalin's Great Purge (Great Terror)1936–1938
- The Munich Agreement Cedes the Sudetenland1938
Further reading
The wider story
Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire
The standard readable single-volume Ottoman history.
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