SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT, secret pact between Great Britain and France during World War I to divide up between them the territories of the Ottoman Empire in the event of its collapse. Negotiations began in November 1915 and were led by Sir Mark Sykes on the British side and François Georges-Picot on the French side; Russia and Italy, which also stood to gain, were privy to the negotiations. The agreement was signed on May 16, 1916.
As the Ottoman Empire declined over the course of the nineteenth century, it hemorrhaged territory, losing its footholds in Europe and Africa. By the outbreak of World War I, which the empire joined on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, its holdings had been reduced to Syria, Iraq, the Levant, and a swath of the Arabian Peninsula.
The empire was also dealing with a restive Arab population seeking its own homeland. In 1915–16 the Ottomans executed several nationalist Arab intellectuals, further solidifying Arab public support for independence from the empire. In response, and after receiving assurances from a senior British diplomat that the colonial powers would honor Arab demands for an independent state, the sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, initiated the Arab Revolt in 1916, providing crucial assistance to the Allied powers on the Eastern Front.
Unbeknownst to Hussein, however, Sykes and Picot were secretly carving the area promised to the Arabs into several arbitrarily drawn zones to be separately administered by the British and French. The British would directly rule one area from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf coast and thereby secure access to the Suez Canal for trade routes to India; the French would administer what would become Lebanon as well as parts of Turkey and Syria. The bulk of the zone comprising Iraq and Syria was to become smaller independent Arab states that would nevertheless fall within British and French spheres of influence. Russia, which had already been promised Constantinople in a previous agreement, was given Armenia and more territory near the Bosporus Strait in eastern Turkey, and in 1917 the treaty was updated to include Italian claims to southern Turkey.
It was also agreed that Jerusalem, because of its religious significance, would be shared internationally, but that the British would claim the nearby cities of Acre and Haifa. One year later Sykes would help draft the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain would also promise the region of Palestine to Zionist leaders in order to provide “a national home for the Jewish people.”
In 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and discovered a copy of the agreement among his files. Lenin called it an “agreement of colonial thieves” and had it published. The revelation of the existence of a secret treaty caused an uproar in the Middle East, as such an agreement directly contradicted promises Britain had made to Arab leaders in support of Arab self-determination.
After the war the Allied powers convened in 1920 at the Conference of San Remo and split up the Middle East roughly along lines drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, thereby creating the borders of modern Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. This new map prioritized colonial interests over regional identity, religion, and politics, setting the stage for a century of conflict in the Middle East.