Empire: World History - 38. Sykes-Picot: Carving up the Middle-East

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

3 characters. 2 nations. 1 disastrous deal. The Sykes-Picot agreement is often blamed as the cause for much of the unrest in the Middle-East today, but what was it exactly? Listen as William and Anita are joined by James Barr to discuss this historic agreement to carve up the Middle-East. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. The Sykes-PICO agreement is a shocking document. It is not only the product of greed at its worth, that is to say of greed allied to suspicion, and so leading to stupidity, it also stands out as a startling piece of double dealing. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William, Duremberg.

Now, that is quite a powerful quote, but what is he going on about? Well, we're hoping to explain this in the podcast. First of all, William, who is that quote from? That quote is from the great Palestinian nationalist leader, George Antonius, who in many ways was the sort of early Palestinian. Palestinian version of what David Ben-Gurion would successfully become, the political leader of the Palestinians, the one, though, who failed to take the Palestinians to statehood. And this was his reaction on discovering the Sykes-PICO agreement, which is what we're going to be talking about today,

which is, I mean, it's one of those classic moments in imperial history, which, in a sense, the very reason that we're doing this entire podcast, where the Middle East is sort of stitched up by a bunch of people who share the same club in London, who are chums, who have very little personal experience of the Middle East. Sykes, who is the main character we'll be talking about today, claims to have Turkish and Arabic, but probably has very little.

And he divides up the Middle East. It doesn't actually become the shape of the map that we have today, but it's the beginning of that process. Well, you know there's that old hackneyed expression, all roads lead to Rome. all catastrophes in the Middle East seem to lead back to this one episode where two men in a locked room decide the fate of an entire region in which they do not live. And in many ways you're going to, I think, here echoes of that sense of confusion, betrayal that happened over partition, where again, a man who didn't know an area is seated in front of a map in a sweaty place where he doesn't want to be, but he has to solve this quickly. and therefore just completely arbitrarily draws a line.

And it is literally a partition. We are talking the partition of the Middle East here rather the partition of India and Pakistan, but it is the same thing. And just as we have shown, I think, in our first series, how the partition of India and Pakistan is many ways sowing the seeds of all the conflicts which still bedevil the region.

So I think you can put a great deal of the current violence, anger, statelessness of some people's, the refugee status of others, many, many of these troubles come down to the fudge that was the Sykes-PICO agreement. Well, as usual, when we have a thorny issue like that, we like to call upon a big brain to come and lead us through the minefield. And, well, he's written an excellent book, and I commend to you, a line in the sand by James Barr, Britain, France, and the struggle that shaped the Middle East, James is with us.

And James, just on very, very basic, basic, minutes, when you are trying to form a nation or even think about forming a national boundary, there are certain things that should be right at the top of your head, should be like demography, maybe natural geographic barriers, economic viability. None of that mattered here, did it? None of it at all. None of it mattered at all, Anita. You're absolutely right. So they knew this even at the time, if you read things that were written at the beginning of the 20th century, British people who were involved in boundary drawing already, knew that you had to have some sort of frontier. And in this case, there was no such thing. There was a pencil, crayon line across a map drawn in great haste.

And in some ways, it's understanding that context, the fact that it was a rush job that explains a lot of what happened. Was that, James, what drew you to write about this? Because you spent many years of your life unpicking this agreement and analyzing it in great detail in your amazing book. What drew me in was that I had written a book already about Lawrence of Arabia. And the thing that I didn't know about him was that he was very anti-French. And it wasn't just him, it was the people around him. If you don't know anything about Lawrence, he started the First World War in Cairo. And he worked in military intelligence there.

Lawrence will be our next episode, in fact, following on from you. We got Anthony sat on next week. So I don't want to spoil him too much. Get off his land, James. Get off his land. I thought Elbeau Anthony aside who knows loads about this. But there were lots of people there who were very anti-French. And that was the thing that really interested me.

And so a line in the sand is a story really about Britain and France, but it's about Britain and France in a part of the world where you didn't necessarily know how much they are responsible for what has happened since. And in trying to explain how they ended up coming to blows there, I started with Sykes Pico. And I want to start with the person. personalities, because I always get drawn into any story by just looking at pictures. I think it's maybe the way I tumbled into writing my first book. It was by an accidental view of a photograph.

But I became quite obsessed with these moustachioed duo. So, I mean, you've got, you've got Sykes who, he says a handsome, very kindly face patrician, again with this extraordinary Edwardian throwback moustache. And Pico on the other side, who's slightly harder-faced, sort of looks a little like a skittle in a uniform, with a... with a less successful facial furniture arrangement. But let's start with Sykes. Let's start with the British side of this. Tell us about Sykes. Let's first, we'll give him his full name, because he's only Sykes of Sykes Pico to most people. Sir Mark Sykes of Sledmere House, I suppose, is the best way of putting him.

Which is a beautiful, beautiful house in the Yorkshire Wolds. It is well worth a visit. Let's start there. It's a slightly funny looking place, but it sits up on top of the Yorkshire Wolds. And it's one of those country houses that slightly subverts the country house genre. And when you go in there, you start to see strange things that you wouldn't see in a country house. Like little sort of corgi sports cars on antique furniture and stuff like that. And that is that little, I remember when I went there, it's almost 20 years ago now. But you get this little insight into the humor of the family, this part of the family. And Mark's father, Sir Tatten, was, they were baronets.

Baronet. And he was an extremely unusual man who's interesting, including milk pudding, church architecture and the maintenance of his body at a constant temperature. So he would go around putting on overcoats and taking them off to try and keep himself at 36. Something degrees. Tell us more about the milk pudding. I think that's probably as deep as my knowledge goes. But he was the master of this country estate. And Mark was his only child. And Mark was his only child. So Tatton had a very, very odd and increasingly difficult marriage to Jessica, his wife, who was pretty much half his age. And when you go to Sledmir today, there's these amazing Persian tiles and these gorgeous orientalist rooms. Is that Mark?

That's Mark. Mark inherited the Baronessie before the First World War, and he had already been travelling widely around the Middle East. He's firstly with his father. It was his father who inspired his intro. in that part of the world. And he was essentially an adventurous tourist with plenty of money. So he bought lots of souvenirs, including those beautiful titles. Beautiful titles. Just drilling down to that. So this is a man who has fondness for the Middle East.

But is he, as he claims, fluent in Arabic and Turkish, is he as he claims, a man who can draw the map of the region on the back of his hand? How much does he know about this area? So the simple answer is, no, he couldn't speak Arabic. Arabic or Turkish. But he was one of those people who went around saying Al-Hambalila and Al-Aqabar whenever something good happened to him. And so he went into it. There's a very famous cabinet meeting. We'll come on to that. But he left people in that room with the impression that he was fluid in both languages and that he certainly was not.

Okay. Well, actually, I mean, let's get into that cabinet meeting. You've given us a beautiful tea up for it. So the meeting you're talking about is the 16th of December 1915. Behind that very famous Black Door at number 10. What is going on? So they face, the cabinet faces a very awkward crisis which they had not wanted and they wanted to deal with as quick as possible. And this was over the need to reach some kind of diplomatic arrangement with France over the future of the Middle East. If we're going to go, if we're trying to explain all this, the background is Gallipoli. So going right back, everyone will know that the First World War was supposed to end by Christmas, 1914, but of course it didn't. And as that became clear at the end of 1914,

a group of British politicians, officials started to try and think of other ways to win the war. They were called the Easterners, and the idea that they came up with was to attack the Turkish Empire, the Ottoman Empire, land at Gallipoli, which is all of 150 miles away from the capital, Istanbul, and knock the Turks out of the war. And they thought that would be an easy job. John. We've had a whole podcast on Gallipoli just a few weeks ago. So there we go. And in fact, at that time, initially the clever idea was to land both at Gallipoli and at a place called Alexandretta, which is modern Iskandarant. So it's somewhere that's just been very badly affected by the earthquake that's happened in Turkey. It's the port

that sits at the sort of the kind of crook of where Syria joins Turkey. And it's a deep water port and it was very important. And the British thought they would land there and cut various communications, the railway, the telegraph, and leave the Turks in chaos. And that would make their job at Gallipoli easier. But it didn't happen because of French suspicions. And this brings in the French side of things, because Britain and France have been rivals in this part of the world for 100 years or more. The French, as soon as they got wind of the Gallipoli idea, their worst suspicions were raised. They thought that Britain wasn't really interested in dealing with the war on the Western Front winning the war, they were off on some kind of great imperial adventure.

And so the Sykes-PICO agreement grew out of this. It was something that was made necessary to allay French suspicions in early 1915. But in the way of one of these sort of bureaucratic deals, it actually way outlasted Gallipoli because by the time it was signed at the end of 1915 and the mat was signed off in January 1916, there was no chance of Gallipoli ever succeeding. That's fascinating. So it's a kind of the diplomatic and the kind of bureaucratic momentum is carrying on even as events are completely changed. We're nowhere near knocking Turkey out of the war. Total failure in Gallipoli. Massive defeat. And yet the committees are still grinding on drawing lines on maps and making grand plans for the post-Ottoman world. And the line, the line on the map. Now, is it true again, you can tell me if this is true or not, that Sykes in this meeting, this fateful meeting at number 10, says let's just draw a line.

line from the E of Aker through to the K of Kierkuk. And that's how we'll do it. Did he say that? That's what the minutes say. So the minutes of this meeting, you know how often people, when they got the minutes out and they do actually say that, Aker to Kirkuk. They do say that. Because, I mean, I once in a job I did wrote minutes and the aim was to keep them as bland as possible and paper over disagreement. But the wonderful thing about this particular set of minutes is they look, they certainly read like a verbatim account. So you get these wonderful snatches of extraordinary dialogue, including this phrase. So the thing that Sykes went into that meeting, knowing that they needed to reach a deal with the French, and trying to suggest something

that he thought would work. So he says he wanted a belt of English-controlled country across the region, running from the Mediterranean Sea right up to the border with what was then called Persia. And the idea was that would be a cordon that would keep all other come as far away from India as possible. Which meant in this particular circumstance, presumably Russia in particular, which is at that point looking as if it's going to move south and... Both Russia and France. So historically, the big British concern was Russia. It was Russia's threat to India, either through Afghanistan and Central Asia or increasingly from the 1870s onwards, they were worried about Russia coming down through what is now Iraq and launching an attack on India that way. So that was the big thing. But so Sykes comes into

the meeting. He wants this belt of country and he says this magical line or a magical appalling line. He proposes a line from the E of Aker to the last K in Kirk Cook. Okay. I've ever, forgive me. But tell me, tell me in the minute, is there not an, because this is not a, you know, a cabinet of idiocy at the time. Are there not people who then throw up their arms saying, stop being such a stupid ass? How can you just suggest just drawing an arbitrary line on an atlas from two letters? And what, what is the reaction to this suggestion? I think there's two things going on. The first thing is the context. And the context is that the cabinet is more worried about conscription. There are lots of other things it has to think about. And the Middle East is very, very low on its priorities. I think this is always the case. And the more I study imperial history, you find that huge and massive decisions happen at the end of cabinet meetings when several other things are on the agenda. And a bunch of people have no idea about the geography. ethnography, the history or the politics in place, end up making decisions very quickly that's going to

have massive historical repercussion. But is there dissent? I mean, just please tell me some people, even if time is running short in the box needed ticking and you need to move on to any other business, tell me some people saw this for the bizarre thing that it was. Definitely. So there were four people in that meeting who really mattered. And Asquith, the Prime Minister, was sort of running out of steam. I think that's the politest way to put it. There was Kitchener who had worked in the region who sort of was interested in the situation. He'd been in Egypt for a while, haven't he? He had been the High Commissioner in Egypt,

or the Governor General, exactly. And so he did know the territory, and he knew a lot of the people. And in fact, Mark Sykes worked for him. So he had, you know, he kind of knew what was going on. But so, and the other two people in the meeting who mattered, who had completely different views on this subject. Well, Arthur Balfour, who had been the Conservative Prime Minister.

There's a declaration coming there. work, carry on. There's a declaration coming there. Well, this is the thing. So the most interesting thing about the entire set of minutes is that Balfour is the skeptical one. He's the one who says, why are we trying to take over the bit east of Egypt? So in 1915, two years before he put his name to a declaration that essentially was designed to extend British imperial control over Palestine, he was saying, are you sure this is a good idea? And the other person was Lloyd George, who, of course, goes on to be prime minister, in a sense. it's the fact that these two people, Balfour and Lloyd George, do end up in a position of power, which is what matters.

And both Lloyd George and Mark Sykes are extremely religious. And their knowledge of the Middle East is really based on biblical learning. They're used to seeing biblical names on the map. They've also both gone through classical education. So when they're thinking about the Middle East, they're not looking at an Ottoman map. They're looking beyond that in the sense to their education with the classics and in the Bible. That's right. And that's something that I underplayed in my book and I increasingly think is really important. Balfour as well. A book I read makes the very interesting point that a lot of the members of the cabinet at that time had grown up in the fringes, in Wales, in Scotland. They had received very, very traditional and religious educations. They also, unfortunately, had an idea that places like Palestine were fairly empty. There was this view that everyone lived in a tent and could pick up their tent and move it somewhere else. Like there's David Roberts Prince where they just have a few Bedouins scattered around. There's always a few Bedouin in the foreground, aren't they, before the picture of the domes and the minarets in the background. Or the ruins. But it's the sparseness, isn't it?

When you see a Roberts picture, there's never that many people in it. And that's critical. Well, I mean, if you're going to crush a region, you need the two hands to clap together. The other hand belongs to the French. It's sort of a good idea to point out what their position is. So the British, you know, thinking that the Ottoman Empire is about to collapse, have withdrawn because they want to keep their mercantile safe.

But the French have been spending quite a few years filling that gap. So they have ambitions, don't they? And they're also looking to see what bits they might be able to hive off should the whole thing fall to pieces. The French, it goes back to the Battle of the Nile. From then on, from 1798 onwards, the French are trying to get back in. And even beyond that, The French are obviously being taught in their schools because you see this coming up over and over again in their memoirs and in their writings about the Crusades.

And at the end of this, when the French actually do march into Damascus, the general famously goes up to the tomb of Saladin and said, No, Revenants, Saladin. Do they march into Damascus? Is that a spoiler? Is it? Yes, I think it does this. He does this, James. He does this.

We'll get back to that. We might return to that. Everybody delete that from your memory banks and pretend that. didn't happen. I'm really good at telling stories. Anyway, let's go back, let's go back to previously, previously on this. What are the French, what are the French thinking and what's forming them? Why are they thinking of it? And why do they think the Crusades gives them a right to any of this? So, so yeah, there is that, there's that strand. It's it's easy to take the Mickey out of, really.

But there is a strand of French thinking that, as you say, goes right back to King Louis and the Crusades. And of course, the French were then given a kind of privileged position in the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. They were under something called the capitulations. They got their sort of role protecting the religious places of the Holy Land was recognized by the Ottoman. So it goes all the way back to there. But I think the key thing is the 19th century where they backed Muhammad Ali, the pioneering, modernizing, tyrannical ruler of Egypt. And then of course they were instrumental in building the Suez Canal after that. So at a point when Britain was beginning to rethink its policy, it was beginning to pull back and realise there were limits to what it could do, the French were investing more and more heavily,

and they invested in particular in utilities. So electric lights, the water company, they bought a railway concession and built that down into Lebanon. So there was stuff like that going on. And that meant that the French had more and more of an interest, a financial interest in what was going on, and they also had this bigger cultural interest. So if you were an Ottoman in 1900, let's say, and you had ambitions for your children, you would have sent them to a French school. You wouldn't have sent them, you wouldn't have put them into the state education system that was run by the Ottomans, because that wasn't very good. Instead, you'd have packed them off to a French school. You still find this, don't you, in places like Cairo,

the elite in Cairo speak perfect French and less good English? Exactly. And if you go to, so I remember going to Balbeck in northern Lebanon some years back. And if you look there, you can see graffiti from 100 years ago written sort of way up where someone's managed to clamber up. And the best thing about that graffiti is that the handwriting is French. It's written by an Arab, but the handwriting is absolutely. In the French cursing. It's French handwriting. They have learned, you know, their handwriting has been learned like that. What does the graffiti say? Sorry, I just, this is fascinating. What kind of thing? I can't remember. It's someone's name. Jean-Pierre kind of thing. Oh, Abdul and Muhammad was here. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so it's an Arab name but written in French handwriting.

Well, look, look, this is now, we've set the stage beautifully for entry. The man who I was a little unkind in describing as a Skittl in a uniform, but Pico. It certainly doesn't do justice to his amazing moustaches, which would need to be highlighted. I think it's bit scragy compared to Marx. Not that these things are important in this story, but, you know, he came off less well, I thought, in the moustachio stakes. It's the full waris. There's two long sort of sideburns. He's got the face to support it.

It doesn't have the face to support it. It's just too much. How could you support a moustache like that? Well, that's some kind of scaffolding I would have thought. But anyway, back to who is he? Who is he? And why is he here? And how important is he going to be?

So, Eniti, you said, I mean, the thing about Sykes was he had this twinkle, even if he was a bit of a chancer and he was sort of, of making it up as he went along. He's slightly a liar pants on fire. I mean, I'd go that far. He is. He was hugely engaging. He was charming too, wasn't he?

He was hugely charming. And people, you know, people couldn't help but like him, even if they knew, you know, they knew that he was, he was. It's a podcast. We can say a bullshitter. A bullshitter. Yeah, a bit of a bullshitter, okay. But a charming bullshitter.

So, exactly. Charming one. And so he was, you know, pleasant, pleasant to deal with. and so on. Francois Georges Picot, to give him his full name, which I'm sure he would have expected, had he been, if he were a listener, was not like that at all. He was, I think, by all accounts, a fairly humourless character. He was called George. So the family name is Pico, but his father was called Georges Pico. And he was a very famous sort of opinion form. I think we'd call him today. He was a lawyer. He'd written lots of books. He'd written a book about the British takeover of Egypt

in 1882, among other things. And Francois took his father's full name as if to say, well, I am the son of this great man, Georges Pico. And he went into the law like his father did, but clearly he didn't flourish there. And in 1898, and this is the critical thing, I think, trying to work out what was going on inside his head, in 1898, he decided that he would shift, he would change career and become a French diplomat at the Cé d'Orsay. And that is a crucial year because it's the year of the Feshoda incident,

one of these magnificent kind of squabbles between Britain and France that nearly went to war. So Fashoda is a place on the Upper Nile. The French came up with the brilliant idea of trying to take that part of what is now Sudan. And essentially, so they could damn it, so they could render British rule in Egypt downstream impossible. But the British who at that point didn't really control that part of the world at all since the murder of Gordon, hurried southwards, they launched an expedition. They then sent a party on to confront the Frenchmen who'd planted the tricolour on the Nile at Faschoda, and the French were forced in rather ignominious circumstances to back down.

And that is the story that was playing out as Francois Georges Picot became a diplomat. So, I mean, does that, because he's sort of famously not a great van or not a great truster, of the British. I mean, hard as it is to believe that the French and the British don't trust each other. He particularly does not. And does this sort of proceed for Shoda or does Fashoda set his mind as to what he thinks the Brits are about? I think it's a bit of both. I think that the whole family was very much tied into the French Empire. They were, they were strong promoters of it. But I think they sort of reinforced prejudices. So he saw, you know, he saw what was happening. And he and others took away the lesson from this that, you know, when you were dealing with the British,

you needed to be a lot tougher. Let's now get to the point. We need to jump head because otherwise we can talk about this stuff all day. When do the moustachios entwine? When do they cross paths? And what is, what are the terms of engagement? Between the moustachios. The clash of moustachios happens because the committee that, so Britain's, Britain wonderfully, the British government set up a committee to decide what it wanted if the Ottoman emberts. empire collapsed. This is the DeBunson Committee, isn't it? This is the DeBunson Committee. Which is a bunch again of sort of classicists whose knowledge of the Middle East is all from Omer. I wouldn't like to be quizzed on exactly who the members were, but Sykes was the youngest

man on this committee and he was then, after they'd come up with their plan, which was really to allow a kind of a series of patchwork of sort of little states to emerge that Britain would try and influence, manipulate, whatever. Sykes got sent off to India to sell this deal to people who were going to be much more skeptical about it. The government of India, the British government of India at that point, were very much believers in the straight line approach to... We've met some of these characters in previous broadcast. This is Lord Harding sitting in Calcutta,

who wants to absorb the whole of the Middle East into his department, doesn't it? He thinks it should all become under the rule of similar in Calcutta and be ruled from India, obviously. And they had great schemes. They had an idea that they would fix all of the ancient irrigation of what is now Iraq that had been allowed. to collapse and they would turn the country back into a, you know, the bread basket of India. So Sykes goes off to do that. But on his way back, he comes to Cairo and unwisely, he kind of

confides what's going on to a pair of French diplomats as he came. You're sitting at a bar? I mean, he just lets it out over a G&T or? Well, not. It's understandable. He thought they were, they were our allies, which is, you know, charming. But of course, the thing that the French diplomats do is perk up their ears and say, well, we didn't know anything about this. So we've got, you know, don't be pushing on Syria. I mean, some of this stuff is ours. Well, only as hours as the rest of it was ours from a British point of view.

I mean, it was no more theirs than... Absolutely. But in their heads, I mean, they've already, you know, it's game set and matched. They've already... I mean, this is the autopsy of a place that isn't dead. That's what's so horrifying about this. Exactly. And I mean, even...

I mean, the diplomats may not have actually thought, you know, they might have been in their thinking that Syria wasn't necessarily. necessarily, you know, shouldn't be French. So these two French diplomats send back a report, and that reaches the desk of Del Casse, the French Foreign Minister. And, I mean, he, like people on the British side, are a bit skeptical about all this,

but he faces a lot of pressure from the French colonial lobby. And in that lobby is Francois Georges Picot and the other parts of the Pico family. And it's they who put the pressure on the French and say, look, you have to stand up to... These Brits are going to... Le March on you again. You've got to do something about this. And Francois Georges Picot,

who had served briefly as France's consul to Beirut before the war, but he engineers himself a job as France's negotiator in London. So he writes his own negotiating brief and arranges for himself to end up in the French embassy. Well, now let's introduce the third key person in all of this. The Sharif of Mecca. Tell us about him, who is he, and what is he like? So he's the complicating factor because whilst all this has been going on between Britain and France, the other thing the British have been doing is trying to reach some sort of deal with Sheriff Hussein. And Sheriff Hussein claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad. He had taken over running Mecca in a few years before the First World War broke out.

But he was a rather obstreperous and an independent-minded man. you get an idea of who he was. There's one one important fact of fact about him. He was the man who had the telephone number Mecca One. And so from his sort of his kind of big house in Mecca, he ran things. But he was quite skeptical about the Ottomans. He didn't really want Ottoman interference. The Ottomans, he found out about a plot where the Ottomans were trying to bump him off.

And so the British were quietly behind the. seen sending him letters and gradually they they managed to reach, well, a deal with him. But he makes a very big demand. He says, look, if I'm going to support you, if I'm going to revolt against the Ottomans, then you need to recognize my claim to a vast swath of what is essentially the Arabian Peninsula, but territory right up as far as the modern border between Syria and Turkey. So we have our three characters. We've got Mark Sykes. with his house parties and his sort of tourist Arabic. We've got Pico and his moustaches and his suspicion of the British,

but is a professional diplomat who knows how to negotiate, unlike Sykes, who doesn't. And then you've got the Sharif of Mecca, austere, turbaned, white-bearded, and suspicious really of both these characters, but with no option because the Ottomans are planning to assassinate him and this is his best chance. So three people with very, very different interests. After the break, we'll have a look to see how this resolves. Welcome back. So before the break, we were talking about the three pivotal characters

who would form the backdrops of this Sykes-Pico line, which now defines so much of Middle Eastern politics in the world. But we should go back, James, because there's one person we didn't mention before the break, and that is Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary. because again, you know, if you are somebody who is planning, future planning for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as everybody seems to be, do you see allies in these other two or do you see rivals in these other two? What is the British attitude to all of this interest that is coming in? I think you've just touched on what is the sort of fundamental weirdness of this, which is the British are thinking to a post-war world in which they won. And in that world, their big rivals are not going to be the countries that they have defeated. It's not,

it's not the Ottoman Turks and the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians that they've got to worry about, but it's their allies. And that is the mindset that is driving all of this. So the First World War breaks out. Britain is allied to France and to Russia. But at this point in the discussions, the whole thinking behind the discussion is, after the war, we're going to face a challenge from France again in this part of the world and from Russia. So we need, need to come up with some sort of strategic idea that protects us and protects India from both of them. And who do they sort of the British trust more? Because I mean, it's kind of almost choosing between two people you dislike very, very much. Because they don't, I mean, historically,

we know that Asquith and Lloyd George do not like Muslims and Arabs. And yet we know the British have historically hated the French forever and ever. So, I mean, plus the British think that the Arabs are basically on the Ottoman side. And while they're negotiating with the Sharif of they're pretty well assuming that the Arabs will not rise up. We know, of course, in retrospect, what happens. But at the time, they're assuming that the Arabs are going to be with their Ottoman masters. Well, not for the last time. There's sort of extremely dubious intelligence coming from the Middle East before a major British military action. And I mean, they just, they didn't know. They had snippets of information suggesting that there were these Arab secret

societies that existed. So before the war, the Arabs had wanted greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. There was a sense of nationhood building, things like the growth of newspapers, for example, Arab literacy. Particularly among Arab Christians, aren't they? Because they've been educated by generations of missionary schools. They've gone to university abroad. Many have come back and founded newspapers or liberal institutions of civic society across the Ottoman world.

In places like Damascus and Alexandria and Beirut, And there's a lot of development. And Arab nationalism, if only the British had been looking out for it, was there in plain sight. Some of the British were looking out for it. But the point was, I suppose, is that Sykes wasn't. Sykes was, you know, he was a romantic and a traditionalist. He liked to go there to see the old stuff. He went there to see, you know, the crumbling architecture and the, you know, people

wearing extraordinary costumes and as he saw it. So stuff like that interested him, whereas, in fact, there was also railway line and there were telegraph poles spouting up. and there was, you know, oil concessions. Oil concessions. And he was alive to that. Interestingly, so one of the things he did, I've just been reading about, and I've seen the report in the National Archives,

he wrote a report about oil, about the prospects for oil in Iraq when he was a diplomat. Mark Sykes did a war year? 1906 or so. But do you know what happened to that report? It was just completely ignored. So he sent it back. It had some nice maps in it and it said, look, here are the places that look like they might have oil.

And it just, it died. a death. So Sykes went into the negotiation really in thinking that oil was not important. And that's another crucial thing that Sykes-BCo is not about oil. Okay. So we're back to, you know, the people now who have to make decisions. And this is largely largely in the lap of the Foreign Secretary. Like, who is he going to side with? Who is he going to trust? Now, does he have a favorite contender? I don't think he does. I think the point is about him is that he is tired, like the rest of this government in 19, beginning of 1916, he is tired. And there is a wonderful little chit of paper, again in the archives, that really sums this up. Because when the discussion

about what terms they should offer, Sheriff Hussein secretly arises, someone comes up with a form of words. And in the cabinet meeting, this must be given to Gray, Sir Edward Gray, who's the foreign secretary. And he writes on a little piece of paper, he writes, Lord K, so that's a reference to Lord Kitchener, and he goes, and then the next line says, will this do, question mark, and then EG. And this is the thing. And this is what illuminates just how at sea all these people were with the particular issues in this part of the world. It wasn't what they were worrying about. They were thinking about the domestic consequences of having to bring in conscription to mobilize people. Yeah, I mean, you know, that, sure, okay,

but what happens? This makes it all, I mean, just history turns. on the most frustrating things. So, you know, you've got a knackered cabinet. You've got this sort of three parties involved in, as I said, performing an autopsy on a body that isn't dead. But there is a missive that goes off to the Sharif, which seems to suggest that Britain will back them up, that Britain will allow them the territories that they want. I mean, is it, that it's a deliberate attempt to mislead them? Because, you know, inevitably it's Sykes-Pico is not Sykes-Sherief, is it? It will be Sykes-Picco that decides this reformation of what will be the Middle East. Are they lying to them? Or they're just too knacket to actually make themselves clear and it's ambiguous

and therefore the Sharif takes it one way, but the Brits mean it another way? Well, so this is exactly what happened. It was deliberately obscure. The wording that they wrote, and you can see all the drafts of this in English, the wording that they chose is, we won't go into it here because it's just a bit too much, but they chose a very, very careful set of words. and those words were then lost in translation when they were written in Arabic and sent to the sheriff. And they only found this out in 1920. So the British lost their copy of what was sent. I think it sort of ended up down the back of a filing cabinet. Did they lose their copy or lose their copy?

Well, no, I think they probably lost it. I think conspiracy... I'm always for the cock-up theory of history over the conspiracy. I think there's the cock-up, yeah. I think this is the British government at its Rolls-Roy's finest. and they did actually lose the thing. But most importantly, they created something where they were going to trip up over their own shoelaces because they'd set out to be disingenuous. They need, but they also needed to keep the sheriff on site.

So the thing that had happened, the crucial thing that had happened, it was just as Sheriff Hussein said, right, I want all the Middle East. They then heard this intelligence from a man called Faruqi, who was an Arab soldier in the Ottoman army who'd been taken prisoner at Gallipoli. and he confirmed this idea of all the sort of, there was a sort of Arab network working beneath

the surface. The Arabs were weighing up whether to back British or the Germans at that moment in time. So this was all very, very finely balanced. And all this sort of information arrives in cabinet, cabinet struggling to cope with it, but kind of sensing there is something really bad here. So they delegate the whole job back to the British in Cairo and just say, look, fix it. We don't care. In a way, care how you do it, but just don't let this blow up on us. And so that gives the local, the local officials a great deal of wiggle room. And unfortunately, they then, they then cocked up. And they're the ones negotiating with the Sharif. So they're negotiating with the Sharif. Bear in mind, the Sharif knows nothing about Sykes, Sykes and Pico. He doesn't know that

simultaneously or, you know, yeah, simultaneously, the British are having to deal with the French. but the French, again, get wind of the negotiations with the sheriff. And they can't believe that the British would do something as unwise as make a big promise to somebody who they think is a non-entity. We haven't actually talked about the negotiations that are going on between Sykes and Pico, or headed up by Sykes and Pico. So where are these happening? What is the level of negotiation that is going on? And at what point is Pico told about the kind of ambiguous, weird letter that's gone out to the,

to the Sharif? So the negotiation with Sykes and Pico hasn't started when Pico hears the all important confirmation that yes, the British have sent Hussein the promise. So Pico gets himself posted to London and he has a strange meeting where he is sort of on one side of the negotiating table. On the other, there are representatives of all the relevant British government departments. So it's a pretty uneven away fixture for him. And he's so he's there. And the British realise that they're going to have to come clean about what they promised to say,

because they really want Pico to agree to it. They want him to say, okay, you know, I see, I can understand that your concern about the Ottomans is so great that you need the sheriff on your side. But of course, Pico doesn't. Pico plays a blinder, and he looks sort of offended, affronted, everything at the same time. He has an inkling of what's going on, but he is also an extremely good actor.

And a very good negotiator. And a very good negotiator. And the thing that he says is that he touches on the really raw bruise that affects the entente all the way through, which is that the French have lost far more soldiers in this war so far and have Germans on their territory. I was thinking the other day, you know, if you think of the pressure that Zelensky is under in Ukraine, you get an idea of what it was like for the French back in 19. They had the Germans on their soil, and yet here were the British saying, oh, let's go off to Gallipoli. We'll fix this war, but it's going to be the long way round. You know, the French are facing massive public pressure at home to, you know, to launch an offensive to end the war. And the British are on manoeuvres. So Pico does this faux flounce, which is, you know, diplomatically very powerful. Did the British panic that, okay, what did they do?

And so the British do panic because they think they have been wondering for a little while by late in 19. 15 when this is. Do the French have it in them to last this out? You know, our French casualties are very, very high. What is French public opinion feeling? And for a long time, the British thought, I think they'll manage. But then you start to get these reports coming from the British embassy in Paris,

saying, well, we're not so sure anymore. We're not so confident. So this question over what will happen to the Middle East suddenly acquires a much greater significance. And the fear is, you know, if the British insist on there, you know, what they want, don't give the French something in return, that this might be the straw that breaks the camels back. But what do they want? We haven't even yet sort of said, in these negotiations around the table while they're sitting in front of a map, what is the

kind of trading that is going on? Like, you take Libya and I'll take Syria. I mean, you know, at what level is it being pitched? So this, it really only concerns the sort of the narrow heartland of the Middle East. Bear in mind that the bigger, the bigger question of Morocco and Egypt had been resolved by the Entente Cordial in 1904. So under that, the British said to the French, you know, we won't get in your way in Morocco and the French finally exceeded such a British control of Egypt. But this is about, really this is about, it's about, it's about Palestine, what is now Israel and Palestine, and it's about Syria and Lebanon, where the French have got, that's where the French interest is strongest. And just to add the element, we're going to talk

about the Belfa Declaration in a different podcast. But how far are negotiations with the Zionists and all that strand of things going? Is he dreaming of the Belfa Declaration already? Is Ross Child and he in discussions? So, I mean, there are certainly some people already working on that. But I think the critical thing is, and this does affect the Sykes-P.K. story. So I think we, maybe we should try and touch on it in a minute or two. But the quest, so the thing is that the British are aware, they're aware of, or they believe, that. They believe that. there is significant support for Zionism and that that needs to be accommodated in some way. But it hasn't yet become a sort of neurosis for the British.

We've established that both Lloyd George and Sykes are extremely religious and they have a very religious worldview. How far is that affecting their attitude to the Zionist cause? It is affecting it. It influences their worldview and it helps explain a strand of British. pro-Jewish policy that goes back 50 years by now. But I don't think it's not the critical factor right yet. That comes after the Sykes-Picode deal has been done. Got it, got it. So at this point, Palestine is being disputed between the English and French on one side and the Sharif of Mecca on the other. There isn't a Zionist claim on it at the cabinet at this point. Not a powerful one, but it becomes, it becomes an issue after the, so the thing about the

Sykes-Pico agreement was they couldn't agree about Palestine. They agreed to disagree. So in the map that was signed off in January 1916, Palestine is, is coloured in brown, sort of yellowy brown colour, and they agree it will have an international administration because they can't really work out what to do about it. Is this, is this really how they did, so they have a map in black and white and They've got crayons. Please tell me there were crayons. I'd love this notion in my head of colouring in territories. And although, I mean, as you say, Palestine question is not what it becomes at this point. There is a lot of trading going on over Lebanon, for example, and Mosul. Those are contentious areas. Tell us how that works. And how long is this meeting? Anyway, how do two powers carve up a region?

The answer to that very last question is I'm not actually sure. So what happens is that Pico, when into the meeting with the British when he was a raid against multiple officials, that's inconclusive. He makes some big demands. Then the British starts scratching their heads thinking this is potentially really bad if it goes wrong. And at that point, Sykes like sort of Tigger arrives in the cabinet meeting in December 1915 and says, I've got a plan and he produces a map and it's a square map. I actually, I now own a copy of this map, not the actual Sykes, not the not the not the sites became that, but the basic map on which the deal was drawn was a map that the Royal Geographical Society had published in 1910 and you can occasionally come across copies of

one of it. So I managed to get one. It's about, it's a bit like holding a bit, it's a bit narrow than an old broadsheet newspaper to hold in your hands about 70. So the thing about this map is it's incredibly portable. All previous maps, high-scale maps of the Ottoman Empire, were vast because you've got to try and get everything from Constantinople. If you're just talking about the eastern territory, the Ottoman Empire, you're trying to get Constantinople through to Basra on a piece of paper, and you need to have a stretch that's bigger than mine to hold that map in your hands. And then if you do that, even if you're holding it, your nose is pressed against the map

because you're so big. So it's useless. But what the Royal Geographical Society did in 1910 was they produced this little map of the middle of the Middle East, the sort of the heartland that matters. And the fascinating thing, this is an exclusive thing. for you, which I'm sure you'll be delighted by, is that Sykes actually helped draw that map. I hadn't realised this until now. But he, both as a diplomat, and he had done it, he'd actually trained in surveying in some way. And he helped draw the map that the Sykes-Pekheur agreement

was eventually drawn onto. So he had this map. He goes into the cabinet meeting. He announces his line from the E of Aker to the last K of Kirkcook. Everyone there is delighted that here is a man who clears to have command of Arabic and Turkish and a command of the issues. And the geography. Yeah, exactly. Because I mean, I'll ask a lot of these people where half these places were on the map. They'd have struggled. Here he is.

He appears to be in full command of the detail. Let's delegate this job to him. And so at that point, that's December the 15th, 16th of 1915. At that point, he is told to go off and fix it with Pico. and I can't remember the date on the map, but it's early January 1916. So in a matter of three weeks, they had cooked this one up.

And are they locked in a room together or what's the... I think so. I suspect that... Locked in a room with crayons? I mean, you know, just colouring in regions. So the map itself, so it has this diagonal line which runs, you know, south-west to north-east across the region. And the vestige of this is still visible on the map.

So if you think of Syria today, it's a right-angle triangle with the right angle in the top left corner. And the diagonal line is, it's not exactly what Sykes and Pico drew on the map, but it... Memories of it. That is, yeah, that is. So that's the vestiges of this line. But the two men sit there. Sykes had a nice house in Buckingham Gate. He lived just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.

And so I suspect they, did they meet there? Did they meet? I don't know exactly where they meet. they met, it's all a little bit unclear, but they had his map. You had three areas that were coloured in. There was a blue bit for what the French were going to get and a red bit for what the British were going to get. And then to square the circle with what had been agreed with Sharif Hussain, they came up with a fudge. So the blue area, the blue French area and the red British area, the best thing is to look up, if you search on the internet for Sykes-Pico map,

you can see this for yourself as you listen to this. But the blue French area and the red British area were on the coast. So the red British area was at the head of what was then the Persian Gulf, the Gulf, covering Basra almost up to Baghdad. And the French area was Lebanon and Syria and a bit of sort of mushrooming into Turkey. And then inland, the area was going to be split. And the Arabs were going to get some autonomy there. So this was the sort of this was the way they tried to square.

the circle with what had already been promised to Hussein. Is the modern Israel-Lebanon border again a vestige of this, this craning exercise? That came later, because that was thrashed out in the 20s by surveyors. And the Palestine on this map is a very, very simple shape. It's kind of, it's a sort of hard to describe. It's got, it runs down the Jordan. So you have everything sort of west of the east. of the Mediterranean to the Jordan. And then there's a sort of a kind of curved line that

carves round north of the Sinai Desert or peninsula. So, and that was going to, that was going to be international because the French wanted this because they said, well, we've always, you know, protected the rights of the religions in Jerusalem, in the Holy City. And the British desperately wanted it for their strategic plan, which was essentially to have all the territory between the Suez Canal and the mountainous frontier of Persia. So Sykes walked out, having failed, essentially. And one of the fascinating details, I don't know how much you can read into this, but on the map that they drew, and this is so, it's all, as you say, Anita, it's all in, in blue and red and sort of a slightly dodgy ochre coloured crayon, all hand-drawn. I don't think

it's even a ruler involved. It's freehand. Where is this map today in the National Last So it's in the National Archives, and it's one of those things. It's so controversial that you can't, if you can go into that, anyone can go and get a ticket and go to the National Archives. It's not on display. You have to go and look at it in a special room, in fact, because, you know, it is an object of some controversy. Look, I mean, we are sort of heading towards the end of this. But this, we should remind everybody as a top secret meeting and a top secret coloring in exercise. But there is one party that needs to be informed about this.

because for any of this to work, you need the Russians to allow it. So what do the Russians say when they hear about this grand plan cooked up between the French and the British? The two of them, Sykes and Pico, then go off to St. Petersburg or Petrograd in 1916 to sell this one to Sassano. Just as Petrograd is about to go up and smoke with the revolution. Yeah, exactly. So they go there. Actually, the Russians, I think, are okay about it because the Russians in the Russians in the meantime, want control of the Bosphorus straight. That's their key demand. So they get that. They get the British and the French to agree to that. You just dropped that about giving the Russians

control of the Bostras, but hasn't the whole of Anglo-French policy for 150 years been to keep the Russians away from the Bostras? Exactly. And the British until 1907 regarded the Russians as public enemy number one, really. And we'll so again, do so again, immediately. after the revolution? Precisely. So it's just, it's a sort of, you know, it's a momentary hiatus. But the Russians do accept it. But actually, Pico did stay on.

I'm just struggling to remember the real detail of this. But Pico tried to stay on to get the Russians to support a French Palestine after, you know. So both sides had sort of agreed this deal. It wasn't a deal. It wasn't a treaty. It was actually an exchange of letters in the end between the French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon and Sir Edward Gray. They sent letters to each other in their own language.

It's not a formal treaty. So like the Belford Declaration, it's just a letter. So it has no final binding diplomatic. What is the legal standing of this? I'm not a lawyer and I don't know. But it's an exchange of letters. So the two sides swap letters and that creates problems. It means it's an understanding.

Yeah, exactly. And that and that, essentially it's a sticking plaster. It's a diplomatic sticking plaster to resolve something, which, as we said already, is already out of date because they weren't going to, the Ottomans had proved incredibly resilient and, you know, glippily had not succeeded. And yet this spat had escalated out of all proportion. At what point does the world get to hear about Sykes-Pico? following the Russian Revolution, following the 1917 revolution, because the Bolsheviks enter the the Tsarist archives and start throwing papers left, right and central, and find this agreement. And they say, what is this, you know, piece of scarletious, perfidious imperialist wrangling? And they release the agreement. So it's known about before the end of the war, and that creates

enormous ructions. And famously, Enver Pasha, sitting in Constantinople, reads it out loud as soon as he hears about it for the Russians. And his main target is to show how far the Sharif of Mecca has been duped. Exactly. Because by this time, the Shreif of Mecca has risen up. The whole Arab world is behind him. And he's saying, look, you've been a complete sucker.

These guys are doing this behind your back. You've been had. And so he does it. Exactly. And that's exactly what happens. And that takes. So, in fact, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the people who ends up papering that over. James, well, that's very, very elegant of you because the next episode is going to be all about the man in the middle of all of this.

Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence and his experience of dealing and then finding out that the Arabs that he believes in have been double-crossed. But we'll come to that in a future podcast. In the meantime, just to finish the legacy of this agreement, which so many people have looked back on, and seen as a classic piece of British, French imperial treachery. What are the repercussions of this agreement made between these two sets of people sitting in a room in London in 1950 and 16? I think there's two things. One is very immediate, and that is that Britain realizes it hasn't got what it wanted, and that is the background to the Balfour Declaration. So the Balfour Declaration comes out of the failings of the Sikes-Pyke's PICO agreement to guarantee British interests. That's the first thing. But more broadly, Sykes-Pico comes to be seen in the Middle East as this shorthand for imperial interference. And there was a

British, the British Council did a survey about this a few years ago. They asked people here and in France about Sykes-Pico, and they asked people in Turkey and I think Lebanon and Egypt about it had you heard of Sykes-Picco and here the numbers something like one out of ten and if you go to Egypt and these countries are not directly affected by this in everyone knows you know it's six and a half seven out of ten so there's a much higher level this again is something we found throughout the series that there's so many of these imperial decisions that are barely known about in England that feature if at all glancingly in our curriculums and yet people around the world trace the disasters around them to these imperial decisions.

And in this case, also it leaves the Kurds and the Druze, minorities like this, split between two different sides of a border, classic sort of imperial mismanagement and with terrible repercussions for hundreds of thousands of people. Exactly. And done, as you said, in a very, very short amount of time by two people who didn't exactly know what they were doing. James, that is a fantastic and fantastically learned look at this crucial thing. I've often heard of and read about Sykes-Speco, but I've never heard it explain so clearly and so fully as by you here.

And it is just utterly jaw-dropping. Baffling how a few people making bad decisions in a room in London can affect hundreds of thousands of people. across the globe to this day, to this moment now. So thank you so much. Really grateful. Thank you very much. That is all from Empire. But as I said, Lawrence of Arabian next up. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Drimple.