The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)

James Barr: So, I think before we get to Sykes-Picot, you were just saying Russ about the Ottoman Empire. And, the Ottomans ruled--at the beginning of the First World War, they still ruled the central Middle East. So, by that I'm thinking of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and going down the sort of edges of the Arabian Peninsula. So, that's--from their capital in Istanbul, they controlled the whole region of what was a part of the Arab world.

They joined the Germans, as you said, in the First World War. And, the Germans convinced the Ottoman Sultan to declare a Holy War against, well, Britain and France, but really this was angled at the British. Because the British had significant Muslim populations in Egypt, which they had run since 1882, which they seized in 1882; and also in India. And, India was a really big part of this story, even though it's off the map, because India was pretty much the most important British colony at that time.

James Barr: It is run by the Turks, but it's a multi-ethnic Empire, and it still is. Although it has become a lot more Turkish in the run-up to the First World War, and there's the sort of--yeah, there's a kind of Turkish ideology now. Which makes some of the Arab subjects of that Empire feel increasingly like second-class citizens. And, I guess we'll probably come back to that in a minute.

But so, the key thing is the First World War starts. Famously, it was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914, and of course it wasn't. The whole war became bogged down on both the Eastern and the Western Fronts.

And, in Britain, people started to think, 'Well, how do we win this war?' And, there was a group of people who were known as the Easterners who believed that one option was to attack the Ottoman Empire, because the prevailing view by the beginning of the 20th century was that the Ottomans were the 'Sick man of Europe.' They'd already lost a chunk--they used to have an empire that extended well into the Balkans in Eastern Europe, but they gradually lost those possessions over the previous quarter of a century or so. And so, the British view, or the view amongst this faction inside the British government, was that the Ottomans would be easy to knock out of the war.

So, the idea they came up with was to attack Gallipoli, which is on the Dardanelles Peninsula. So, that's the very narrow straits south of Constantinople, leading from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara towards the Black Sea. And, that's about 150 miles from Constantinople, or Istanbul as I should call it.

So, the idea was: Grab the Ottomans by the throat, defeat them, and then march into Istanbul, and then that would be the Ottomans out of the war. And, that would enable the British and the Allies to open up a new front in Southern Europe and force the Germans to disperse their efforts. So, that was the aim of the thing.

But as you said, of course what that did--rather prematurely--was encourage a discussion about what would happen to the Ottoman Empire once this had happened. And, bearing in mind this was assumed that it wasn't going to be too difficult to achieve.

The British, in true British form, formed a committee which set out to try and investigate options: What could happen to the Ottoman Empire? And, there was a man called Mark Sykes on this committee, and he was in his mid-30s. He had been elected a Member of Parliament for the east coast port of Hull in 1911, but he'd made his name already as an expert on the Ottoman Empire. So, he'd written about it. He'd worked for the British Ambassador in the British Embassy in Istanbul before the war. And, he'd written a couple of big, thick books on the subject and traveled pretty widely. And, he was a member of the landed gentry. His father was Sir Tatton Sykes. He was a devotee famously of church architecture, milk pudding, and keeping his body at a constant temperature. And, Mark Sykes was his only son--the only son of this slightly eccentric character.

And Sykes, really by force of personality--he was a twinkly man--he was quite convincing, and he took on a lot of the work of the committee because he essentially had time on his hands. And, it was he who eventually became the British negotiator of what became the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

The reason the Agreement comes about is that the French find out about what the British are thinking of. They also find out that Britain had, during this time, had made a promise to the Arabs as well. Because of the jihad that I mentioned, the British were very worried about the possibility of a Holy War. And, the way that they decided they would blunt that was by encouraging the ruler of Mecca--the axis point of the Islamic world--to rise up against the Ottomans.

So, the Ottomans controlled Mecca--in theory, but not really. They didn't really have a particularly tight hold on it. And, they persuaded Sharif Hussein--who, he himself claimed he was a descendant of Muhammad--they persuaded him to rise up in 1916. But, to do that, they made him this big--rather vague--but they made him quite a big promise.

Well, the French found out about that promise through rather nefarious ways. And, once they discovered that, they then forced the question of what would happen to the Ottoman Empire, because they were worried about their own interests.

And, we should talk a bit about those interests. Because, the French had gradually--they had influence in the Ottoman Empire going way, way back, going right back to sort of the 1500s where the Ottoman Sultan at the time had acknowledged that they were the representatives of Christians living in what we think of as the Holy Land--or what Christians think of as the Holy Land--in Israel, Palestine now. And, the French had quite significant cultural influence in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, mainly through monastic organizations and institutions, which provided education.

And, a French education--if you could be taught by the monks of one of these monasteries--if you were an Ottoman at that time, that was pretty good. That was better than an Ottoman state education. And so, if you were an aspiring Ottoman, sort of a middle class Ottoman with aspirations, then you would send your children off to a French school where they learn French and they would be taught in the French way. So, the French had this sort of influence through that, primarily in what we now think of as Lebanon and Syria, and they wanted the British to acknowledge that position that they had.