So what about the people living where Sykes and Picot drew their lines in the sand? What did they want? That they were largely ignored has been the source of much misery since. Fitzgerald explains why France first claimed Mosul, with its oil (then all potential), only to cede it to Britain soon after the war ended in 1918: the French were initially thinking less about oil in Mosul than their long-time interests in what became Lebanon and Syria. The countries were allies against Germany, Austria, and the Ottomans, but they also had their own interests and colonial agendas. According to Khalidi, Sykes and Picot assumed they were formalizing the pre-existing European financial control of the region by inaugurating a new era of more direct political control.Įdward Peter Fitzgerald elucidates the competing British and French interests involved in the Levant (yet another European name for the region). An alliance with the Central Powers proved to be the old Empire’s final undoing, leading to its splintering at the end of the war. By the First World War, the Empire was propped up by European investments. The doddering Ottoman Empire had been described as “the sick man of Europe” since the 1850s. Khalidi argues that the agreement was prefigured by the already existing economic partition of the Ottoman Arab provinces. Out of Sykes-Picot came the outlines-indeed even some of the still-existing borders-of Palestine (later Israel), Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This made their deal one of the last European colonial projects of the century whose second half saw the sometimes violent end of such missions. Sykes and Picot divided the Near East, as it was then known to Europeans, into British and French spheres of influence, with enough for the Russians to keep them happy. The Sykes-Picot deal was one of the last European colonial projects of the century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |