Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Sykes–Picot Agreement was the most famous of the joint Anglo-French arrangements devised to partition the Ottoman Near East. In Edward Said’s account, it was both a practical scheme for dividing territory and an expression of a deeper assumption: that Britain and France possessed a traditional entitlement to determine the Orient’s destiny. Its map-making belonged to the same imperial order as the production of knowledge that represented the region as an object to classify, administer, and possess.

Imperial Setting

Britain and France confronted one another in the territory of the declining Ottoman Empire, where their interests overlapped. Britain held positions in Egypt and Mesopotamia and, through a series of treaties with local chiefs whom Said describes as powerless, controlled the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal, and much of the land between the Mediterranean and India. France, by contrast, appeared to hover over the Orient, periodically pursuing projects modeled on Ferdinand de Lesseps’s canal success. These included railway plans, notably a Syrian-Mesopotamian line crossing territory more or less under British influence. France also claimed a role as protector of Christian minorities, including the Maronites, Chaldeans, and Nestorians.

Their rivalry did not prevent agreement on a larger objective. Britain and France accepted in principle the need to partition Asiatic Turkey when the opportunity arose. French expansionist sentiment, strengthened during the geographical movement, gathered around such partition plans; in Paris, a striking press campaign for them appeared in 1914. In England, committees were charged with studying how the Orient might best be divided. The resulting policy process included the Bunsen Committee and, most famously, the joint Anglo-French team headed by Mark Sykes and Georges Picot.

Partition and Strategic Calculation

The agreement’s organizing principle was an equitable division of geographical space. In Said’s account, that language of balance served not only to allocate territory but also to ease Anglo-French competition. The planned partition formed part of a wider progression: secret diplomacy sought first to assign spheres of influence and then to establish mandated or occupied territories. Sykes and Picot’s work was thus a prominent instrument in a joint effort to turn imperial claims into an arrangement of divided space.

The planners also looked toward the possibility of an Arab rising. Sykes argued that such a rising would occur sooner or later, and that Britain and France needed to improve their relations so that it would not become a curse rather than a blessing. This calculation exposes the agreement’s dual purpose: the powers were preparing to divide territory among themselves while trying to coordinate their response to political change in the region. The prospect of Arab action entered their diplomacy as a strategic problem to manage, not as a basis for relinquishing their own claims.

Rivalry, Self-Determination, and Imperial Assumptions

The Anglo-French settlement remained vulnerable to disagreement. The animosities between the powers persisted, and the Wilsonian program for national self-determination added a further irritant. Sykes himself noted that the program appeared to invalidate the framework of colonial and partitionary schemes the powers had jointly constructed. The proposed division therefore stood in tension with a principle that challenged the powers’ authority to decide other peoples’ political futures.

Said places the agreement within an epistemological framework as well as a diplomatic one. Despite their differences, Britain and France conceived the Orient as a unified geographical, cultural, political, demographic, sociological, and historical entity over whose destiny they believed they had traditional rights. In that view, the region’s value was defined in European terms, and European science, scholarship, understanding, and administration claimed credit for having made it what it was. Partition was not simply a response to an empty space on a map: it depended on a way of seeing the Orient as an object available for European definition and rule.

Knowledge, Representation, and Historical Significance

The agreement’s logic echoes the broader practices of modern Orientalism described by Said. In Napoleon’s Egyptian project, colonial occupation and scholarship worked together to classify and record the region, converting living realities into textual objects and presenting knowledge acquired under domination as a contribution to learning. The Description de l’Égypte could then displace Egyptian history with a record that identified itself with world history understood as European history. In this wider context, the partition of Ottoman territory and the scholarly representation of the Orient were related forms of European authority: one arranged political space, while the other claimed the power to explain it.

Said’s comparison of the Description with the chronicles of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti clarifies what such authority could obscure. The massive work of French scholars, backed by a conquering army, dwarfed the testimony of a writer describing the invasion from the position of the invaded. Their accounts did not represent neutral, equivalent views: the French record served a powerful effort to hold Egypt within the imperial orbit, while al-Jabarti’s account registered the cost of invasion. Read against that contrast, the Sykes–Picot project belongs to a history in which European powers not only divided territories but claimed the authority to define the history and political meaning of the people who lived there.

Said does not attempt to recount the entire contested history of the Near East as its fate was negotiated among the powers, local dynasties, nationalist movements, and Zionists. His emphasis is instead on the framework that made such negotiations possible: Europe’s belief that the Orient was a coherent region whose future could properly be shaped from outside. The agreement’s historical significance lies in how it made that belief legible as policy, even as the challenge of national self-determination exposed the instability of the powers’ partitionary design.