History worth knowing
The Pencil Stroke That Divided The Middle East
13 min
How a secret map drawn in 1916 by two bureaucrats fueled a century of global conflict and instability.
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Show notes
Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot drew a secret line from Acre to Kirkuk using a single pencil.
The nineteen sixteen partition ignored natural landmarks like the Taurus Mountains and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Bolsheviks exposed the secret treaty in November nineteen seventeen to discredit the imperial order of the Triple Entente.
The British and French color-coded map prioritized securing oil resources and a strategic land bridge to Haifa.
Iraq was formed by forcing three distinct populations from Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul into a single state.
The Sykes-Picot agreement left thirty million Kurds split across four different countries without a sovereign state.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Illusion of Organic Borders2 min
- 3The Myth of the Inevitable Conflict2 min
- 4The Mechanics of the Carve-Up3 min
- 5The Century of Consequences3 min
- 6The Reframe: Geography vs. Cartography1 min
- 7Outro1 min
Sources
- Sykes-Picot Agreement | Map, History, & Facts - Britannica
- Sykes-Picot: The map that spawned a century of resentment - BBC News
- The Avalon Project : The Sykes-Picot Agreement : 1916
- The Origins of the World War I Agreement That Carved Up the Middle East
- Sykes-Picot Agreement
- What was the Sykes-Picot agreement, and why does it still affect the Middle East today?
- The Sykes-Picot Agreement and the making of the modern Middle East
- Sykes–Picot Agreement
- The Sykes–Picot Agreement - Wikisource, the free online library
- Sykes Picot: An Agreement That Did Not Shape the Middle East
- The Sykes-Picot Agreement: A Legacy of Betrayal and the Making of the Modern Middle East - Explaining History Podcast
- The Sykes–Picot Agreement - Wikisource, the free online library
- Sykes-Picot Memorandum - Wikisource, the free online library
- The Imperial Cartographers: Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, and the Line That Split the Sand - Explaining History Podcast
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