The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret accord concluded in May 1916 between Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, dividing the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. Britain received control of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Palestine; France received Syria and Lebanon. The agreement was made without the knowledge or consent of the Arab leaders who had been promised independence in exchange for rising against the Ottomans. When published by the Bolsheviks in 1917 after they discovered it in tsarist archives, the revelation produced lasting Arab resentment that fed into nationalist movements for the rest of the century. The borders of modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine derive substantially from the arrangements Sykes-Picot initiated.
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