The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

The story of the catastrophic British mishandling of the Middle East – told through the career of Sir Mark Sykes – Edwardian aristocrat, traveler, writer, politician, and co-author of the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, a shady deal between Entente powers to carve up the Middle East that lies at the heart of many of region's problems today. At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to a notorious treaty, drawn up in 1916, between the French and the British, that divided up the Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in the War. Written without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier promise that the British Government had made to the Arabs they would gain independence. Drawn up in secret, a controversy has raged around it ever since. Following the Second World War, waves of Arab nationalism revealed cracks in these countries – most recently after the 2011 uprisings – as old frictions, frustrations came to the fore, leading to the situation in the region today. Appointed to Kitchener's staff during WWI, Political Secretary to the War Cabinet and a member of the Committee set up to consider the future of Asiatic Turkey, where he was 30 years younger than any of the other members, the precocious Mark Sykes was considered the ideal diplomat for the task of finding a peaceful solution in the Middle East. Continuing to the search for this, Sykes worked himself to death just two years later. Following the Paris Peace Conference, he dies aged 39 from the Spanish Flu. Drawing from previously undisclosed family archives, Christopher Simon Sykes analyses his grandfather's notorious legacy.