Grey approves the Sykes-Picot Agreement

On 16 May 1916 the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, replied to the note of 9 May from the French ambassador, Paul Cambon. His letter concluded the British-French part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and is regarded as its official English version. The British chronology of the war records under this day the conclusion of an agreement between Britain and France on their claims to Turkish territory.

Grey made no secret of the fact that London was paying a high price. He wrote that accepting the whole scheme meant “the abandonment of important British interests”. The government nevertheless agreed to it, because it saw an advantage to the Allied cause in bringing about an internal situation in Turkey more favourable to the coalition. What was meant was an Arab revolt. The consent was therefore conditional: the agreement was to apply if the Arabs cooperated, fulfilled the agreed conditions and took the cities of Homs, Hama, Damascus and Aleppo. These four cities, lying within the zone of the future Arab state, had been named earlier by Sir Henry McMahon in his letters to the Sharif of Mecca.

What else the letter contained

Besides the division into zones, which Russia had already accepted in April, Grey’s letter contained a number of detailed undertakings. Britain was to receive a guarantee of water supply from the Tigris and the Euphrates from French zone A to British zone B. In return it promised never to open negotiations for the cession of Cyprus to a third power without France’s consent. The Baghdad Railway was not to be extended south of Mosul in zone A, or north of Samarra in zone B, until a line linking Baghdad with Aleppo through the Euphrates valley had been built. For twenty years the existing Turkish customs tariff was to apply throughout the partitioned lands, with no internal customs barriers. Neither party could cede its rights in its zone of direct rule to anyone other than the Arab state without the consent of the other.

A clause on the Arabian Peninsula was also important. Britain and France, as “protectors of the Arab state”, undertook neither to acquire possessions there themselves nor to allow anyone else to do so, and not to consent to a foreign power establishing a naval base on the eastern shore or on the islands of the Red Sea. The exception was an adjustment of the frontier of Aden, where the Turks had been pressing since 1915. Negotiations with the Arabs on the borders of their state were to be conducted “through the same channel as heretofore”, that is through the British authorities in Cairo. The two governments were also to consider controlling the import of arms into Arab lands.

Russia, Italy and Japan

At the end of the letter Grey announced that, to complete the agreement, London would propose to Russia an exchange of notes similar to those that Russia and France had exchanged on 26 April. He also pointed out that the conclusion of the agreement raised the question of the claims of Italy, which under Article 9 of the Treaty of London of April 1915 had secured a share in any partition of Asiatic Turkey, and that the Japanese government should be informed. The day before, the two diplomats had also exchanged letters in which they promised each other to maintain existing concessions, navigation rights, and British and French religious, educational and medical institutions in each other’s zones.

The agreement remained secret. According to the British official history, Sharif Hussein did not learn its full details until 1918, although in June 1916 he launched the Arab Revolt, relying on McMahon’s promises. In August 1916 Cambon and Lord Crewe, who was standing in for Grey at the Foreign Office that summer, changed one word in the text: France and Britain were no longer to “protect” but to “uphold” an independent Arab state.