LOEVY MACRO (DO NOT DELETE) 4/2/2018 10:42 AM RAILWAYS, PORTS, AND IRRIGATION: THE FORGOTTEN REGIONAL LANDSCAPE OF THE SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT Karin Loevy ABSTRACT What was the geo-political scale of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916? What did the British and French mid-level officials who drew lines on its maps imagine as the territorial scope of their negotiations? This Article claims that the Sykes-Picot Agreement cannot be understood strictly as the beginning of a story about territorial division in the Middle East, but also as an end to a story of perceived regional potency. Rather than a blueprint for what would later become the post-war division of the region into artificially created independent states, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was still based on a powerful vision of a broad region that is open for a range of developmental possibilities. Part II of this Article outlines the prewar regional landscape of the agreement in ideas and practices of colonial development in Ottoman territories. Part III outlines the agreement’s war-time regional landscape in inter-imperial negotiations and in the more intimate drafting context, and locates the Sykes-Picot Agreement within a “missed” moment of regional development. I. INTRODUCTION: OPENING TERRITORIAL SPACE ............................ 288 A. Preface: December 1915, at 10 Downing Street .................... 288 B. A Forgotten Regional Landscape ........................................... 290 C. The Sykes-Picot Agreement: A Region Opening-Up for Development ........................................................................... 291 II. PRE-WAR HISTORY OF THE SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT ................. 296 A. The Context of the Agreement in Pre-war Colonial JSD Program Manager, IILJ Visiting Scholar New York University School of Law; 22 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10001,
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