The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)

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🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

Until the end of WWI, the Middle East as we know it didn't exist. No Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, or Iraq. Instead, there was the Ottoman Empire, whose dissolution using an arbitrary line on a map set the region on a course of upheaval that's still with us. Listen as historian James Barr speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, and how, in the century that followed, the machinations of the French, the British, and the local residents created the modern Middle East and affected the lives of millions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is February 11, 2025, and my guest is historian and author James Barr.
0:42.3	I reached out to him after recent events in Syria, the fall of Assad, and I realized I had no idea how Syria became Syria, along with some other things I didn't know about the Middle East, of course.
0:57.0	It's a long list.
0:58.7	But after a little research, I discovered a book, A Line in the Sand, Britain, France, and the struggle that shaped the Middle East by our guest, James Barr.
1:07.9	The book explores how the French-British rivalry shaped the outcome of the area
1:13.2	and the region in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which eventually gave the
1:18.5	world the nations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. And that's our conversation for today.
1:25.8	James, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:29.6	Thank you for having me, Russ.
1:38.6	So I want to go back in time. We've been talking a little bit about the Middle East now and then in the last 16 months since October 7th. But we're going to take us a larger panoramic view today. And we're going to go back to the Ottoman Empire, which many of you
1:47.6	listening will have heard of. But it ends at the end of World War I. The Ottomans ally themselves
1:54.6	with Germany and lose. And so the run-up to that, with the understanding that that might happen, many countries were thinking about, well, what's going to happen to the Ottoman Empire?
2:09.6	And so I thought we'd start with an obscure moment in history, but it turns out to have some significance, which is the Sykes P--O-P-I-C-O-T, the Sykes-P-C-O-E-C-O-T, it's got a hyphen in the middle or dash.
2:27.4	James has been British, we'll probably know which one it is. But it's the Sykes-P-P-C-O agreement,ico Agreement, which started the West's ongoing involvement in a major
2:40.9	way in the Middle East. And by Middle East, we mean much more than Israel-ware focuses today,
2:46.5	but on a much broader range of the region. So start us off there if you could.
	...

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