What does it take to shock a writer? At the beginning of his study on the shaping of the modern Middle East, the academic James Barr describes his eyes bulging at the sight of new evidence relating to the depths to which the French stooped when trying to outdo their British rivals. The document revealed how, during World War II, with British forces fighting to liberate France, the French government was funding and helping to arm Jewish terrorist attacks on British troops in Palestine. The move was both supremely cynical and, as this book shows so clearly, entirely in keeping with the behaviour of these two allies: the British and French had been undermining each other in the region for more than half a century.

We live with the idea of the entente cordiale, that the Anglo-French relationship is perhaps second in importance only to Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States. But as Barr reminds us, the entente was only agreed after the two nations had nearly gone to war over control of part of what is now Sudan, and it was only signed in 1904 as it seemed inevitable that there would be a war with Germany. The agreement was also limited in its reach, acknowledging British rule over Egypt and the Sudan, and the French right to occupy Morocco.

At the time, it might not have seemed surprising that two of the world’s most powerful nations believed they had the right to decide such matters. Twenty years earlier, the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 — at which Britain, France, Germany, the United States and others agreed which areas of Africa each would colonise — marked the height of the age of empires. In 1916, the British and French agreed a similar carve-up, this time of the Ottoman Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement drew a line east-west from north of Acre across to the Iranian border, ‘giving’ some of modern Turkey, all of Syria and Lebanon and some of Iraq to the French, while what became Jordan, the bulk of Iraq and Israel ‘went’ to Britain. What might have been possible in the 19th century was to prove more problematic in the 20th.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP