• DOI:10.1086/244937
• Corpus ID: 144249048

France's Middle Eastern Ambitions, the Sykes-Picot Negotiations, and the Oil Fields of Mosul, 1915-1918

@article{Fitzgerald1994FrancesME,
  title={France's Middle Eastern Ambitions, the Sykes-Picot Negotiations, and the Oil Fields of Mosul, 1915-1918},
  author={Edward Peter Fitzgerald},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1994},
  volume={66},
  pages={697 - 725}
}

• E. Fitzgerald
• Published 1 December 1994
• History
• The Journal of Modern History

One of the puzzles of the territorial settlement in the Middle East after the First World War is France's surrender of its diplomatic claim to the Mosul region of Iraq. A remote province on the eastern marches of the Ottoman Empire, Mosul (al-Mawsil) was considered a promising area for oil exploration.' France's feeble petroleum industry possessed no overseas production facilities, and a gasoline crisis during the winter of 1917-18 had heightened awareness of the military significance of dependence on foreign-controlled sources of supply. Meanwhile, the Sykes-Picot negotiations on the postwar partition of Ottoman territory had apparently gained Mosul for future French control, and this accord was formally ratified by Paris and London in May 1916. Thus France possessed both a need for Mosul's anticipated oil reserves plus an incontrovertible diplomatic claim to the area. Yet three weeks after the war ended, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau abandoned France's rights to Mosul and ceded control of all northern Mesopotamia to Britain. The "Mosul cession" was agreed during a private conversation between Clemenceau and David Lloyd George at the French embassy in London on Sunday, December 1, 1918. No aide-memoire committed this bargain to paper, nor was it mentioned in the official record of the Allied talks that took place at Downing Street during the following two days.2 However, enough