MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · May 16 · 1916
ON THIS DAY · 16 MAY 1916
The Sykes–Picot line
16 May 1916 — The same year as the promises to Hussein, Britain and France secretly rule lines across the post-Ottoman Middle East: “A” for France, “B” for Britain. The Bolsheviks publish the map in 1917. The double promise shapes a century.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Call it the First World War and mean it: look at how little of this map is parchment. Around four million men from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas served the European empires — 1.4 million from British India alone, fighting from Flanders to the Tigris; some 450,000 tirailleurs and other troops from French Africa; 140,000 laborers of the Chinese Labour Corps digging the Western Front (marked at Weihaiwei, where they embarked); porters in Africa by the million, conscripted at gunpoint, who died of disease and overwork in numbers — perhaps 100,000 in East Africa alone — that no one troubled to count precisely. The Dominions sent armies that came home nations: Canada took Vimy, Australia and New Zealand counted Gallipoli as a founding, South Africa took German South-West Africa while suppressing a Boer revolt at home. None of these peoples chose the quarrel in Sarajevo. All of them paid for it — and many concluded, watching their rulers bleed, that the empires were neither invincible nor grateful.
From Chapter 7 — The World’s War of The Great War, 1914–1918 (MAY 1917).
OPEN THE INTERACTIVE MAP →New here? Chapters 1–2 of every atlas are free to sample, and the WW2 atlas is free in full. One membership opens all ten — the Cartographer’s Circle.
TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — Empires wage war with empires. Why was a European war global on day one? Because its belligerents were not countries but systems: shipping lanes, coaling stations, colonial…
- The turn — The double promise, 1916. Between January and May 1916, Britain committed itself to Arab independence and to partition with France over the same territory. It is this atlas’s…
- What it changed — The empires lose their aura. A generation of colonial soldiers saw Europeans die badly, take orders, and depend on colonial labor and loyalty. Wilson’s “self-determination” and…
Then ask the room: “A European civil war with global casualties” — is that a fair description of 1914–18? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT
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