In 1916, two diplomats — one British, one French — sat down with a map of the Ottoman Empire and drew lines. Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot carved up a region they barely understood, dividing territories that had functioned as integrated communities for centuries. Their pencil strokes would determine the fates of millions. More than a century later, people are still dying along those lines.
The borders that define most of today's geopolitical flashpoints — from Iraq to India, from Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of Congo — were not drawn by the people who live within them. They were imposed by colonial powers pursuing strategic interests, often in direct contradiction to promises made to local populations. Understanding why these borders were drawn, and what they destroyed, is essential to understanding why the world looks the way it does today.
Before European powers began redrawing the world's maps, complex civilizations had already built sophisticated systems of governance, trade, and scholarship across vast territories.
In West Africa, the Songhai Empire stretched from the Atlantic coast to present-day Nigeria, controlling critical trade routes along the Niger River. Sonni Ali's military campaigns between 1464 and 1492 expanded the empire to over 1.4 million square kilometers, while his successor Askia Muhammad centralized the bureaucracy, established Sharia law, and expanded Sankore University in Timbuktu. Songhai inherited and intensified the commercial networks of its predecessor, the Mali Empire, which had prospered through gold and salt trade since the mid-13th century. These were not primitive societies awaiting European organization — they were complex states with functioning tax systems, universities, and trade networks spanning thousands of miles.
In the Middle East, the Ottoman system — for all its imperfections — maintained a multi-ethnic, multi-religious mosaic through administrative structures that accommodated local realities. Trade routes, pastoral migration patterns, and tribal territories had functioned for centuries across land that would soon be sliced into "nations" by foreign diplomats.
The destruction of these pre-existing systems was not incidental to colonialism. It was the mechanism by which colonial borders became permanent. Once local governance was dismantled, the imposed borders became the only framework left.
The modern borders of the Middle East were born from a combination of secret deals, broken promises, and strategic calculations that prioritized oil and transportation over people.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement, negotiated in secret between November 1915 and January 1916, planned the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire with Russia's assent. When the Bolsheviks found and published the agreement in November 1917, Arab leaders who had revolted against the Ottomans based on British promises of independence discovered they had been betrayed. The agreement directly contradicted the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, which had promised Arab self-determination in exchange for military support.
At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, the Allied powers formalized the carve-up into League of Nations mandates. Britain received Iraq and Palestine; France received Syria and Lebanon. The borders split contiguous populations — Kurds were divided among four future states, while Iraq combined a Shia south, Sunni center, and Kurdish north into a single entity. As Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi observed, the main considerations were oil and transportation, not the people who actually lived there.
The pattern repeated in South Asia with even more catastrophic speed. When Lord Mountbatten advanced Indian independence from June 1948 to August 1947, British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe — who had never been to India — was given five weeks to draw a border affecting 400 million people. Armed with outdated census data and imprecise maps, Radcliffe drew a line through Punjab and Bengal that ran through the middle of villages, towns, and fields. The boundary was published on August 17, 1947, two days after independence — meaning when India and Pakistan came into existence, some border districts didn't know which country they belonged to.
The result was the largest mass migration in human history: 15 million refugees crossing borders in both directions, over 200,000 murdered despite a 55,000-strong boundary force, and communal violence that began even before the line was announced.
Colonial borders weren't just political impositions — they were economic infrastructure. The wealth extracted through these territorial arrangements financed the very industrial development that gave European powers the military capacity to maintain them.
Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that the plantation system fueled the Industrial Revolution through fortunes accumulated by slave owners and merchants. Recent quantitative research confirms this: the slave trade accelerated Britain's Industrial Revolution, increasing national income by 3.5% and capital owners' aggregate income by 11%.
The scale of extraction was staggering. Economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that Britain drained nearly $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938. The East India Company's servants sent home nearly £6 million from Bengal between 1758 and 1765 alone. This re-export system financed Britain's imports of strategic industrial materials — iron, tar, and timber — from Europe. Meanwhile, India's share of global industrial output collapsed from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900 as British policy systematically deindustrialized the subcontinent, regulating what crops could be grown, where they could be exported, and at what prices.
Infrastructure in the colonies was built not for local benefit but for extraction. In Mozambique, the Portuguese developed railways to transport coal and minerals from inland mines to coastal ports. The colonial wealth funded welfare states in Europe — the markers of modern development were built, in significant part, on resources extracted from colonized territories.
This economic architecture created a dependency that outlasted formal colonial rule, ensuring that even after independence, the borders — and the power relationships they encoded — proved nearly impossible to escape.
Most discussions of colonial borders focus on Western European empires, but Russia's territorial expansion created equally enduring fault lines — ones that dominate today's headlines.
Catherine the Great's reign added approximately 200,000 square miles to Russian territory, absorbing modern Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Crimea, and the Northern Caucasus through the partitioning of Poland-Lithuania and wars against the Ottoman Empire.
The mechanics were textbook imperial conquest. In 1764, Catherine placed her former lover on the Polish throne. By 1795, through three successive partitions, Poland was erased from the map of Europe until 1918. In 1783, after military victories against the Ottomans, Catherine annexed Crimea — triggering the first wave of Crimean Tatar emigration as thousands fled Russian occupation.
Catherine's expansion incorporated millions of non-Russian subjects into the empire: Polish nobles, Ukrainian Cossacks, Lithuanian populations, Jewish communities (confined to the Pale of Settlement from 1791), and Muslim Crimean Tatars. Each group's identity formed in tension with Russian imperial structures — Polish nationalism against Russian domination, Ukrainian identity within the imperial framework, Jewish communities navigating legal restrictions, Tatar displacement from ancestral lands.
The 18th-century conquests established the geographic framework and ethnic tensions that exploded when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Catherine's 1783 annexation of Crimea became the ideological basis for the myth of "Russian Crimea" — and for Putin's occupation and attempted annexation in 2014. From Catherine's reign through the Soviet period to the present day, Ukraine continues to be Europe's battleground, and the borders she established remain actively contested.
The conflicts generated by colonial borders are not historical relics — they are intensifying, compounded by resource competition and climate pressure.
In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot framework continues to generate instability. Syrian opposition groups launched an offensive in late November 2024 that reignited the civil war and overthrew the Assad regime by December 2024. Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq remain contested arenas where Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia compete for influence — usually at each other's expense. In 2025, Palestinian refugees across Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan face compounding crises of conflict, displacement, and economic collapse.
Resource competition is layering new tensions onto colonial-era borders. Over 70% of cobalt mining occurs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where UN reports suggest Rwanda's involvement in the M23 insurgency is motivated by access to cobalt reserves. Turkey's dam projects have reduced Iraq's water supply from the Tigris and Euphrates by 80% since 1975. In May 2025, India reportedly restricted water flows to Pakistan — which Pakistan called a "potential act of war" — escalating tensions rooted directly in the Radcliffe Line drawn 78 years earlier.
The Pacific Institute database shows a nearly 20% increase in water conflicts in 2024 compared to 2023. The shift from fossil fuel dependence to critical mineral dependence is not resolving colonial-era power dynamics — it is reshaping them. China controls 100% of refined natural graphite and dysprosium and nearly 60% of lithium refining. The minerals powering the clean energy transition are concentrated in territories whose borders were drawn by colonial powers, ensuring that the resource curse of the 20th century has a 21st-century sequel.
The evidence assembled across these eight distinct bodies of research points to an uncomfortable conclusion: the majority of the world's active conflict zones trace directly to borders imposed by external powers who prioritized strategic interests over human geography.
This is not a claim that pre-colonial societies were peaceful utopias. The Songhai Empire fell to Moroccan invasion. The Ottoman system had profound inequalities. Conflict predates colonialism. But the specific conflicts dominating today's geopolitics — sectarian warfare in Iraq, the India-Pakistan confrontation, the war in Ukraine, resource wars in central Africa — share a common origin in borders drawn without regard for the people living within them.
The colonial powers who drew these lines are largely gone. The lines remain. And as climate change drives mass migration, as clean energy transitions create new resource dependencies, and as water scarcity intensifies in the world's most stressed regions, the aftershocks of empire are not fading. They are amplifying.
Understanding this history is not an exercise in assigning blame. It is a prerequisite for understanding why the world's most dangerous flashpoints exist where they do — and for recognizing that solutions which ignore these origins are likely to fail.
Composed with Quarex Compose