United Kingdom
Mark Sykes
1879–1919 British diplomat and negotiator of the Sykes-Picot agreement
A Yorkshire baronet, Conservative MP, traveler and amateur Orientalist, Sykes had journeyed widely in the Ottoman Empire before the war. In 1915 he became an influential government adviser on the Middle East, and in the winter of 1915–16 he negotiated with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot the secret partition of the Ottoman provinces that bears their names. He later worked for the Arab cause and for the Zionist cause, believing that they could be reconciled, and helped to arrange the Balfour Declaration. He died of influenza in Paris on 16 February 1919 at the age of 39, before the peace settlement took shape, leaving a legacy that his critics have spent a century undoing.