Abstract

This thesis explores how the perception of race, influenced by Enlightenment concepts of the nation and the political, was deployed as an operative category by the British Empire in nineteenth century Palestine. It will show how a racialized political hierarchy was substantiated through the humanitarian rhetoric of “protection” of minorities in late Ottoman Palestine. This line of thinking would be appropriated by the British Empire again in the twentieth century, and guided British policy-makers, such as the man under discussion in this thesis, Sir Mark Sykes. By studying Sykes’ diplomatic decisions as the “British expert of the Middle East” throughout World War I, which engendered the creation of new nation-states based on ethno-national lines in the former Ottoman territories, this thesis shows how a process laid out by proto-Zionists and British officials in the nineteenth century, culminated with the espousal of the Balfour Declaration in November, 1917. The declaration guaranteed British support for the “Jewish National Home” as a fulfillment of emancipation, but paradoxically erased Palestinians not only from a new international political reality, but from historical narratives as well.