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Background

The Arab Revolt concluded four centuries of Ottoman control of Arab lands. The Arab lands included areas from Syria and Mesopotamia, to Western Arabia and Yemen, and North Africa, with the exception of Morocco. In Arab historiography, the revolt was the arrival of an ‘Arab Awakening’ which had progressed for some time. The relationship between the Arabs and the Turks can be seen as amicable from the Ottoman conquest in 1517 until the late stages of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s reign. In an example of their good relationship, the Arabs regarded the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph as the defender of their faith, Islam.

Beginnings of Arab Nationalism

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans began a series of reforms to re-stabilise and modernise their regime, however, these were only implemented with effect in the middle of the nineteenth century. The impact of the Arab reforms differed throughout the Empire. For example, the reform movement was heavily applied in places such as Syria, Beirut and Aleppo whereas the reforms in Baghdad and Basra were more discrete, ultimately in Yemen and al-Hijāz there were little administrative changes.. In the regions where the reforms were more heavily applied, a stronger sense of the origins of the Arab national movement against the Ottomans emerged in response to these changes.

Alongside the period of reforms the Ottomans began to centralise their government, inspired by the French system of government. In doing so, the Ottomans adhered to a rigid regime which was very detrimental to the Arab territories. This disagreement over the Ottoman regime did factor into the Arab Revolt and the consequential break from the Ottoman Empire in 1916. .

After the 1908 Turkish revolution, the tension between the Ottomans and the Arabs became politicised during the first election under the new constitution. . The constituencies had been established to favour the Turks over the other nationalities in the Empire, noting that the actual population ratio of Turks to Arabs in the Empire was 2:3. . Once the Committee of Union and Progress had been elected, with a Turkish majority, it became clear that they were not interested in dismissing the previous centralisation policies of which the Arabs suffered from. .

British Interest in Arab Territories

During World War One, the British fought off the Ottoman fourth army at the Suez Canal for the second time, in 1916, they planned a series of offensives to take place in the Arab provinces to weaken the Ottoman’s resource supply. . As an alternative to these offences, the British stationed in the Middle East understood that a revolt from within the Ottoman Empire would also be beneficial to their war effort. If they were to foment an Arab revolt, the Ottoman troops would be diverted away from the British front lines and it would restrict access between the Ottomans in the Middle East and the Germans in North Africa.