Henry McMahon

Sir Henry McMahon was the British High Commissioner in Egypt who promised the Arabs a kingdom, and the Indian Foreign Secretary who drew the line that India and China still dispute. He was an Indian Army officer who moved into political and diplomatic work on the North-West Frontier. As Foreign Secretary of the Government of India he ran the Simla Convention of 1914 between Britain, China and Tibet, and drew the McMahon Line along the Himalayan watershed as the boundary between Tibet and British India. China never signed, which is why the eastern sector of the Sino-Indian border remains contested and was fought over in 1962. Sent to Cairo in 1915, he conducted the correspondence with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, that produced the Arab Revolt. Between July 1915 and March 1916 the two exchanged ten letters in which Britain undertook to support Arab independence in return for a rising against the Ottomans, with territorial reservations phrased vaguely enough that whether Palestine was included has been argued ever since. While that correspondence was running, Britain and France were separately dividing the same territory in the Sykes-Picot agreement, and Britain would issue the Balfour Declaration the following year. McMahon left Egypt in 1917. He spent much of his retirement insisting he had not promised Palestine, and much of the Arab world has never accepted that reading. He also drew a boundary line in the Persian Gulf and served as British commissioner on the commission that settled the Turco-Persian frontier. Two lines and one correspondence, all drawn or written within a decade, still shape three of the world's more intractable disputes.

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