PhD thesis defence by Louis Le Douarin.
The aim of this research is to study the production and circulation of cartographic and geographic knowledge about Syria and Lebanon, as well as the role of this knowledge in the construction of these territories. My objective is to propose a critical historical geography of the genesis of these territories, renewed by a social history of knowledge about space, aiming to nuance the "Sykes-Picot narrative" according to which these territories would only be unilateral colonial inventions, with borders drawn in 1916 on empty maps in European chancelleries.
In the nineteenth century, the rediscovery of the Ottoman Levant and its exploration introduced a cartographic competition that participated in the emergence of new spatial references. These spatial frameworks are also inserted into new theoretical reflections on the place of the region, which is then gradually integrated into material and immaterial, international, and Eurocentric networks. At the time of the partition of 1916-1920, imaginaries and cartographies thus clashed in multiple and contradictory strategies. With the establishment of the French mandate in the Levant, the cartographic project for the region inherited the experiences of the French colonial empire, particularly in North Africa. However, the Levant also constituted a specific field of experimentation with a lasting influence on the Service Géographique de l’Armée, which was then in the process of being re-organised after the Great War. The mandate also marked the internationalisation of political and scientific fields, and the map of Syria and Lebanon became an object for new forms of political expertise.
Finally, the detailed study of the manufacture of the mandate's borders illustrates in a very concrete way the articulation between the production of knowledge, maps, and territory. By combining the knowledge accumulated during the previous decades with new studies carried out in the field, in particular in the name of the spirit of the mandate, the experts drew borders as palimpsest.