The Ottoman Empire, which imploded in the wake of World War I, controlled a vast geographical region known as Greater Syria. Greater Syria had no legal basis but everyone was able to identify it. It was the sprawling territory south of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey and north of the Nefud Desert in Arabia. It included the present-day countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and part of Iraq.

There were relatively few arguments or battles over who controlled what territory since everywhere in Greater Syria was part of the Ottoman sultan’s domain. Thus, the Ottoman Empire, while it lasted, solved a problem that would bedevil the entire 20th century into the 21st.

New Statesman