Drawing New Borders

After the 1918 Armistice, the victorious Allies, along with violent struggles among the peoples formerly governed from Istanbul, put an end to the Ottoman Empire. This process of imperial collapse created new countries and established national borders that have, for the most part, lasted to the present day. Some of those new borders were quite literally drawn on old maps, as Allied leaders considered attempting to group peoples by their nationality and languages and to protect their own imperial and economic interests. This map from Woodrow Wilson's papers shows a proposal for a large Armenian state and Jewish homeland that was never implemented.