Until the early years of the twentieth century there were no defined frontiers in the Arabian peninsula. Indeed, the very concept of territorial sovereignty in the Western sense was unknown there. While those parts of Arabia which were under real or nominal Turkish suzerainty – the Hijaz, Yemen, Kuwait and al-Hasa – were classed as one or other of the administrative units of the Ottoman empire (a vilayet, a sanjaq, a mutassarifate or a qaza), their actual boundaries had never been fixed. Elsewhere in the peninsula there was not even the pretence of frontier delimitation.

The original impulse for the determination of territorial frontiers in Arabia derived from the increasingly strained nature of Anglo-Turkish relations in the first decade of the twentieth century, caused in large degree by growing German involvement in the affairs of the Ottoman empire. A succession of tribal disturbances on the marches of the Turkish vilayet of Yemen and the Aden Protectorate in the opening years of the decade convinced the local British authorities and their superiors in London of the necessity to reach agreement with the Sublime Porte over the limits of their respective jurisdictions in south-western Arabia. An Anglo-Turkish frontier commission was duly appointed, and between 1903 and 1905 the commissioners drew up a series of protocols defining the Yemen-Aden frontier from the Red Sea coast to the edge of the great southern desert. (see Map 1)

On the opposite side of the peninsula the Porte had been endeavouring to consolidate and extend its hold over the shaikhdom of Kuwait, over the province of al-Hasa to the southward, and over the shaikhdom of Qatar further east. Britain objected to the extension of Turkish control on the grounds that it would interfere with her policing of the Gulf 's waters, and complicate her treaty relations with Kuwait, Bahrain and the Trucial Shaikhdoms. Strategic considerations, connected principally with the proposed Berlin to Baghdad railway and its effect upon the defence of India on the north-west, also played a major part in determining Britain's attitude.

Beginning in 1910, the British and Turkish governments embarked upon a protracted series of negotiations to settle the outstanding differences between them over a number of issues, among them the Baghdad railway, freedom of navigation on the Tigris and the Euphrates, customs dues within the Ottoman empire, the grant of an oil concession by the Porte, and, not least, the definition of their respective interests in the Gulf region. Negotiations over several of these issues were still going on when war between the two sides broke out in 1914.