A tactic that most of the colonial powers used was to divide local ethnic/religious groups and set them up in opposition to each other, the concept being if they fight each other they won't fight us. This meant that areas that were a united people under the Ottomans found themselves suddenly split into fractions with borders between the colonial powers imposed on them. Think of it as the colonial version of gerrymandering.
Essentially how the Indian subcontient and the Indian Raj was controlled by the EIC.
In 1857, the ‘Great Mutiny’ broke out in which the Hindus and Muslims jointly fought against the British. This shocked the British government so much that after suppressing the Mutiny, they decided to start the policy of divide and rule.
The British would pay off various people to speak out against the other group i.e. pay of a Hindu priest to stoke anti-Muslim sentiments, and vice versa.
The Ottoman empire was every bit as colonial and extractive as any Western power - the same favoring of local ethnic groups over others, the same subjugation of native cultures.
> Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other one measures how straight land borders are, under the assumption the straight land borders are more likely to be artificial. We then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.
> Eighty per cent of African borders follow latitudinal and longitudinal lines and many scholars believe that such artificial (unnatural) borders which create ethnically fragmented countries or, conversely, separate into bordering countries the same people, are at the roots of Africa's economic tragedy.
> Under the Skyles-Picot agreement between British and French during WWI, Northern Palestine would go to the French, Southern Palestine to the British, and Central Palestine including Jerusalem would be an allied Condominium shared by the two. After the war, the French agreed to give up any claims to Palestine in return fo rcontrol over Syria. The British abandoned their protegee (Faisal) in Syria and offered him Iraq, cobbling together three different Ottoman provinces containing Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This set the stage for instability and the military coups that lead to Saddam Hussein. In Lebanon, the French added Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon to the traditional Moronite area around Mount Lebanon, giving their Maronite Christian allies control to what were originally Muslim areas.
> Latin America is a lesser known (and much earlier) example of artificial borders drawn by a colonial power, in this case Spain.
> The partition of India and Pakistan is [a] famous example of artificial borders
> The partition displaced between 10–12 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million.[1][c] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.
Could you provide examples of such structures?