Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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and maintenance of the imperial defence policy did not consume so much

of the empire’s ﬁscal, industrial, human and economic resources that the

act of producing imperial defence altered the very fabric of what was being

protected.

Therefore, due to this diversity in the factors contributing to

the management of imperial defence, and the corresponding ebbs and

ﬂows of the idea of imperial defence within the totality that was empire as a

whole, the idea of imperial defence has often been erroneously identiﬁed

by some historians as more a myth than reality.

This case of strategic ﬂuctuation raises a difﬁcult methodological ques-

tion for those wishing to ascertain the centrality of the concept of imperial

defence to the idea of Britishness: Does one measure the actions and phys-

ical appendages of the action of providing imperial defence, or, does one

have to locate the resting place of the idea and visions of imperial defence

within the imperial psyche in order to judge how valued the idea was?

The measuring of the manifestations of imperial defence is by far the

more obvious path to take. One can approach such a topic from a statisti-

cal and scientiﬁc standpoint.

Measuring coaling stations, numbers of naval

units, money spent on armies and navies, how, when and where those mili-

tary units were to ﬁght, foreign policies constructed to protect geographic

interests or strategic nations in the global balance of power system are only

some of the more familiar elements exposed to the historian’s quest to ﬁnd

the primacy of imperial considerations in Britain’s national security policy.

Less obvious, and more revealing, is attempting to interrogate the minds of

the men who made those decisions. What view of the world condition, and

in particular the imperial condition, did they hold at the time of the

making of a particular decision?

What aspects of the impact of empire on

ﬁnance, society, religion, culture, civilization did these men hold to the

fore as they spent more money on squadrons, regiments or bases? The

trick of the matter is that, in order to understand imperial defence in its

totality, the investigator is required to be able to follow both streams and

overlay them as he or she goes. Only then is it possible to speak of imperial

defence, the idea and action.

And, it is the amalgamation of those two

paths that provides the explanation of Britishness that was imperial

defence and is still a large part of the British national security character.

In terms of the action or implementation elements of imperial defence,

the Royal Navy (RN) holds primacy of place. The RN was not only the

most important wielder of military power throughout this entire century

but also played a crucial role in the construction of imperial defence, ﬁscal

and foreign policies.

The RN before 1914 was the one true guardian of

the empire, with responsibility for safeguarding the far-ﬂung lines that

were the vital sea lines of communication that linked the global empire

into a coherent whole. Inculcated into the national identity of the nation

and empire as a whole, the RN was intellectually, physically, symbolically

and intuitively regarded as the embodiment of the martial nature of impe-

rial defence. Tied to a web of industrial and economic interests, through

2 G. Kennedy

its procurement, manpower, budgetary, and basing needs, the RN was big

business for both metropolitan Britain and imperial possessions alike.

After 1914, this role was challenged by the new technological aspirations

of the Royal Air Force (RAF) to be the guarantor of imperial defence.

However, the short-term effects of the application of air power, as well as

the technical limitations of aircraft in that era, in conjunction with the

geo-strategic realities of sea-power to the British Empire meant that the

RN never lost its dominant position amongst the services as the primary

service responsible for providing the physical protection of the empire.

Challenges to the RN from various parts of the empire itself, in the guise

of colonial and dominion nationalism, saw difﬁculties arise as to questions

of provision of forces, payment for forces and allocation of units after First

World War. However, despite these modest, emotive and at times irra-

tional demands for “independence” of action in naval matters, the reality

for the large dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa and New

Zealand was that their own marginal efforts made no sense without the RN

as the mainstay and underpinning factor of any maritime defence strategy.

Technical training, equipment, doctrine and a plethora of other assets had

to be provided by the RN if these other “national” units were to survive in

any sort of professional naval form. This predominance went unchal-

lenged in any serious fashion until the age of the atomic bomb. In the

nuclear age following the end of the Second World War, all navies were

suspect and all national security strategies in need of rethinking. Even so,

the RN in the ﬁrst decade following the conclusion of the war clung tight

to its title of predominant service.

The British Army, until the dire needs of the First World War changed

the strategic circumstances, was always a second sister. Enjoying spurts of

support in the pre-First World War period, the army found its salvation in

the idea of imperial defence. Never able to ﬁnd political or economic

support as a rival to massive European armies, the British Army existed to

garrison the empire, usually in a post situated primarily to provide a major

base for the RN.

As well, in India the acquisition and control of the jewel

of empire allowed a bigger army to be maintained away from the home

shires. Maintained in a cheaper economy, with easy access to manpower

and the rudimentary elements necessary for the creation and mainte-

nance of a modest army, the Indian Army was a pivotal part of the British

Army’s imperial defence capability. Geographically central, but a political

and ethnic risk, the Indian Army enjoyed a roller-coaster existence with its

Camberly brethren. The two world wars were anomalies for the relation-

ship between the empire and the British Army.

Imperial defence in these two wars worked as it was supposed to, in that

the centre core provided the bulk of the manpower, money, technology

and command, while the periphery contributed as much manpower,

ﬁnance and industry as it could. In each case, the beholdenness of the

periphery to the core, in terms of the British Army, was eroded. In the

Introduction 3

Boer War, colonial troops happily served under tactical command of

British ofﬁcers. By the First World War, operational command, with stra-

tegic input into the war’s direction and the British Army’s use were con-

ditions demanded by the periphery if their units were to be part of the

army. Tactical and operational prowess, combined with growing national

military cultures that thrived on the failure and “donkey” images of the

British Army, manifested themselves in the inter-war into an even greater

political factor in the negotiations regarding what price the core would

have to pay for the periphery’s contribution in the next European war. By

the end of the Second World War, all major dominions possessed ﬁrst-rank

armies. Modelled, trained, equipped in most part and incorporating cen-

turies of tradition not available in their own national existences, these

dominions armies were now full-ﬂedged, independent appendages of the

British Army. These armies could now protect, of their own accord, the

periphery of the empire. However, the process of conﬂict, alliances and

changing global balances of power, which had created the wherewithal for

the creation of these peripheral copies of the British Army, also helped to

cause a questioning of the need for empire at all any more in the post-

Second World War world. India and her vast military value left ﬁrst, with its

leaving quickly followed by a less obvious but no less deliberate turning

away from the British Army by Australia and Canada towards closer ties

with the American military community. By 1956 the British Army, now con-

structed primarily for operations in Germany against the Soviet Union,

looked more like Wellington’s Army than it did the armies of 1914 or 1939.

The Continental Commitment had triumphed over imperial defence.

The RAF came late to the game of imperial defence, and its interest in

things imperial was also ﬂeeting. The interwar period saw Hugh Trenchard

and other proponents of an independent RAF use the fear of spiralling

imperial policing costs to argue for the utility of air power for fulﬁlling that

role. But the lure of strategic bombing was already the mainstay of the

newest military service, and, unlike the RN, or even the British Army, the

RAF never subsumed the role of imperial defender into its service identity.

Pushed to the fore of the defence services funding competition through

acts of metropolitan defence performed by Fighter Command and the stra-

tegic bombing of Germany in the Second World War, the RAF left the

rationale of imperial defence quickly behind. The atomic age was also the

Air Age, and all small wars and minor roles were seen as either an annoy-

ance or an interesting sidelight in the post-Second World War RAF world.

Indeed, attempts to harness the new technologies of atom bomb and

bomber focused some of their wrath on the RN itself, as the RAF moved to

assert itself as the only defender of the British faith. But, by 1936, the RAF

was unable to deﬁne what the faith was. Grudgingly forced at times to con-

tinue to have to contribute to imperial missions, the post-1945 RAF con-

tinued to focus primarily on the strategic defence and bombing doctrines

that had won it such prominence in the Second World War and paid no

4 G. Kennedy

serious attention to the question of air power and the retention of air

power in the decade following the end of the war.

Underpinning these military services, as well as the diplomatic, eco-

nomic and ﬁscal power that accompanied them in the imperial defence

system, was an extensive system of intelligence provisioning. Information

and intelligence-gathering and processing were areas in which the Army,

Navy and Air Force provided their own specialist technological, tactical,

operational and strategic intelligence. These systems were fed into, and

were supplemented when required, by the intelligence created by the

Foreign Ofﬁce, Treasury, Board of Trade, Department of Overseas Trade

and a plethora of other governmental departments. The varied intelli-

gence apparatus available in the colonies and dominions, some run by

central British agencies, many not, also fed into this web of information-

gathering and processing. As well, intelligence from private sources, such

as missionaries, journalists, bankers, shippers, police agencies, and so on,

who operated in the far-ﬂung parts of the empire, all contributed to this

precursor of the Information Age. Information gathered from this

complex and highly organized system, but at times mismanaged, was trans-

mitted by state-of-the-art telegraph and telephone cable systems that were

the envy of the rest of the world. Radio systems, cryptography and code-

breaking were also vital parts of the evolution of the world’s most

sophisticated information-gathering and processing system. Without such

abilities, the blockade of the First World War, the operational and stra-

tegic decisions required in the interwar and the plethora of intelligence

requirements dictated by the needs of the Second World War and Cold

War would not have been achieved. Early investment in this system in the

late nineteenth century by the British Empire, in order to maintain mili-

tary supremacy, market supremacy, ﬁscal dominance, administrative

control and cultural inﬂuence, ensured that this system ushered in the

modern information revolution of the late twentieth century. The rapid

growth of the need for and ability to obtain information and intelligence

was something that the British Empire led the world in throughout the

century from 1856 to 1956. This growth in data creation and the need to

process it effectively and utilize it in an effective and timely fashion was

reﬂected in the bureaucratic and administrative functions that manifest

themselves in the formal governmental apparatus that was the nerve

centre of formal imperial defence.

Of the greatest importance to this evolutionary process were the

increasing abilities of the Foreign Ofﬁce and Treasury to gather a vast

amount of information and use it to inﬂuence and make Government

policy related to defending the British Empire’s position as the world’s

most powerful nation. Internal changes were required in the period to

these bodies to allow them to deal with the changing circumstances pre-

sented by domestic governmental change and the changes in the inter-

national system.

As well, other departments such as the Board of Trade,

Introduction 5

the Department of Overseas Trade, and most important, the Committee

of Imperial Defence were part of this administrative revolution that

allowed some semblance of the management of imperial affairs to take

place in a logical and reasoned way. No other nation had this structure, or

a need for it.

While some have claimed that the pure weight and size of

such an administrative nightmare as the British Imperial Defence commit-

tee system did not allow for timely or effective decision-making to take

place, to argue such a point of view is to fail to understand the nature of

imperial defence. Often no decision needed making, rather it was that the

questions needed asking. And while it is true that there was often no

apparent hand on the tiller of imperial defence, the ﬂexibility of such an

unstructured ediﬁce was a protection in itself. Not bound to only one

General Staff or Imperial Council, having to contend constantly with the

cycle of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, the administrative structure of the

British Empire was able to ﬁnd solutions when required, although not

always as fast as some would have liked. It was able to trade space for time

by its very vastness, able to create coalitions or alliances where none had

stood before in rapid order due to its geo-strategic realities, and was able

to mobilise the world’s greatest industrial and ﬁscal might in defence of its

ideas twice in a quarter of a century, something no other nation has or

had ever successfully done. So, while bureaucratic donkeys and missed

chances, muddling through and “it’s all right on the night” are often pejo-

rative ways of explaining the British Imperial Defence administrative

system, such is done in ignorance of the complexity and power of the vast

machinery. It was a system of ideas and beliefs that had the courage and

power of its convictions, as well as the muscle, metal and money that these

ideas and convictions created.

These ideas were the most powerful form of imperial defence. Peace

groups, imperial promoters, poets, artists, journalists and academics all

plied the troubled waters of Imperialism in the hundred years under

review.

Missionary zeal, educational reform, the introduction of civil,

ﬁscal and criminal law, as well as the introduction of medicine, techno-

logy and outlawing of centuries-old customs, were all part of the process

of imperial defence. Certainly race was a key issue, and thus racism was a

form of communication and identiﬁcation. It was a value that needed

defending and a fact of international relations that created strategic

mental maps, ﬂavoured strategic assessments as well as investment strat-

egies and resource allocation.

For many intellectuals and academics, as

well as politicians and administrators, the view was that Great Britain had

established between itself and its subject peoples a bond of moral

responsibility, a kind of imperial strength that no other empire enjoyed: a

sense of Britishness. This empire was an expression of not merely com-

mercial enterprise and force of arms but of a racial nation–producing

quality; and that the foundations of the empire were the self-governing

sections of it. Indeed, the Empire was seen as a vehicle for social reform

6 G. Kennedy

for all, including and most importantly Great Britain itself as ideas of

culture, race and civilisation permeated as aspects of that nation’s live,

consciously and sub-consciously. The British system of imperial defence

was the ﬁrst modern British “Force For Good”, and it is the task of this

collection to show how its multiple parts were connected and operated.

Whether or not it achieved its lofty goal is a tale for other studies

Notes

1 John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874–1914

(London, 1999); Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

(London, 1994); Anil Seal, ed., The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire:

The Ford Lectures and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1982); Niall Ferguson, Empire:

How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004).

2 C.J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy, 1878–1902, vols. I and

II (London, 1967); W.C.B. Tunstall, “Imperial Defence, 1815–1870”, vol. 2, pp.

807–41; “Imperial Defence, 1870–1897”, vol. 3, pp. 230–54; “Imperial Defence,

1897–1914”, vol. 3, pp. 563–604, all in the E.A. Benians, J.R.M. Butler and C.E.

Carrington eds, Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1940, 1959);

Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: Anglo-Russian Relations, 1894–1917

(Oxford, 1995); D.C. Watt, “Imperial Defence Policy and Imperial Foreign

Policy, 1911–1939: A Neglected Paradox”, Journal of Commonwealth Political

Studies, 1(1963); John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold

War, 1944–49 (Leicester, 1993).

3 David French, “Rationality and Irrationality in the Political Economy of British

Defence Policy: The Pre-1914 and Pre-1939 Eras Compared”, paper given at

the Second International Strategy Conference, Carlisle Barracks, 1991;

Antonín Basch, The New Economic Warfare (London, 1942).

4 Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence

Policy in the Era of Two World Wars (London, 1972); W. Wark, The Ultimate

Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–39 (Ithaca, NY, 1985); B.J.C.

McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United

States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1999).

5 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn. (London,

2000).

6 T.G. Otte ed., The Makers of British Foreign Policy: From Pitt to Thatcher (Basing-

stoke, 2002); Greg C. Kennedy and Keith Neilson eds, Incidents and Inter-

national Relations: People, Power, and Personalities (Westport, CT, 2002).

7 Donald M. Schurman, John Beeler ed., Imperial Defence, 1868–1887 (London,

1997); Eric A. Walker, The British Empire: Its Structure and Spirit (Oxford, 1943).

8 John F. Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone and Disraeli Era, 1866–1880

(Stanford, CA, 1997); C.I. Hamilton, Anglo-French Naval Rivalry, 1840–1870

(Oxford, 1993); Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy

against Russia, 1853–56 (Manchester, 1990); G.A.H. Gordon, British Seapower

and Procurement Between the Wars (London, 1988); Nicholas Tracy ed., The

Collective Naval Defence of the Empire, 1900–1940 (London, 1997); Christopher

Bell, The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (London, 2000); Paul

Haggie, Britannia at Bay: The Defence of Britain’s Far Eastern Empire, 1919–1941

(Oxford, 1981); Greg Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the Far

East, 1933–1939 (London, 2002); T124, Sea Power (London, 1940).

9 David French, Raising Churchill’s Armies (Oxford, 1999); Hew Strachan, The First

World War (Oxford, 2000); Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

Introduction 7

(London, 1994); David Killingray, “The Idea of a British Imperial African

Army”, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), pp. 421–35; Keith Neilson, Strategy

and Supply (London, 1984); Peter Burroughs, “Imperial Defence and the Victo-

rian Army”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15 (1986), pp. 53–72;

R. Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War (London, 1967); Christopher Bayly and

Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies; The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London, 2004).

10 Works of Antony Best, British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia,

1914–1941 (Basingstoke, 2002); John Ferris, “ ‘Indulged in all too Little’?

Vansittart, Intelligence and Appeasement”, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 6(1995),

pp. 122–75; Richard Aldrich, The Key to the South: Britain, the United States, and

Thailand during the Approach of the Paciﬁc War (Oxford, 1993); Christopher

Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community

(London, 1985).

11 D.N. Chester and F.M.G. Willson, The Organization of British Central Government,

1914–1956 (London, 1957); Nicholas d’Ombrain, War Machinery and High

Policy: Defence Administration in Peacetime Britain, 1902–1914 (Oxford, 1973);

John Darwin, Britain and Egypt in the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath

of War, 1918–1922 (London, 1981); J. Connell, The “Ofﬁce”: A Study of British

Foreign Policy and its Makers, 1919–1951 (London, 1958); Zara Steiner, The FO

and Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Cambridge, 1968); Robert Johnson, British Impe-

rialism (Basingstoke, 2003); A. Clayton, The British Empire as a Superpower,

1919–1939 (Georgia, SC, 1986).

12 Ian Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 1919–1939 (Toronto,

ON, 1972); H.F. Fraser, Great Britain and the Gold Standard (New York, 1933);

John Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Policy,

1919–1926 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); Patricia Clavin, The Failure of Economic Diplomacy:

Britain, Germany, France and the United States, 1931–36 (London, 1996);

13 Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich eds, Special Issue Journal of Imperial and Com-

monwealth History, “The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity”, 31(2003);

Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and Inter-

national Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford, 2000); Rhodri Williams, Defending the

Empire: The Conservative Party and British Defence Policy, 1899–1915 (New Haven,

CT, 1991); Howard Robinson, The Development of the British Empire (New York,

1936); Lord Elton, Imperial Commonwealth (London, 1945); Lectures given at

the Canadian Institute on Economics and Politics, Canada: The Empire and the

League (Toronto, ON, 1936); Basil Williams, The British Empire (London,1928).

14 Vaugh Cornish, A Geography of Imperial Defence (London, 1922) Cornish was a

regular lecturer at the Imperial War College in the 1920s; Michael Freeden ed.,

Minutes of the Rainbow Circle, 1894–1924, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 38

(London, 1989); Brig. D.H. Cole, Imperial Military Geography (London, 1953);

Stephen King-Hall, Imperial Defence: A Book for Taxpayers (London, 1926).

15 Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?: The Impact of Imperialism on Britain

from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 2005); Bernard Porter, The Absent-

Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought about Empire (Oxford, 2004);

W. David McIntyre, The Imperial Frontier in the Tropics, 1865–75 (London, 1967).

8 G. Kennedy

1 The Foreign Ofﬁce and defence

of empire, 1856–1914

T.G. Otte

and a statesman who faces the truth, . . . and preserves what is sound in the

old diplomatic system, will deserve the thanks of all thoughtful men.

Percy M. Thornton

There is no single, comprehensive scholarly account of the problems of

imperial defence as a problem of British foreign policy. For the most part,

studies of nineteenth century British diplomacy may be categorised under

two broad headings: those examining relations with other European

Powers, almost invariably with an exclusively bilateral slant or focused on

the policies of an individual Foreign Secretary, and those dealing with

British policy overseas, usually with a strongly regional focus. There are

some notable exceptions. The late C.J. Lowe’s study of Lord Salisbury’s

Mediterranean policy, for instance, examines relations with Berlin, Vienna

and Rome as well as a wide range of strategic factors revolving around the

notion of Britain’s growing international ‘isolation’ in the 1890s.

A more

recent and conceptually very signiﬁcant work is R. Keith Neilson’s account

of Britain’s policy towards her principal and most persistent, long-term

enemy, Russia. At one level a study of bilateral relations, it is more than

that. In using relations with Russia as a prism, Neilson offers a reassess-

ment of the status of Britain as the pre-eminent world power before 1914,

as well as of the nature of British foreign policy.

These, however, are exceptions. In general, the historiography of

Britain’s external relations between the Crimean War and the First World

War tends to reﬂect the dual nature of British power. The British Empire

consisted of two strategic blocs, the British–European and the Anglo-

Indian.

This duality also inﬂuenced Britain’s foreign policy. Nineteenth

century Europe was the powerhouse of international politics. Europe’s

leading nations constituted the select club of the Great Powers. As one of

the six Great Powers of the day, in her relations with other European

nations, Britain operated within the established contemporary system of

Great Power relations. The norms of the so-called Concert of Europe,

which underpinned European diplomacy throughout the century even

though ‘Concert’ activity varied over time in its intensity, and the constel-

lations among the other Powers, as shaped by alliances and other treaties,

thus placed certain ‘systemic’ constraints upon British foreign policy.

Britain’s worldwide interests and her global reach, at least until the 1870s,

and perceived naval supremacy gave her a pre-eminent status among the

other Powers. ‘Systemic’ aspects were therefore, largely, though not

wholly, absent in British overseas policy. In Russia, as her principal long-

term threat, of course, she had to deal with a Power that was a European

Great Power, and therefore a ‘systemic’ Power, but whose Asiatic ambi-

tions affected British interests outside the constraints of the European

system.

Despite its signiﬁcance, the dynamic of ‘systemic’ constraints and

‘non-systemic’ factors in nineteenth century British foreign policy still

awaits scholarly examination.

Much of contemporary thinking about the requirements and means of

imperial defence inevitably revolved around Britain’s armed forces, as is

amply demonstrated by the chapters focused on the military service in this

collection. Nevertheless, foreign policy played, and was frequently seen to

play, a signiﬁcant role in safeguarding the empire. At the very least, the

‘soft power’ of diplomacy was a cheap means of defending imperial inter-

ests.

This consideration gained in strength in the latter half of the nine-

teenth century. Until the Crimean War, Britain was able to maintain her

naval pre-eminence over her actual and potential rivals, as the most effect-

ive means of protecting her imperial and commercial interests, at minimal

expense to the Exchequer.

The exigencies of the war severely tested

Britain’s ﬁnancial resources. A pragmatic mixture of increased taxation

and borrowing quite comfortably met the requirements of the moment,

and so underscored the fundamentally rude health of the nation’s

ﬁnances. Still, between them, increased national debt and the ignomin-

ious failure of Britain’s military system in the face of the Crimean emer-

gency weakened the conﬁdence of Britain’s political elite. This, combined

with the changing nature of British politics after the second reform act of

1867, affected the framing and executing of British foreign and imperial

policy. The rising middle class’s demands for greater budgetary stringency

began to outweigh the Whig aristocracy’s traditional appreciation of

continental affairs. Victorian ﬁnance pursued strictly economic ends; and

the nineteenth century system of government, moreover, was such as to

reinforce conservative ﬁscal orthodoxy. This, in turn, helped to engender

a generally more cautious approach to external problems. Financial con-

straints and ﬁscal conservatism did not lend themselves to a rumbustuous

Palmerstonian policy of bluff.

The effect on foreign and imperial policy

was twofold. In European affairs, it led to greater caution. With the reduc-

tion in government expenditure, both the size and the preparedness of

the armed forces fell until the mid-1880s. The growth of the continental

railway networks, meanwhile, began to undermine Britain’s commercial

dominance but also reduced the strategic advantages of the country’s

10 T.G. Otte

naval supremacy.

Britain’s military insigniﬁcance compared with the mass

conscript armies of the continental Great Powers, and the inapplicability

of naval pressure against these Powers, reinforced a trend towards selec-

tive and strictly non-military interference.

Victory in the Crimea in 1856 ensured the containment of the Russian

menace, at least for some period of time. The Crimean coalition was the

product of the allied struggle against Russia, ostensibly in defence of the

Ottoman Empire and the reality of the wider balance of power in Europe.

The Treaty of Paris of 1856 underscored Britain’s commitment to the con-

tainment of Russia, while the Crimean system was founded on an Anglo-

Austrian attempt to preserve the outcome of the war. Yet, it was built on

sand. French commitment to the status quo was never ﬁrm, and even

Austria was ready to abandon aspects of the Crimean settlement.

By the

1870s, the system had unravelled, and disintegration affected the two stra-

tegic blocs of British power in equal measure. In Asia, Russia’s unchecked

expansion in Central Asia increased her pressure on British India.

November 1870, exploiting Europe’s preoccupation with the Franco-

Prussian War, Russia renounced the Black sea clauses of the Paris peace

treaty, thereby effectively remilitarising the sea and the surrounding

area.

By the time of the ‘Great Eastern Crisis’ of 1875–8, especially after

the preliminary peace treaty of San Stefano, Britain faced the prospect of

Russian dominance of the Balkans, to be followed in the near future by a

Russian descent on Constantinople. In that case, Russia would have been

able to project her naval power into the Eastern Mediterranean and pres-

surise Britain’s vital sea lines of communications there. Already during the

early stages of the crisis, Britain’s naval tools had proved practically

useless. Only diplomacy could provide a solution. Disraeli’s and Salisbury’s

surefooted policy before and during the Congress of Berlin ensured

Russia’s isolation and thus forced her to relinquish her ill-gotten gains.

The acquisition of Cyprus shored up Britain’s position in the Mediter-

ranean, and gave her the means of pinning down the Russian ﬂeet, if ever

the Tsar’s government decided to break the Treaty of Berlin and force the

Turkish straits.

Britain’s ability to act unilaterally in defence of her imperial interests

remained curtailed however. Already the second Afghan War of 1879 and

the abortive Herat Convention with Persia demonstrated Britain’s limited

ability to sustain a consistently ‘forward’ policy in Central Asia in the face

of Russian expansionism.

Gladstone’s well-meant but ultimately disas-

trous attempt to revive the ‘Concert of Europe’ served further to encour-

age Russia’s ‘Drang nach Osten’ whilst simultaneously isolating Britain

from the status quo Powers in Europe. During the Pendjeh crisis in 1885,

war with Russia seemed imminent, and though the latter eventually disen-

gaged, the problems of facing Russia unaided were clearly discernible.

The precarious situation in 1885 underlined also the interaction between

systemic constellations in Europe and developments in the Anglo-Indian

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 11