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

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sphere. For as long as Russia was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary

in the Dreikaiserbund, Russia was potentially in a position to pressurise points

of strategic interest for Britain. With the collapse of the combination of the

three Eastern monarchies in 1886–7 during the Bulgarian crisis, Britain’s

diplomatic and imperial problems eased somewhat. With a political

settlement with Russia not feasible, Salisbury sought a diplomatic solution

to Britain’s Russian problem in an informal leaning towards Germany

and an alignment with Italy and Austria-Hungary in the Mediterranean

entente.

At the same time, Salisbury’s failure to negotiate an evacuation of

Egypt, combined with a growing realisation that the navy could no longer

force the now heavily fortiﬁed Dardanelles, provided an incentive to place

Britain’s position in Egypt on a ﬁrmer footing. Ironically, then, the relative

success of the Mediterranean entente in containing Russia in the Balkans ulti-

mately undermined the combination with Vienna and Rome, as Cairo

began to replace Constantinople as a key British strategic interest in the

Eastern Mediterranean.

The increasing importance of Britain’s hold on

the country on the Nile brought East Africa and the Upper Nile Valley into

the sight of British foreign policy. The Heligoland–Zanzibar exchange with

Germany, the Anglo-Italian delimitation of sphere of inﬂuence on the Horn

of Africa, the Anglo-French West Africa agreement (all of 1890) and Rose-

bery 1894 Congo agreement with the Belgians – all aimed at ensuring that

the upper reaches of the Nile were kept out of the hands of another

Power.

To attain this end, Salisbury used a judicious mixture of treaty

diplomacy and military force. His decision in 1896 to reconquer the

Sudan, following Italy’s rout at Adowa in March and the stalemate in the

Anglo-French talks on Africa, prepared the ground for the Fashoda stand-

off with the French in September 1898. France’s decision to yield to

British pressure, in turn, led to the Anglo-French agreement of March

1899, in which Paris acknowledged Britain’s predominance in the Upper

Nile Valley. This also underlined Britain’s reduced dependence on the

Mediterranean entente that had withered away in 1897.

It was symptomatic of the nineteenth century system of government that,

despite the key role of foreign policy in defending imperial interests, there

was no central coordinating mechanism at the heart of government. Until

the creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in 1902, cooper-

ation between the Foreign, India and Colonial Ofﬁces and the two armed

services departments was on an ad hoc basis, usually in reaction to emerg-

ing crises rather than in reﬂection of longer-term strategic objectives. At

Cabinet level, the Foreign Ofﬁce (FO) enjoyed a degree of autonomy that

was not vouchsafed to other departments of state. Unlike the rest of White-

hall, the FO and the diplomatic service, which latter remained a separate

branch of the civil service until its merger with the FO in 1918, were relat-

ively inexpensive. Treasury interference was, therefore, restricted to matters

of administration, personnel and pensions. An exception was loans, espe-

cially to China, Persia or Latin America, issued by British banking houses

12 T.G. Otte

with the encouragement of the FO. Here, the need for Treasury approval

potentially restricted the Ofﬁce’s freedom of manoeuvre.

Crucially, the

FO’s superior status among other Whitehall departments was a function of

hierarchy. It reﬂected the contemporary constitutional notion that foreign

affairs were part of the royal prerogative. As ‘the ofﬁcial organ and adviser

of the Crown in its intercourse with foreign powers’, Her (or His) Majesty’s

Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs enjoyed a status more ele-

vated than that of other senior ministers.

While in theory the ﬁnal

decision-making power over foreign policy was vested in the Cabinet, it

was a theory only rarely tested in practice. Notwithstanding the deep divi-

sions over the Eastern Question within Disraeli’s second government, or

the clash between Rosebery and Harcourt, his thwarted rival for the post-

Gladstonian leadership of the Liberal party, or Cabinet opposition to Salis-

bury’s ideas of a more coercive policy during the Armenian crisis of 1895–6,

or even the split within the Asquith government between ‘economists’ and

‘imperialists’, these were exceptions. Overall, the Cabinet was no effective

check on the powers of the Foreign Secretary. Cabinet involvement in

foreign affairs was intermittent at best. In general, the most ministers ‘know

and care nothing about foreign affairs’.

As a matter of routine, relevant

FO papers were circulated to the Colonial, India and War secretaries, the

First Lord of the Admiralty and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Most

administrations of the period also had in their ranks the odd senior elder

statesman with special expertise or interest in foreign and imperial ques-

tions. The roles of the Duke of Devonshire in the Unionist administration

after 1895, the Marquess of Ripon in the Campbell-Bannerman govern-

ment or Viscount Haldane in the Asquith cabinet are cases in point.

Central to the foreign policy-making process was the relationship between

the two tenants of Nos 10 and 14 Downing Street. In the Earl of Granville’s

felicitous phrase, the Prime Minister ‘should only appear as a Deus ex

machinâ’, intervening at the crucial moment to facilitate the solution to the

problems under discussion.

This consideration also explains why the

Marquis of Salisbury decided to hold the two ofﬁces in conjunction for

large parts of his premiership.

The small number of politicians who served as Foreign Secretary in the

nineteenth century underscores the exclusivity and relative autonomy of

the post. Their previous political and administrative experience is also

indicative of the wider imperial context of British foreign policy. During

the period 1856–1914, there were only 11 Foreign Secretaries. Most of

them served several times at the head of the FO: Salisbury four times;

Clarendon and Granville three times; and Derby, Malmesbury, Russell and

Rosebery twice each. Only Grey, Iddesleigh (whose brief spell at the FO

was the exception during this period), Kimberley, and Lansdowne held the

ofﬁce once only. With the exceptions of Malmesbury and Rosebery, all had

previous diplomatic or imperial experience, though the latter had at least

served in a Cabinet post before his elevation to the foreign secretaryship.

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 13

Some, like Clarendon, Granville and Kimberley, had held diplomatic posts.

Russell, Derby, Granville and Kimberley had previously been Colonial Sec-

retaries. There were three former India Secretaries among the FO chiefs

in this period: Derby, Kimberley and Salisbury. Russell and Lansdowne had

held the War Ofﬁce. The latter had also held senior positions in imperial

administration as Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India. And

ﬁnally, Derby, Granville, Kimberley and Grey had served their political

apprenticeships as Parliamentary Under-Secretaries at the FO. Two

Foreign Secretaries, Salisbury and Rosebery, succeeded to the premiership,

and Derby might have done so. At the same time, the FO was seen also as

an appropriate ofﬁce for the former Prime Minister Lord John Russell.

Imperial concerns were also reﬂected in the FO’s administrative struc-

ture and the career patterns of senior ofﬁcials and diplomatists. Of the

seven permanent heads of the department in the period covered here, ﬁve

had been connected with Anglo-Russian relations prior to their appoint-

ment: Charles Hardinge and Arthur Nicolson as ambassadors at St. Peters-

burg; Edmund Hammond as senior clerk of the Oriental Department; and

Philip Currie and Thomas Sanderson as heads of the Turkish Department

and its successor, the Eastern Department, respectively. Thus, the personnel

arrangements at the Ofﬁce reﬂected the signiﬁcance of the Russian factor

for Britain’s foreign and imperial policies throughout the nineteenth

century.

Among the senior diplomats, some acquired reputations as area

experts. Sir Nicholas O’Conor or Sir Arthur Nicolson, for instance, were

acknowledged ‘Eastern’ diplomats with expertise in Chinese, Turkish and

Russian affairs (O’Conor) and Persian, Turkish, Moroccan and Russian

questions (Nicolson). Sir J. Rennell Rodd’s East African experience was

crucial in his later appointment as ambassador at Rome, while Sir Arthur

Hardinge was regarded as an authority on Persian and Central Asian

matters.

The FO internal structure mirrored wider changes in inter-

national politics. Thus, for instance, the creation in 1899 of a separate Far

Eastern Department provided for more specialised advice at a time when

much international attention was focused on this area.

It was as much a reﬂection of the superior status of the FO as of the

lack of proper policy planning and coordination in Whitehall that fre-

quently the FO was able to dictate imperial policy. Thus, for instance,

Lord John Russell decided early in 1860 to cede the Bay Islands colony off

the coast of Honduras to that state without consulting the Colonial

Ofﬁce, which had issued certain guarantees to the population of the

islands. Removing a source of tension in relations with the United States

had overriding priority.

It was on the basis of Russell’s treaty policy in

West Africa and the manoeuvres of Britain’s consuls in the region in the

late 1850s that the FO forced the Colonial Ofﬁce to acquiesce in early

1861 in the annexation of Lagos for a mixture of humanitarian (anti-

Slavery) and commercial reasons, but principally in order to forestall

French plans for a military establishment there at a time when British

14 T.G. Otte

policy was subject to repeated French war and invasion scares.

Salisbury

at the FO, forcefully aided by Disraeli, pushed through Cabinet the

decision to acquire Cyprus from Turkey in April–May 1878. Obtaining a

foothold in Ottoman territory was deemed to be vital as a means of block-

ing Russia’s further advance in the Near East, as well as a means for con-

trolling what might some day become the great highway to India through

northern Syria.

It is suggestive of the ill-deﬁned borders between foreign

and colonial affairs at the time when the FO initially administered that

island under the supervision of Philip Currie, senior clerk of the Ofﬁce’s

Turkish Department and a future Permanent Under-Secretary. In a

similar manner, territories north of the Zambezi River, including the

British Central Africa protectorate, and later Uganda were originally

under the Ofﬁce’s administration.

No such interdepartmental border

disputes arose when in 1898 Salisbury and the FO decided upon the

acquisition of the northern Chinese harbour of Weihaiwei as a strategic

counterpoise to recent German and Russian seizures of Chinese ports as

well as a sop to a critical press at home. It was symptomatic of the absence

of a proper policy coordinating mechanism that the decision to take Wei-

haiwei was driven by Salisbury and senior ofﬁcials at the FO without prior

consultation of the Admiralty or the embryonic Cabinet defence commit-

tee. Indeed, the navy department was anxious to rid itself of Salisbury’s

gift base, and, having administered it jointly with the War Ofﬁce from

1899, both service departments decided in 1901 completely to divest

themselves of their joint responsibilities by passing the leasehold into the

care of the Colonial Ofﬁce.

Relations between the Foreign and Colonial Ofﬁces were, if not close,

at any rate not distant. Frequently, colonial problems could only be solved

within a wider international context; and this required closer

coordination of efforts by the two ministries. One such instance was

the settlement in 1906–7 of the future status of the New Hebrides islands,

the last remaining territories in the South Paciﬁc unclaimed by any of the

Powers. While British diplomacy aimed to moderate French claims in the

question as well as to block rumoured German ambitions on the islands,

the Colonial Ofﬁce worked on the government of the Australian Com-

monwealth to accept the terms of the Anglo-French convention.

Con-

tacts between the two Ofﬁces also extended to personnel exchanges. Sir

Julian Pauncefote, Permanent Under-Secretary at the FO in the 1880s and

then Britain’s ﬁrst ambassador at Washington, began his ofﬁcial career at

the Colonial Ofﬁce where he rose to become Legal Assistant Under-

Secretary before taking up the same position at the FO in 1876.

Con-

versely, Sir Robert Meade began his ofﬁcial career in the FO and served

on several diplomatic missions before transferring to the Colonial Ofﬁce

as an Assistant Under-Secretary in 1871, eventually to become one of the

outstanding permanent heads of that department (1892–7).

Meade and

Pauncefote’s cases involved permanent career changes. But there were

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 15

also temporary personnel transfers between the two Ofﬁces. The diplomat

W. Conyngham Greene, legation secretary at Tehran and later Ambas-

sador at Tokyo, was seconded to the Colonial Ofﬁce in 1896 to act as

British agent at Pretoria, where he remained until the outbreak of hostili-

ties with the two Boer republics.

Relations with the India Ofﬁce (IO) were more complicated. To an

extent, this reﬂected the somewhat anomalous position of the Ofﬁce

among the other great departments of state. As Lord George Hamilton,

who held the seals of the IO several times, later reﬂected in his memoirs, it

was ‘a miniature government in itself’.

The characterisation of the

Ofﬁce’s departmental remit by its long-serving permanent head Sir Arthur

Godley, the later Lord Kilbracken, bears repetition: ‘it is concerned with all

the affairs, great and small of a gigantic empire, and contains under one

roof some eight or nine departments, corresponding respectively to the

Treasury, Board of Trade, the FO, and so on’.

Developments in India’s

strategic perimeter in Central Asia and the effects of European diplomacy

on India made it necessary that the Foreign and India Ofﬁces communi-

cated regularly and frequently. The bulk of this communication consisted

of copies of despatches to and from the British embassy at St. Petersburg

and reports by the Indian government’s military intelligence branch.

The

two departments also had joint responsibilities in Asia. In India’s central

Asian security glacis, some British consular ofﬁcials were directly respons-

ible to the Indian government, such as the agents at Kabul and, perhaps

most famously, Sir George Macartney, the consul at Kashgar in Sinkiang,

China’s most westerly province.

In addition, the India and FOs jointly

subsidised a number of consulates and legations in the region around the

Persian Gulf, where the two departments also shared areas of joint jurisdic-

tion. Thus, the consuls at Aden or the political resident in the Gulf at

Muscat were recruited from the Indian Political Service but were respons-

ible to the British minister at Tehran. The latter was appointed by the FO

from the ranks of career diplomats, though a notable exception was the

appointment in 1894 as minister to Persia of Sir Mortimer Durand, who

had previously been Indian Foreign Secretary. Similarly, the FO clerk,

Charles Sebastian Somers-Cocks, was seconded to the IO’s foreign depart-

ment as assistant secretary for two years (1904–6). An exception of a kind

was also Evelyn Baring, the later Earl of Cromer, who had been private

secretary to the Viceroy of India before becoming British representative on

the Egyptian Caisse de la dette publique, the debt administration created by

the European Powers at Cairo, a transfer that would eventually see him

emerge as Britain’s de facto ruler over Egypt at the end of the century.

Durand’s transfer to the diplomatic service and Cromer’s straddling of the

Indian and proconsular ﬁelds were exceptions. Generally, there were no

personnel exchanges of the kind that took place between the Foreign and

Colonial Ofﬁces. There was, however, the joint exercise of responsibilities.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the government of India paid half the

16 T.G. Otte

costs of the Tehran legation, although there were no Indian ofﬁcials on its

staff. In 1914, as many as 13 of the 23 salaried consular positions in Persia

were paid out of Indian government funds.

Nevertheless, in normal times relations between the two departments

‘were carried on with great formality and some jealousy’, especially where

international politics were concerned.

To an extent this reﬂected pro-

found differences in the ‘ofﬁcial mind’ of the two departments. With

India’s security usually not under immediate threat, the IO and the govern-

ment at Delhi and Simla tended to stress longer-range developments and

policies, usually with a view to formulating an early ‘forward’ action to pre-

empt possible actions by foreign Powers. The FO, by contrast, moved in a

much more dynamic and ﬂuid environment, where differences of interest

with other governments always had the potential of escalating into crises.

British diplomacy operated on the assumption that any disagreement with

another Great Power carried the risk of military conﬂict. In consequence,

Britain’s foreign policy tended to be status quo oriented and conciliatory,

reactive rather ‘forward’.

Inevitably, conciliating diverging departmental

perspectives and interests so as to formulate joint policy positions was a

cumbersome and slow process. This did not preclude cooperation, but it

did not facilitate it either. Senior ofﬁcials in the IO were anxious not ‘to be

exploited by the FO’.

The submission by the Indian authorities to the

‘greater imperial considerations’ often claimed by the FO was grudging at

best. In 1898–9, during the talks on the Persian loan project, the two

Permanent Under-Secretaries, Sir Thomas Sanderson (FO) and Sir Arthur

Godley (IO), consulted with each other. But it was Sanderson who pre-

pared the ground for discussions with the Treasury, the Imperial Bank of

Persia and the Tehran government and who formulated the British govern-

ment’s position.

Friction between the two Ofﬁces grew considerably

during Curzon’s viceroyalty, when various questions connected with the

Persian Gulf came to the fore. Interdepartmental tensions, combined with

the already complex and cumbersome policy-making process, meant that

the ultimate policy decisions were often so delayed or so diluted that they

lost all practical meaning, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of

Selborne, noted in 1903: ‘What an intolerable method of doing business!

Indian Government, India Ofﬁce, Minister at Tehran, FO, Cabinet Com-

mittee, Treasury, Cabinet! Bah! the Russians ought to walk round us each

time’.

A further group of ofﬁcials close to the centre of the foreign policy-

making process were the members of Britain’s nascent intelligence ser-

vices. Following the release over recent years of nineteenth century secret

service ﬁles, and the pending release of further intelligence-related

material, this formerly ‘missing dimension’ can now be more fully incor-

porated into analyses of British foreign and imperial policy.

Although

there was no formal organisation or a properly constituted ‘intelligence

community’ yet, internal channels of communication existed that made

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 17

senior intelligence ofﬁcers part of a wider foreign policy ‘strategic clique’.

The views, for instance, of Sir John Ardagh, the head of military intelli-

gence in the 1890s, were sought by the Permanent Under-Secretary of the

FO.

A great deal of the intelligence gathering, limited though it was in

comparison with later twentieth century practices, was ﬁnanced out of the

annual secret service vote, which was administered by the FO’s Permanent

Under-Secretary. The fund could be used to ﬁnance activities which the

Foreign Secretary thought ought to remain secret. These were often, but

not exclusively, related to intelligence gathering, usually through ad hoc

informants or agents. Senior diplomats abroad were themselves often

involved in intelligence work, though such activities were largely conﬁned

to non-European countries. Successive heads of mission at Constantino-

ple or Peking cultivated secret sources within the governments there.

Such efforts were often extensive and remarkably reminiscent of methods

usually associated with later periods. At Peking, for instance, the British

minister there had established a British hospital in the Chinese quarter of

the capital at the end of 1902, paid for out of the secret service fund. The

real purpose of the establishment, however, was not so much the adminis-

tration of medicine to ailing Chinese, but to serve as a kind of ‘safe

house’, an innocuous meeting place for native informants and the

Chinese Secretary of the legation.

When in 1909 the Asquith govern-

ment, reacting to the contemporary ‘spy hysteria’ which had affected the

public and Whitehall alike, set up the Haldane committee to investigate

the need for more organised counter-espionage measures, the FO

retained an important role in the nascent secret service. The Ofﬁce’s

Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Charles Hardinge, well versed in the craft

of the trade since his days in charge of the St. Petersburg embassy, was

a senior member on the committee. While the primary function of the

ﬂedgling organisation was counter-intelligence, there was a clear under-

standing that political intelligence remained the business of the FO;

even so, the secret service was ﬁnanced out of FO funds. Relations

between the Ofﬁce and the new service, however, were anything but

smooth. Ironically, although the senior diplomats appreciated the

signiﬁcance of intelligence, the Ofﬁce guarded its preserve against inter-

lopers. Attempts by the intelligence service to use Britain’s consular ofﬁ-

cials as additional sources of operational intelligence led to constant

friction with the FO.

From the turn of the nineteenth century, there was also a growing

bureaucratic awareness across Whitehall that a major war was then a realis-

tic eventuality. This heightened an awareness of the need for properly

organised intelligence gathering. The absence of such organisation or,

indeed, intelligence sources was keenly felt during the Boer War.

Bureaucratic and parliamentary pressure resulted in a series of ofﬁcial

enquiries into various aspects of Britain’s armed and intelligence services.

Responding to such pressure, the new Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour,

18 T.G. Otte

who had himself become increasingly disturbed by the inadequacy of the

Cabinet’s existing defence committee, established the CID in December

1902.

This body never had any executive authority, and its wartime func-

tions were dispersed among other organisations. But its formation created

a new interdepartmental forum, chaired by the Prime Minister, for the

discussion of strategic questions affecting foreign and imperial policy. It

was an attempt, in the contemporary spirit of ‘national efﬁciency’, to

apply a broader and more systematic approach to defence planning; and

the CID was to prove the principal advisory body on imperial and home

defence matters until 1939.

From about 1901 onwards, considerations of the strategic requirements

of imperial defence began to have a more direct impact on foreign policy.

At one level, this reﬂected the differences in temperament and personality

between Salisbury and his successors, Lansdowne and Grey. Lord Salisbury

had encouraged the work of the military intelligence branch under Gen-

erals Brackenbury, Chapman and Ardagh, and he regularly received and

studied intelligence reports. He also authorised additional funding for the

branch’s work from the Secret service vote, for example, to consolidate

the information gathering to the north of Meshed up to the Oxus river,

commonly accepted as Afghanistan’s frontier with Russia.

There were

instances when Salisbury’s decisions were guided by intelligence assess-

ments provided by the military and Admiralty intelligence branches, such

as the abandoning of his earlier preference for a forcing of the Turkish

Straits as a means of coercing the Sultan’s government during the Armen-

ian massacres in 1895–6.

His recognition of the need for intelligence

gathering and his acceptance of the recommendations of the secret ser-

vices were entirely pragmatic; and he was frequently dismissive of military

and naval advisers, as the First Lord of Admiralty noted ‘[Salisbury] very

characteristically pooh-poohed the present naval and military Defence

Committee as its members were all professionals and professionals were

always narrow-minded’.

Lansdowne was more receptive to advice by pro-

fessionals. His previous, somewhat unfortunate, experience at the helm of

the unreformed War Ofﬁce and, more important, his lengthy spells in

imperial administration had sharpened his understanding of the military

requirements of the empire and the dangers of over-extension.

The differences in Salisbury and Lansdowne’s responses to intelligence

advice were not simply rooted in their different personalities. They reﬂected

also the shifts that had occurred in the wider strategic landscape within

which British foreign policy operated at the beginning of the twentieth

century. British military planning was still primarily concerned with the

eventuality of a war with the Franco-Russian combination. Such a conﬂict, a

report by the military intelligence branch warned in August 1901, would be

prolonged and would spell disaster for all parts of the empire.

Lansdowne

and the FO were fully aware of such deliberations. Policy planning discus-

sions within the department, in fact, reﬂected the strategic deliberations of

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 19

the armed services as well as the growing Treasury anxiety about Britain’s

mushrooming budget deﬁcit as a result of the South African war. Acknowl-

edging concerns of the naval authorities about an over-extension of naval

resources, and in nod to Treasury pressure for an overall curb on expendi-

ture, the Assistant Under-Secretary of the FO, Francis Bertie, recommended

in a series of memoranda in the summer of 1901 a reciprocal, geog-

raphically deﬁned arrangement with Japan as the best means of containing

Russia’s threat to the status quo in the Far East, Britain’s most pressing over-

seas problem at that time. A regional defence pact would act as a deterrent

against Russia but would also help to reduce the strain on Britain’s naval

and ﬁnancial resources.

The constraints were very real. Technological

changes in naval architecture led to signiﬁcant increases in the production

costs of naval vessels in the period between the passing of the 1889 Naval

Defence Act and 1904. The expansion and acceleration of the French and

Russian armament programmes exacerbated the situation. The need to

increase the Royal Navy’s (RN) narrow margin of superiority over the com-

bined naval forces of France and Russia, and to adapt British ships to the

changes in enemy battleship design, led to a 20 per cent increase in the cost

of the 1901–2 building programme alone.

In the summer and autumn of

1901, the Earl of Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, warned that, in

view of the increased naval competition by other Powers and Britain’s own

naval overstretch, foreign policy had to provide the solution. As the First Sea

Lord argued, ‘our hitherto followed policy of “splendid isolation” may no

longer be possible’.

Thus, the Admiralty’s strategic resource management,

the Treasury’s attempts to curb spending and the FO’s evolving diplomatic

strategy reinforced each other. The result was a new dynamic within White-

hall, where an axis of these three departments of state dominated foreign

and imperial policy discussions.

It enabled Lansdowne to carry through

the revised Hay–Pauncefote treaty of November 1901 with the United

States, under which Britain effectively relinquished the Western hemisphere

to Washington’s custodianship. The treaty, ‘one of the great treaties of the

twentieth century’, laid the foundations for the rapid improvement in

Anglo-American relations and the ‘special relationship’ of later years.

But,

mending fences with America was purchased at the price of recognising

American naval supremacy in the Western hemisphere and thus having to

conform British policy to that of the United States. More signiﬁcantly, for

the immediate future in 1901, naval considerations encouraged Lansdowne

to pursue the option of a Japanese alliance. He expected the alliance to

safeguard British interests in the Far East, without entailing European com-

mitments. The combination with Japan, therefore, underscored Britain’s

continued aloofness from the European Great Powers. It did not mark the

end of ‘splendid isolation’.

The combination of British and Japanese naval

forces established a Russo-Japanese balance of tension in northern China

and Korea, the main focus of Great Power diplomacy around the turn of

the century. Delicately poised, it nevertheless offered a kind of strategic

20 T.G. Otte

umbrella for the protection of British regional interests against Russian

ambitions. Although essentially reactive and defensive, it was not without

risks, for the combination with Japan did not reduce the likelihood of a

Russo-Japanese conﬂict.

Following Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, considerations of

European diplomacy and imperial defence became more closely entwined.

The ‘catastrophe in the Korea Straits’ eliminated Russia as a naval factor.

Her military weakness combined with domestic instability, moreover, effect-

ively disabled the Franco-Russian alliance. This helped to ease the various

strains on Britain’s over-extended resources. During the Anglo-Japanese

talks in 1905 about the renewal of the 1902 alliance, the CID pushed hard

for a geographical extension of the renewed alliance’s scope.

Indeed, the

second alliance of August 1905 not only then covered India but was also

much tighter, with the casus belli triggered by the attack of just one Power on

either party. The revision of the alliance had the effect of ‘rais[ing] the wall

of our back garden to prevent an over-adventurous neighbour [i.e. Russia]’,

as Lansdowne aptly commented.

Russia’s weakness worked in Britain’s

favour. On taking ofﬁce, Lansdowne’s successor, Sir Edward Grey, stressed

his wish ‘to see Russia restored in the councils of Europe, & I hope on

better terms with us than she has yet been’.

Given Russia’s need to consoli-

date her position, the St. Petersburg government was willing to negotiate a

settlement with Britain. Grey, aided by the India Secretary John Morley, suc-

ceeded in overcoming opposition to an Anglo-Russian accord from within

the IO as well as the Liberal Party. The convention of August 1907 removed

long-standing Anglo-Russian frictions in Asia, and so further strengthened

Britain’s position in Asia, though Grey’s simultaneous attempts to negotiate

further Japanese assistance for Britain in India in the event of a collapse of

the convention with Russia failed.

While Russia’s defeat in 1905 blunted her advance in Asia and so

increased the security of Britain’s Asiatic position, it also disrupted the

European equilibrium. The German challenge of France over Morocco in

1905 was a direct result of the disabling of France’s alliance with Russia. In

the changed post-conﬂict circumstances, British foreign policy was forced

to lend greater support to France than was originally warranted under the

terms of the 1904 Anglo-French entente. German pressure transformed

the settlement of outstanding imperial problems with France into a ‘virtual

diplomatic alliance’, though Grey insisted on the non-binding character of

the agreement, and it would, indeed, be fallacious to argue that either the

entente or Grey’s diplomacy during the Moroccan crisis paved the way for

war with Germany in 1914.

The dislocation of the European equilibrium and Germany’s growing

restlessness had an impact on Britain in an imperial context also. To a

large extent, this was the result of the Anglo-German naval race that was

fully under way since 1904/6 and which had implications for the balance

of power in Europe and the security of the empire.

In addition, German

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1856–1914 21