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

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enormous demands on the British army, which had to provide the forces

necessary to stabilize the region. In 1920, there were British troops in

Germany, Poland, Flanders, France and southern Russia, in addition to

those in Ireland and Britain itself. The result was that Curzon’s grand

vision found itself incapable of realization. Instead, he was forced to

pursue a number of separate policies.

Afghanistan’s defeat in the Indo-

Afghan war of 1919 restored Kabul as a buffer state between a recrudescent

Russian power and the British Empire. A similar policy was followed with

respect to Persia, where the British encouraged Reza Khan’s efforts to

create stability rather than attempt to maintain their wartime intervention

there.

Support for the nascent states in the Caucasus was abandoned; the

decision being made that the British could not provide them with ade-

quate material means to ensure their independence, and that, in any case,

their existence was not central to imperial security.

Instead, the cordon

sanitaire against Bolshevism was to be supplemented by diplomacy. In 1921,

the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement was signed in an attempt to restore Euro-

pean economic stability and aid British post-war reconstruction.

This did not bring an end to concerns about India.

Late in 1926,

Soviet Russia and Afghanistan began a border quarrel over the island of

Urta Tagai, situated in the Oxus. The British had headed off an actual

conﬂict by persuading the Amir of Afghanistan to refer the matter to

a commission, but the question of whether the British should and how

they could defend the North-West frontier remained. There were divided

counsels. Men like Birkenhead, the Secretary of State for India, pointed

out that Britain lacked any military means of defending Afghanistan.

Instead, he argued that Britain must ensure that Moscow realized that any

Soviet threat to the North-West frontier would mean war with Britain. The

Chiefs of Staff (COS) echoed the bleak military assessment but were

deeply suspicious of Soviet motives, a position shared by the Chancellor of

the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

The FO, for its part, preferred a policy of ‘aloofness’ towards Soviet

Russia.

Any clash or break with Soviet Russia would threaten both the

Locarno accords that Austen Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for

Foreign Affairs, had concluded in 1925 and Britain’s position in China. For

the FO, the Russian threat to British security could be met in two ways. First,

Anglo-Japanese relations should be improved as much as possible in order

that Tokyo could help buttress the British position in China. Second,

Britain should build on Locarno and thus make Europe secure and pros-

perous so that Soviet subversion would ﬁnd no fertile ground there.

Nonetheless, the COS continued their examination of the security of

the Afghan frontier. The government of India favoured caution. They

contended that building rail lines into Afghanistan, the COS’s preferred

response to possible Soviet aggression, was not practical politics and that

to inform Moscow and Kabul that an attack on Afghanistan would mean

war would permit Kabul to adopt a policy of provocation towards the

32 K. Neilson

Soviets. This, in turn, would mean, in the words of the Foreign Secretary

to the Government of India, Sir Denys Bray, that Britain ‘would have sur-

rendered the issues of peace or war with Russia to the incalculable actions

of an unscrupulous, reckless barbarian’.

For the Government of India,

diplomacy, not armed force, was the way to maintain India’s defences.

This line of argument was still favoured at the FO. But, the govern-

ment’s discontent with Soviet Russia, which had simmered throughout

1926 and early 1927, boiled over. The result was the Arcos raid and the

breaking of diplomatic relations with Russia. The immediate result, after

mutual recriminations, was a reduction in Anglo-Soviet tension, while the

purge of communists in the Nationalist government in China lessened

British fears for that region of the world. However, with the cessation of

formal relations, British diplomacy could no longer act directly in

Moscow. However, the Soviet threat remained. In July 1927, Chamberlain

told the CID that the British army should be organized on the basis that

its most likely ﬁeld of endeavour would be on the North-West frontier.

Diplomacy was to focus on maintaining good relations with Afghanistan,

while the Birkenhead Committee, set up to examine the entire issue of

the defence of that country, emphasized the need for plans to be made to

defend the region, while a second sub-committee dealing with the secur-

ity of the Persian Gulf reached similar conclusions.

While the Bolshevik threat to Afghanistan and India went into remis-

sion in 1928, it emerged again in 1932. This resulted from an inquiry by

the Afghans as to what response the British would make should Soviet

Russia threaten Kabul.

British policy remained the same: any Soviet

attack on Afghanistan would be a casus belli; however, it also remained

imprudent to let the Afghans know this deﬁnitely. Instead, Kabul was

informed that action might be taken through the agency of the League,

and, if this proved ineffectual, British aid would be forthcoming. However,

the nature of Soviet action required to trigger such a response was left

deliberately vague. The FO was convinced by this time that Soviet Russia

would not risk taking action against Afghanistan due to the Soviet need to

contend with a belligerent Japan.

This interaction between Great Power relations and the empire also was

noticeably during the deliberations of the Defence Requirements Sub-

Committee (DRC), set up in November 1933 to consider the deﬁciencies

in Britain’s defences.

In these discussions, the defence of India was made

the third priority, after the need to guard against Japan and Germany.

fact, it was simply assumed in the DRC’s report that if Britain were pre-

pared to deal with the ﬁrst two contingencies, then the wherewithal to

defend India could be found. This remained the position until 1938, when

once again the question of defending India was raised.

However,

throughout this period the FO (if not the India Ofﬁce) remained con-

vinced that Soviet Russia was unlikely (as a result of facing both a German

and Japanese threat) to contemplate aggression. Thus, the defence of

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1919–1939 33

India remained a low priority, and the inherent strength of the Indian

army itself was felt likely sufﬁcient to deal with any issues.

The defence of India and Afghanistan was not the only issue that

derived from the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. We have

seen that the Caucasus were not deemed essential to imperial defence,

but the same could not be said with respect to the Middle East.

For one

thing, the Suez Canal still remained the ‘jugular vein of empire’, although

the British attempted to establish alternative routes to the empire beyond

Suez via railways.

When the British granted Egypt ‘independence’ in

1922, the issue of defence was left to be decided by a later treaty, as there

was strong opposition to putting such a vital matter in the hands of the

Egyptians.

The negotiation of this treaty was a difﬁcult matter. The FO’s

desire to ﬁnalize the matter foundered, initially, on the nationalist opposi-

tion of Egypt’s ruling Wafd party and, then, in 1933, on the objections of

the British service chiefs.

Italian actions in Abyssinia in 1935 broke this

deadlock and acted as a catalyst, raising both British concerns about impe-

rial lines of communication and Egyptian fears about their own security.

The result was the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and

Alliance in 1936, under the terms of which British forces remained

(indeed were augmented) in Egypt. From this time, until the Italian dec-

laration of war in 1940, the FO had to deal with a number of often contra-

dictory issues. On the one hand, it supported the Anglo-Egyptian

Agreement as an important element for maintaining Britain’s strategic

position; on the other, it wished to ﬁnd a modus vivendi with Italy and so

avoid the possibility of facing three enemies – Germany, Japan and Italy –

simultaneously.

Equally, it was concerned that Egypt might be unwilling

to invoke the emergency clauses that would permit the Suez Canal

Defence Plan to be initiated. Finally, the FO was troubled by the fact that

sending the Mediterranean ﬂeet to the Far East would fatally compromise

Britain’s position in the Middle East and Balkans generally.

The other problem in the Middle East was the fate of Turkey itself.

British promises of Turkish territory to Italy in the Treaty of London were

incompatible with the aspirations of the Turkish nationalism under the

leadership of Mustafa Kemal. The Treaty of Sèvres, which put the Straits

under international control and provided for both Greek and Italian

acquisitions in Asia Minor, thus would have to be reiﬁed by force of arms.

However, as usual, the British lacked troops, and Greek forces became

involved in the attempt to enforce the provisions of Sèvres. The Kemalist

movement seemed to tie many of Britain’s enemies together.

Kept

informed by its intelligence services of behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings,

the British feared that the Turkish nationalist movement contained a

number of elements that threatened the empire: the most frightening

aspects of the Pan-Turanian movement and, lurking in the shadows behind

it, both the red hand of Bolshevism and Japanese efforts to create an anti-

Western linkage between Tokyo and militant Islam.

34 K. Neilson

Thus, when the Greeks were crushed by the Turks in August 1922, the

British attempted to establish a united front against the latter. However,

Curzon soon found that France was unwilling to help, and the govern-

ment’s approach to the Dominions was bungled.

Thus, the so-called

Chanak crisis ended in disaster for the British, one that was instrumental

in the revolt that removed Lloyd George from the prime minister’s ofﬁce.

Curzon and the FO managed to rescue Britain from this embarrassing

ﬁasco. At the conference held at Lausanne at the end of 1922 and in early

1923 to resolve the issue, the foreign secretary managed to secure Britain’s

concerns with respect to imperial defence by maintaining the freedom of

the Straits, with international commissions to administer demilitarised

zones at them.

What remained was to delineate the border between Iraq

and Turkey, the sticking point being the possession of Mosul, which the

British wished to retain because of its strategic signiﬁcance for the produc-

tion of oil for the Royal Navy. This was initially referred to the League for

arbitration (another instance of the changed environment for the making

of British strategic foreign policy after 1919), and the result was ﬁnally

conﬁrmed by the Anglo-Turkish Treaty of 5 June 1926. From that time

until the approach of war in 1939, Anglo-Turkish relations remained

cordial, the only issue of strategic signiﬁcance being the revision of the

Straits agreement in 1936.

In the years just before the war, both sides

moved to make relations even closer in order to check the threat that,

ﬁrst, Italy and then Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia posed to Turkey and

Britain’s position in the Middle East.

While the defence of India and British interests in the Middle East

occupied much time and thought, by far the greatest difﬁculty for imper-

ial defence after the First World War was to protect British interests in the

Far East. This was due to the fact that the Far East involved a greater

number of issues than did any other area. In that region, formulating

British strategic foreign policy involved dealing with the complicated

tangle of Great Power relations among Britain, Japan, China, Soviet Russia

and the United States. And, as imperial defence in the Paciﬁc centred on

naval issues, it also was intimately involved with the twin issues of naval

arms control and disarmament. Various British departments of state

ranged on opposing sides, with the Admiralty, the War Ofﬁce and the

Treasury all possessed of differing (and contradictory) views as to how best

to ensure British security. The FO’s task was to establish a policy that

resolved all these issues.

The fundamental starting point for imperial defence in the Far East

had been established in 1902 with the signing of the Anglo-Japanese

Alliance.

On the British side, the motive behind the alliance had been

to check Russian depredations in China.

However, with St. Petersburg’s

defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the subsequent conclusion of the

Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, much of the advantage accruing to

Britain by virtue of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance vanished with the end

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1919–1939 35

of the Russian threat.

In fact, by the time of the Imperial Conference

of 1911, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had to reassure

the delegates that the real advantage of the arrangement with Tokyo

was that it ensured that Japan would not threaten the empire.

The

possibility of a Japanese threat became more pronounced during the

First World War when Japan took advantage of Britain’s European pre-

occupations to attempt to force China to accept the Twenty-One

Demands of 1915.

As the war came to an end, and as the date for the expiry of the Anglo-

Japanese Alliance drew closer, the FO had to ponder whether a renewal of

the agreement still served British strategic needs.

While Japan had proved

a useful ally, particularly in the naval war, Japan’s aggressive actions on the

Asian continent were clearly a menace to Britain’s imperial possessions.

However, as the Admiralty pointed out at the end of the war, to abrogate

the alliance would mean that Britain faced a period of naval inferiority in

the Far East. For the FO, the position was even more complicated. Amer-

ican–Japanese relations had deteriorated during the war, and the Ameri-

cans believed that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was aimed at them. This,

combined with American unhappiness over the British blockade during the

First World War, raised the spectre of an Anglo-American naval race unless

Washington could be convinced that no sinister Anglo-Japanese naval

combination existed.

The ideal solution would be an Anglo-American

agreement in the Far East, but this was not a likely prospect. The FO thus

had to balance good Anglo-American relations against the Far Eastern

security provided by the ongoing relationship with Japan.

A committee was set up under Curzon in September 1920 to consider

all these matters.

The result was a call for the perfection of an Anglo-

American–Japanese agreement to replace the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

But, this could not be considered in isolation. At the same time, the

impending Imperial Conference raised the issue of how to defend the Far

East.

The deﬁnitive arguments were made by the Admiralty and sup-

ported by the Lord President of the Council, Arthur Balfour, a former

prime minister and foreign secretary who had been instrumental in the

very creation of the CID.

It was concluded that, regardless of the fate of

the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, it was necessary to build a major naval base at

Singapore in order to ensure the security of the Far Eastern portion of the

empire. This was the origin of the so-called ‘Singapore strategy’, the basis

of all interwar thinking concerning the defence of the Far East.

It is

important to note, however, that the Treasury opposed the Singapore

project. They contended that Japanese aggression was unlikely, that the

Singapore base was too expensive and that the one-power standard against

Tokyo (the basis of Admiralty building programmes) was both unneces-

sary and imprecise in deﬁnition.

It was now up to the FO to ensure that all these considerations did

not adversely affect British policy generally. This was achieved at the

36 K. Neilson

Washington Naval Conference.

Here, the British delegation, under

Balfour’s leadership, achieved marvels. The Four Power Treaty and the

Nine Power Treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and guaranteed

China’s sovereignty and integrity.

The naval portions of the conference

established ﬁxed ratios between the principal naval powers with respect

to capital ships. As long as the treaties remained in place and were

observed, Britain’s Far Eastern empire remained secure, a naval building

race against the United States had been avoided, and a reasonable

degree of harmony among the Great Powers with respect to East Asia

seemed likely.

Diplomacy had come to the aid of imperial defence.

Of course, such a situation was only temporary and was dependent on

circumstances. The Treasury and the Admiralty continued to quarrel over

the costs of building Singapore and ﬂeet construction, while Soviet Russia

became a threat to the British position in China.

Under Chamberlain,

the FO decided that it wished to pursue a new policy in the Far East to

counter this trend. Beginning in 1925, the FO repeatedly asserted that no

conﬂict with Japan was likely.

In fact, by mid-1926, the FO asserted that

British imperial defence policy in the Far East should be ‘based on the

assumption that Russia is the enemy and not Japan’.

The FO wished to

couple this with a changed policy towards China, a policy that was more in

line with post-1918 thinking about empire and was aimed at creating a

prosperous uniﬁed China that would continue its lucrative trade with

Britain without the need for the unequal treaties that had been concluded

in the nineteenth century.

This had a direct impact on imperial defence. The assertion of good

relations with Japan meant that the Admiralty would no longer ﬁnd an ally

in the FO against the Treasury’s calls for economy. If Japan were no longer

a potential opponent, against whom was the Admiralty’s building pro-

gramme directed? And, what reason was there for the Singapore naval

base? However, the new policy in China also had the potential to compli-

cate Britain’s relations with the Great Powers: a policy of cooperation with

China meant that Britain would automatically be ranged on the opposite

side if Japan were to pursue an adventurist policy against the mainland.

Further, although less so after the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-

shek had purged itself of its communist elements in 1927, support for the

Nationalists created yet another opportunity for Anglo-Soviet clashes. And,

it also underlined departmental differences: the War Ofﬁce saw Japan as

an ally against Soviet actions in China, whereas the FO wished to combat

Soviet incursions without Japanese aid.

A new China policy did not bring an end to the issues of arms control

and the extent of naval building programmes. General arms control was a

difﬁcult matter for the FO. While the Treaty of Versailles had inherently

promised that disarmament would be pursued, the practical achievement

of it was arduous.

It was difﬁcult to ﬁnd agreement on technical matters,

and each of the Powers wished to exempt from limitation those weapons

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1919–1939 37

that it deemed necessary for its own needs. The British were no exception.

Since air power promised the maintenance of order in Britain’s colonial

possessions on the cheap, the British were loathe to limit its use in the

colonial sphere (although quite willing to restrict or abolish any air force

that threatened Britain itself).

However, the Admiralty’s realization that it could no longer use the

Japanese bogey to extract funds for its building programmes meant that it

became a supporter of naval arms control as a means to maintain its pre-

dominant position at sea: if the Royal Navy (RN) could no longer build as

it pleased, then it was best to limit the building programmes of other

countries. This dovetailed nicely with the FO’s desire to improve Anglo-

American relations. While the 1927 Geneva conference failed to ﬁnd a

solution to the differing needs of London and Washington with respect to

cruisers – themselves a vital component for maintaining the sea lanes so

necessary for imperial defence – this did not bring an end to the attempt

to regularise naval construction.

This was renewed in 1930 at the

London Naval Conference.

Here, the Labour Prime minister, J. Ramsay Macdonald, working in

tandem with the FO, set the parameters for the naval aspects of imperial

defence in the Far East.

The FO’s desire to improve Anglo-American

relations overrode the Admiralty’s desire for maintaining a ﬂeet of 70

cruisers, while Macdonald gave short shrift to the Treasury’s attempts to

cut naval budgets even further. With Anglo-American naval relations set

on an even keel and with Anglo-Japanese relations seemingly good, it

appeared as if the FO had established the diplomatic requirements for

ensuring British imperial defence east of Suez. This proved not to be

the case.

In the autumn of 1931, the Japanese began an aggressive campaign

against China, beginning a phase that would not end until 1945. This cam-

paign soon spread and threatened the British position at Shanghai.

The

British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, found himself in a dilemma. He

wished to get the Japanese to moderate their actions, but he also wished to

pursue this under the aegis of the League so as to avoid focussing Japan-

ese resentment on Britain. This resulted in his being unwilling to follow

the anti-Japanese line proposed by the American Secretary of State, Henry

L. Stimson. While Simon believed that if Britain were to adopt the Amer-

ican position, Washington would leave it to the British to take any con-

crete action and do nothing itself, for his part Stimson asserted that he

had been let down by the British foreign secretary. This created a situation

that bedevilled any Anglo-American cooperation in the Far East for the

rest of the decade. There were elements on either side of the Atlantic that

distrusted the other, something that the British, and particularly the FO,

worked hard to overcome.

Here, Singapore became an important

symbol, as the FO endeavoured to persuade the Americans that its

defence was as much an American as a British interest.

38 K. Neilson

The emergence of the Japanese threat also was the motivating force

behind the calling of the DRC. At that body, the FO sent mixed signals:

the bulk of the Ofﬁce believed that Japan remained the principal threat to

British interests, while Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Undersecre-

tary at the Ofﬁce, insisted that Germany was the ‘ultimate’ enemy.

Nonetheless, the DRC’s report reﬂected the FO’s priorities, with Japan

being designated as the ﬁrst contingency against which Britain must

guard. At this point, the Treasury’s long-standing arguments in favour of

improving Anglo-Japanese relations in order to reduce costs again took

the ﬁeld. These arguments were championed by Neville Chamberlain, the

Chancellor of the Exchequer, who disliked the Americans and believed

that British imperial interests in the Far East could be best safeguarded by

a return to the Anglo-Japanese amity of the period from 1902 to 1921.

Chamberlain’s arguments impressed neither the FO nor the Fighting Ser-

vices (including the Royal Air Force (RAF), despite its beneﬁtting from

Chamberlain’s preference for creating sufﬁcient air power to deter any

possible British opponent), but his political clout was sufﬁcient that the

priorities of the DRC were skewed away from naval power and imperial

defence against Japan.

In these circumstances, the FO had to fend off the Treasury’s attempts

to shape British policy in the Far East, while instead attempting to provide

for imperial defence in that region by means of diplomacy.

Its preferred

means of doing so was to improve Anglo-American relations and to

attempt to plant in Japanese minds the idea that Tokyo faced a united

Anglo-American front.

This, the so-called ‘no-bloc’ strategy, also utilized

the ongoing tension between Japan and Soviet Russia to create the impres-

sion that there was a shadowy European coalition designed to thwart

Japan’s expansion on the Asian continent.

Additionally, the FO worked

hard to help the Admiralty to maintain the precarious naval balance that

had emerged at London. This was less than successful. The London Naval

Conference of 1935 scarcely got off the ground, as the Japanese refused to

contemplate any restriction on their building programmes. However, the

FO’s adroit handling of the preliminaries to the conference helped to

convince the Americans that Britain was neither pro-Japanese nor

attempting to go back on the naval parity that Washington had gained

in 1930.

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 was another attempt to

make bricks without straw.

In limiting German naval power to 35 per

cent of the RN’s level, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was part and

parcel of the Admiralty’s effort to maintain the shaky naval balance estab-

lished at the London Conference in 1930. As such, it was supported by

some at the FO, particularly Robert Craigie, who had been the FO’s chief

naval negotiator since the late 1920s. However, others felt that concluding

the Anglo-German agreement was bad policy due to its implications for

Britain’s relations with the other Great Powers. This was due to the fact

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1919–1939 39

that signing it both destroyed the Anglo-French agreement of 3 February,

which called for arms control agreements to be made only in the context

of a general settlement with Germany, and encouraged the Italians in

their desire to attack Abyssinia.

Equally, it annoyed the Soviets, who lost

all faith in any British commitment to a general settlement. This later had

its impact on naval arms control with all that implied for imperial defence.

In 1936, when the British attempted to conclude a naval agreement with

Moscow, the Soviets proved quite unwilling to shape their building pro-

gramme to suit British interests.

The Russians were only reluctantly per-

suaded to limit their building to ships that would neither undermine the

basis of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement nor inspire an increase in

Japanese naval construction, each of which would have ruined the Admi-

ralty’s careful efforts to maintain a naval balance. Using diplomacy as a

substitute for armed might in imperial defence was clearly something that

needed to be handled with care.

The defence of the Far East became even more complicated in the late

1930s.

Italy’s growing hostility in the Mediterranean precipitated a crisis in

imperial defence as the country imperilled Britain’s lines of communication

to the Far East.

Faced with the ‘triple threat’ of Germany, Italy and Japan,

the British turned once again to diplomacy. This was a failure. Neville Cham-

berlain’s naive attempt to wean Italy away from its hostile policy towards

Britain was unsuccessful.

With Italy’s being unable to be appeased, this

turned the FO’s attention back to the interaction between naval power and

diplomacy.

Opinions were divided. Sir Robert Craigie, then Ambassador to

Japan, wanted the Admiralty to send a substantial ﬂeet to the Far East to

shore up the British imperial position. At the FO, some agreed, arguing that

abandoning the Mediterranean was more sensible than leaving the Far East

to Japan’s tender mercies. However, leaving the Mediterranean had its

drawbacks. France would be disheartened by a British abandonment of the

Middle Sea, while Egypt would see this as a betrayal of the 1936 treaty, and

Turkey needed to be guaranteed against Italy if Britain wished to persuade

Ankara to become the hub of a Balkan combination against the Axis

powers. Others at the FO wished to continue the ‘no bloc’ policy and to

utilize Japan’s concerns about Soviet Russia and the latent power of the

United States to safeguard Britain’s interests in the Far East.

The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war made this

latter preference the only practicable policy. With the RN unable to go to

the Far East due to the situation in Europe, the defence of Britain’s

Empire in the Far East was dependent on the kindness of strangers. With

respect to the United States, this meant that British diplomacy had to

ensure that Washington continued to believe that Britain did not contem-

plate any action in the Far East that would either violate the Nine Power

Treaty or appear to suggest that Britain was doing a deal with Japan at the

expense of China. With respect to Soviet Russia, British policy had to walk

a ﬁne line. It was all to the good that Soviet–Japanese tensions should

40 K. Neilson

remain high, but any Anglo-Japanese rapprochement to encourage such

a state (as the Japanese persisted in suggesting) was forbidden by the

simultaneous need not to offend Washington. And, the Soviet attack on

Finland in late 1939 brought Anglo-Soviet relations to a crisis in which it

was contemplated declaring war on Moscow.

The fall of France and the Italian declaration of war in June 1940 made

the situation in the Far East even more difﬁcult. With the Japanese moving

into French Indo-China, the security of British lines of communication to

the Far East becoming less reliable than ever, and America’s apparent

unwillingness to take any concrete actions against Japan, the FO contem-

plated making a general settlement with Japan.

But this alternative would

have involved abandoning China, and both forfeiting any American help

that might be forthcoming in the Far East and lessening American support

for Britain in the European conﬂict. If diplomacy were to continue to sub-

stitute for military power in imperial defence, then Britain must appear to

have no truck with aggressors. This circumstance remained until Pearl

Harbor converted the ‘no bloc’ policy into the Grand Alliance.

A consideration of the FO and imperial defence in the period between

the wars makes evident a number of things. It underlines the need for a

broader conceptual basis for the study of imperial defence. A recent com-

mentator has pointed out the need for ‘reintegrating the sub-disciplines’

of imperial history generally; this point is particularly apt when consider-

ing imperial defence.

For the latter to be understood properly, it needs

to be contemplated in the context of British strategic foreign policy. This

latter term is a complex one, but involves considering how the British

used all their resources – economic, ﬁnancial, military – within the con-

ﬁnes of foreign policy narrowly deﬁned to achieve their aims. And, it is

equally important to note that such policy was made within a particular

intellectual framework, one that limited what policies could have been

both contemplated and pursued. Thus, those who wish to write about

imperial defence must place their study not only in the context of empire,

but also in the context of British foreign policy generally. Further, they

need to take into account specialist work dealing with economics, ﬁnances

and military and naval matters, all the while being aware of the limiting

intellectual constraints on policy. Such general observations have a

number of ramiﬁcations for research. One is the need for more time in

the archives and the requirement to consult a wider range of primary

materials than is usual. Another is the necessity to read more widely in the

realm of the history of ideas. Only when this is done can imperial defence,

properly considered, be understood.

Notes

1 Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe (Cambridge, 1976);

Hugh Seton-Watson and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe

(London, 1981).

The Foreign Ofﬁce, 1919–1939 41