“A Kind of Black Hole”?: Commercial Diplomacy Before 1914

Abstract

Commercial diplomacy is the Cinderella branch of international history. To varying degrees, it remains neglected, ignored or ill-used. Treated by most diplomatic historians with a sort of disdain, which the many critics of the nineteenth-century Foreign Office imagined to be the department’s natural attitude towards ‘trade’ and those in it, it has not fared any better in the hands of economic historians, who usually see little cause to dirty their hands with past political machinations, let alone to plumb the depths of international politics.