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‘Chief of All Offices’: High Politics, Finance, and Foreign Policy, 1865–1914

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Book cover The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000

Abstract

To argue the case for a Rankean ‘primacy of foreign policy’ in British politics at the end of the long nineteenth century seems, at best, counter-intuitive. At worst, it smacks of a certain Teutonic rigidity, ill-suited to such a laissez-faire entity as the Victorian and Edwardian state or the protean nature and fluidity of Britain’s external relations. It has been tempting, therefore, for historians to shelter behind the observations on the subject by one foreign secretary of the period. ‘[T]he true reason’ of British foreign policy, Sir Edward Grey observed after the Great War, ‘is not to be found in far-sighted views or large conceptions or great schemes’ attributed to it by historians.1

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Notes

  1. Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1925) Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916 (2 vols, New York: Hodder & Stoughton) I, p. 6.

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  40. Exemplary, M. Swartz (1985) The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London: Macmillan), pp. 5–6;

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  41. for a more nuanced approach see W. Mulligan (2008) ‘Mobs and diplomats: The Alabama affair and British diplomacy, 1865–1872’, in M. Mösslang and T. Riotte (eds) The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 105–132.

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  49. The subject still awaits its full treatment; for a discussion of some of this, see T.G. Otte (2006) “Avenge England’s dishonour”: By-elections, Parliament, and the Politics of Foreign Policy in 1898’, English Historical Review CXXI, 385–428.

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  50. Parliamentary Debates, 5th series xxii (13 March 1911), cols. 1977–1991 [hereafter PD]; for the event, see T.G. Otte (2010) ‘Grey ambassadors: The Dreadnought and British Foreign Policy’, in A.D. Lambert (ed.) The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age (Aldershot: Ashgate).

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  56. Salisbury to Chamberlain (private), 13 December 1896, Chamberlain Mss, Birmingham University Library [hereafter BUL], JC 5/67/56. Salisbury was not alone in holding such views. His erstwhile rival Randolph Churchill similarly regarded the Treasury as ‘a lot of d — d Gladstonians’, H.G. Hutchinson (ed.) (1922) The Private Diary of Sir Algernon West (London: John Murray), pp. 4–5.

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University College Dublin, Ireland

    William Mulligan (Lecturer in Modern History) (Lecturer in Modern History)

  2. University of Cambridge, UK

    Brendan Simms (Professor of the History of International Relations) (Professor of the History of International Relations)

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© 2010 T. G. Otte

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Otte, T.G. (2010). ‘Chief of All Offices’: High Politics, Finance, and Foreign Policy, 1865–1914. In: Mulligan, W., Simms, B. (eds) The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289628_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289628_15

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