Abstract
The period from 1898 to 1907 is generally, and rightly, regarded as a turning-point in the history of Britain’s relations with foreign powers.1 It saw the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese alliance — the first such formal undertaking towards another great power of the new era. It also saw the making of the ententes with France and Russia which, although formally consisting only of agreements on matters external to Europe in dispute between the parties, was to prove in effect a commitment to the support of the Franco-Russian alliance against Germany and Austria.2 Although some historians have held that the Anglo-Japanese alliance was an outcome of rivalries in Europe, its most recent historian has pointed out that ‘Britain entered into the alliance largely by reason of her eastern rather than her European interests’.1 The second version of the alliance in 1905 with its extension to cover India, supports this thesis.
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Notes
See V. Cromwell, ‘European Treaty Obligations in March 1902’, Historical Journal, vol. VI (1963), pp. 272–9.
Francis Oppenheimer, Stranger Within (London, Faber, 1965), p. 208.
G. P. Gooch and H. V. Temperley, British Documents on the Origins of the War, vol. III (1928), Appendices A and B.
H. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (1967), pp. 577–8.
On the international diplomacy of the period generally, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954).
Sir Charles Petrie, Life and Letters of Sir Austen Chamberlain (London, Cassell, 1939), vol. 1, pp. 133–4.
Marder, Fear God and Dread Nought (London, Cape, 1952), vol. 1, p. 159.
For two recent treatments by South African historians, see J. S. Marais, The Fall of Kruger’s Republic (London, 1961), and
G. H. Le May, British Supremacy in South Africa, 1899–1907 (London, 1965).
See John H. Ferguson, American Diplomacy and the Boer War (Philadelphia, 1939).
See ‘Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire’, in Max Beloff, The Great Powers (1958).
On the anti-semitic aspect of J. A. Hobson’s indictment of imperialism, see R. Koebner and H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 250–3.
On the general subject of anti-imperialism, see also Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire (London, Macmillan, 1968).
Sir Alfred Milner to the Rev. M. G. Glazebrook from Cape Town, 29 September 1897, in A. E. Wrench, Alfred, Lord Milner (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), p. 182.
See N. H. Gibbs, The Origins of Imperial Defence (Oxford, 1955);
John Ehrman, Cabinet Government and War, 1898–1940 (Cambridge, 1958);
F. A.Johnson, Defence by Committee (New York, 1960).
See also W. C. B. Tunstall, ‘Imperial Defence, 1897–1914’, chapter XV of C.H.B.E., vol. III, and Denis Judd, Balfour and the British Empire (London, Macmillan, 1968).
Esher, Journals and Letters, vol. 2 (1934), p. 114.
Sir George Clarke (1848–1933) (created Baron Sydenham in 1919), a soldier by profession, had been secretary of the Colonial Defence committee from 1885 to 1892 and governor of Victoria from 1901 to 1904. He was a member of Esher’s War Office Reconstruction committee and secretary of the C.I.D. from the establishment of that office. He was retired from the office in 1907 owing to his opposition to Fisher’s dreadnought programme and was made governor of Bombay, a post which he held till 1913. In later life he developed extreme right-wing opinions and a devotion to the ‘Baconian’ theory of Shakespeare. See his writings, My Working Life (1927), and Studies of an Imperialist (1928).
Julian Amery, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol. IV (1951), pp. 421–2.
Spenser Wilkinson, Thirty-Five Tears (1933), pp. 186, 190.
Marder, From the Dread Nought to Scapa Flow (London, Cape, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 41–2, 110.
P. K. Kemp, ‘The Royal Navy’, ch. XIII of S. Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England, (London, 1964), pp. 502–3.
R. W. Leopold, The Growth of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1962), p. 226.
Sir Herbert Richmond, Statesmen and Sea Power (Oxford, 1946), pp. 280–1.
Michael Edwardes, High Noon of Empire: India under Curzon (1965), pp. 161–3.
Esher’s own attempt to put the matter in perspective is to be found in his letter to Kitchener of 4 October 1906, Esher, Journals and Letters, vol. 2, pp. 189–92.
For an account of the Curzon-Kitchener quarrel from a point of view sympathetic to the latter, see Philip Magnus, Kitchener, Portrait of an Imperialist (London, John Murray, 1958), ch. 11.
See on the whole subject of the role of economic questions in British foreign policy, D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968).
The autobiography of Sir Francis Oppenheimer, Stranger Within (London, Faber, 1960), is particularly revealing in this respect.
See Sir Sydney Caine, History of the Foundation of the London School of Economics and Political Science (1963).
Quoted in Peter Fraser, Joseph Chamberlain – Radicalism and Empire 1868–1914 (London, Cassell, 1966), p. 283.
B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London, Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 145, 147, 152.
Bernard Holland, Life of the Duke of Devonshire (London, Longmans, 1911), vol. 2, pp. 331–2.
Quoted by J. D. B. Miller, Richard Jebb and the Problems of Empire (1956), p. 11.
Amery to Milner, 26 February 1904, in A. M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics (London, Blond, 1964), p. 105.
See Gollin, Balfour’s Burden (1965), pp. 224–6.
S. D. Waley, Edwin Montagu (Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1964), pp. 12–13.
On the negotiation of the alliance and its early history, see Ian H. Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Diplomacy of Two Island Empires, 1894–1907 (London, Athlone Press, 1966).
Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. I (1961), pp. 236–7.
I. A. Nish, ‘Australia and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1963.
See Lord Newton, Lord Lansdowne (1929), pp. 318–20.
Hargreaves, ‘Origin of the Anglo-French Military Conversations in 1905’, History N.S., vol. XXXVI, 1951.
Esher to M. V. Brett, 6 September 1906, Letters and Journals, vol. 2, p. 183.
M. Edwardes, High Moon of Empire (1965), pp. 191–2.
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© 1987 Max Beloff
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Beloff, M. (1987). The Weary Titan. In: Britain’s Liberal Empire 1897–1921. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18957-1_3
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