The Foreign Office, Foreign Policy and Commerce: Anglo-German Relations in the 1930s

Abstract

With the foreign policies pursued by states in the twentieth century becoming increasingly entangled with commercial considerations, the potential existed for a complexity of geopolitical interactions to cloud judgements over how best to ensure national security. For Britain, nothing was more important than ensuring the defence of the home nation and the empire from attack by its enemies. The First World War had demonstrated unequivocally that only those states with assured access to supplies of vital raw materials, large-scale manufacturing capacity and advanced technological know-how could hope to endure in a global conflict.

The author gratefully acknowledges comments made by Gill Bennett on a draft of this chapter