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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2011

T. G. Otte
T. G. Otte
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

  1. ‘So that’s your Diary – that’s your private mind

  2. Translated into shirt-sleeved History. That

  3. Is what diplomacy left behind

  4. For after-ages to peruse, and find

  5. What passed beneath your elegant silk-hat.

  6. …

  7. But I, for one, am grateful, overjoyed

  8. And unindignant that your punctual pen

  9. Should have been so constructively employed

  10. In manifesting to unprivileged men

  11. The visionless officialized fatuity

  12. That once made Europe safe for Perpetuity.’

  13. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘On Reading the War Diary of a Defunct Ambassador’

For those who share the poet’s sentiments, this book is already too long. Those who take a more detached, possibly even cynical, view of the diplomatic machinations before the Great War may well judge it to be too short. This book is not intended as an exploration of past international relations as such. It does not seek to probe into every nook and cranny of Britain’s foreign affairs in the second half of the long nineteenth century. Neither does it offer an administrative history of ‘the quill-driving life of the F.O.’ and the then still separate diplomatic service. It seeks, instead, to explore an aspect of British foreign policy, to which historians have frequently alluded, but which still remains hidden in the darker recesses of the past: the ‘official mind’.

At its best, diplomatic history has never been the preserve of painstaking plodders who merely chart the waxing and waning of foreign relations, without any pretence at understanding their wider context or significance. It would be a bloodless analysis of diplomatic activity, indeed, that did not trouble itself to relate that activity to contemporary norms of behaviour and contemporary conceptions of what was politically permissible or practically possible. Without taking into account ‘the manner in which contemporaries tried to explain their situation in time and place and … the language and concepts in which such explanations are formulated’ no real understanding of past politics is possible.

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The Foreign Office Mind
The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914
 , pp. 1 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • Introduction
  • T. G. Otte, University of East Anglia
  • Book: The Foreign Office Mind
  • Online publication: 07 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139003520.003
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  • Introduction
  • T. G. Otte, University of East Anglia
  • Book: The Foreign Office Mind
  • Online publication: 07 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139003520.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • T. G. Otte, University of East Anglia
  • Book: The Foreign Office Mind
  • Online publication: 07 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139003520.003
Available formats
×