¹ Work on attachés is surprisingly limited. In military history, a lone monograph deals with them systematically. Vagts, Alfred, Military Attaché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Anderson terms it ‘a somewhat disappointing and opinionated book but the only effort at a comprehensive study of a significant subject’. The latter is still true. An informal survey of military history reference works found only one with an entry, less than a page long. Corvisier, André and Childs, John (eds), A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, trans. Turner, Chris (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 51–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Four others include none. Dupuy, Richard Ernest and Dupuy, Trevor N., The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present, 2^nd rev. edn (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986)Google Scholar; Holmes, Richard (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luttwak, Edward and Koehl, Stuart L., The Dictionary of Modern War (New York, NY: Harpercollins, 1991)Google Scholar; Margiotta, Franklin D. (ed.), Brassey's Encyclopedia of Military History and Biography (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 1994)Google Scholar. John Keegan's Intelligence in War includes no general account. Intelligence In War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda (London: Hutchinson, 2003). In IR, Barkawi and Porter appear to be alone in taking them seriously unto themselves. Tarak Barkawi, “‘Defence diplomacy” in North-South relations’, International Journal, 66:3 (2011), pp. 597–612; Porter, Patrick, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

² Witter, Maureen O'Conner, ‘Sanctioned spying: The development of the military attaché in the nineteenth century’, in Jackson, Peter and Siegel, Jennifer (eds), Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 90Google Scholar.

³ Adler, Emanuel, ‘The spread of security communities: Communities of practice, self-restraint, and NATO's post-Cold War transformation’, European Journal of International Relations, 14:2 (2008), pp. 195–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adler, Emanuel and Pouliot, Vincent (eds), International Practices (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Recent work has shown that status is essentially relational – an actor has it to the extent its peers confer it by witnessing its enactment. Marina G. Duque, ‘Recognizing international status: A relational approach’, International Studies Quarterly (2018); Renshon, Jonathan, ‘Status deficits and war’, International Organization, 70:3 (2016), pp. 513–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On status and/as performance, see Pouliot, Vincent, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying', p. 91.

⁶ Barkawi, Tarak, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 279CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ The war has been the subject mostly of passing interest in IR, for example, Zarakol, Ayşe, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 165, 173Google Scholar. The most important study dealing with observers, Porter focuses chiefly on the British, and on a critique of ‘military culture’ as a variable. Porter, Military Orientalism, pp. 85–110.

⁸ See American, British, German, and other reports and memoirs cited below. Several of these national reports were published in multivolume editions after the war; Staff, General (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War: Reports from British Officers Attached to the Japanese and Russian Forces in the Field (London: Wyman and Sons, 1907)Google Scholar; Historical Section of the German Staff, General, The Russo-Japanese War, trans. von, Karl Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1910)Google Scholar.

⁹ The role is thus distinct from trade, cultural, and other attachés, with whom they have in common only having been seconded to a foreign embassy by a particular national bureaucracy. Thayer, Charles Wheeler, Diplomat (New York, NY: Harper, 1959), p. 123Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Burdick, Charles B., ‘The American military attachés in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen; Freiburg, 0:2 (1989), p. 61Google Scholar.

¹¹ Vagts thus speaks of a ‘double authority under which the service attaché seems to act’. Vagts, Military Attaché, p. ix. Another account refers to the practice as ‘open military intelligence gathering’. Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying', p. 90. Wark summarises the interwar British variant as having ‘to behave and think both as a soldier and as a diplomat (and on occasion as a spy); … to serve, simultaneously, two immediate superiors –the Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, and the Ambassador’. Wark, Wesley K., ‘Three military attachés at Berlin in the 1930s: Soldier-statesmen and the limits of ambiguity’, The International History Review, 9:4 (1987), p. 587CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Vagts, Military Attaché, pp. ix., 3.

¹³ Jones, David, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, in Wolff, David et al. (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 142–3Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Vagts, Military Attaché, pp. 34, 68. See similarly estimates in Corvisier and Childs (eds), A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, p. 51. Ad hoc observation of wars by third-party military representatives appears to be somewhat older: ‘Hardly a war between 1815 and 1914, in Europe or beyond the seas, escaped this neutral observation’. Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 261.

¹⁵ Vagts, Military Attaché, pp. 33–4.

¹⁶ See summary in Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying’, p. 90.

¹⁷ Koch, Scott A., ‘The role of US Army attachés between the world wars: Selection and training’, Studies in Intelligence, 38:5 (1995), pp. 111–15Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Callwell, C. E., Stray Recollections (London: Arnold, 1923), p. 46Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Cohen, A. A., Galula: The Life and Writings of the French Officer who Defined the Art of Counterinsurgency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2012), pp. 68–70Google Scholar; Galula, David, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1964), p. 35Google Scholar.

²⁰ Sir Nicolson, Harold George, Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 236Google Scholar. Similarly, Platt's history of the British consular services and Sharp and Wiseman's volume on American diplomacy do not mention them. Platt, Desmond Christopher Martin, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London: Longman, 1971)Google Scholar; Sharp, Paul and Wiseman, Geoffrey (eds), American Diplomacy (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kissinger mentions attachés strictly in passing. Kissinger, Henry, Diplomacy (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 239, 366Google Scholar.

²¹ Anderson, Matthew Smith, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 130Google Scholar. In Germany, circa 1900, ‘it was made clear that military attaches were subordinate not to the head of the mission of which they were formally members but only to the kaiser himself’ (p. 131). Anderson nonetheless emphasises the importance of the Russo-Japanese war to their institutionalisation (p. 130).

²² Thayer, Diplomat, p. 123.

²³ They are mentioned only to specify receiving nations’ right to approve them in Article 7 of the ‘Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations’ (1961). They go unmentioned in the ‘Vienna Convention on Consular Relations’ (1963).

²⁴ Eftimiades, Nicholas, ‘China’, in Dover, Robert (ed.), Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 193Google Scholar; see similarly Len Scott, ‘Human intelligence’, in Dover (ed.), Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies, p. 98.

²⁵ Inversely, an intelligence-gathering role differentiated military attachés from consuls. John Dickie, The British Consul: Heir to a Great Tradition (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 88–9Google Scholar.

²⁶ Inaba, Chiharu and Kowner, Rotem, ‘The secret factor: Japanese network of intelligence-gathering on Russia duing the war’, in Kowner, Rotem (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5: Volume I, Centennial Perspectives (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2007), p. 89Google Scholar; Menning, Bruce W., ‘Miscalculating one's enemies: Russian military intelligence before the Russo-Japanese War’, War in History, 13:2 (2006), p. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wada, Haruki, ‘Study your enemy: Russian military and naval attachés in Japan’, in Wolff, David et al. (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 13–44Google Scholar. On the hosting of enemy's alliance partners during the war – see below.

²⁷ Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying', p. 91.

²⁸ Hilbert, L. W., ‘The origins of the military attaché service in Great Britain’, Parliamentary Affairs, 13 (1960), p. 330Google Scholar.

²⁹ The rise of the attaché further correlates with the late nineteenth-century emergence of national intelligence organisations in Europe – bureaucracies that had not previously existed. British military intelligence, for example, expanded rapidly circa the Boer War. Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War (New York, NY: Random, 1979), pp. 572–3Google Scholar.

³⁰ Wark, ‘Three military attachés at Berlin in the 1930s', p. 586.

³¹ Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying', p. 90. Some concessions were made to professionalisation. Where pre-Napoleonic military representatives were often aristocrats, by the late nineteenth century most attachés were non-aristocratic professional officers, trained in staff colleges and linked to military chains of command, not political dynasties. Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', pp. 145–7. Their duties remained loosely defined and largely discretionary.

³² Adler, ‘The spread of security communities'; Adler and Pouliot (eds), International Practices; Wenger, Etienne, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The IR literature on communities of practice has grown rapidly – see, for example, Bicchi, Federica, ‘The EU as a community of practice: Foreign policy communications in the COREU network’, Journal of European Public Policy, 18:8 (2011), pp. 1115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goff, Patricia M., ‘Public diplomacy at the global level: The Alliance of Civilizations as a community of practice’, Cooperation and Conflict, 50:3 (2015), pp. 402–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Græger, Nina, ‘European security as practice: EU–NATO communities of practice in the making?’, European Security, 25:4 (2016), pp. 478–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On related epistemic communities, see Haas, Peter M., ‘Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination’, International Organization, 46:1 (1992), pp. 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cross, Mai'a K. Davis, ‘Rethinking epistemic communities twenty years later’, Review of International Studies, 39:1 (2013), pp. 137–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Adler, ‘The spread of security communities', p. 196.

³⁴ Jasanoff, Sheila, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Cetina, Karin Knorr and Bruegger, Urs, ‘Global microstructures: The virtual societies of financial markets’, American Journal of Sociology, 107:4 (2002), pp. 905–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While neither uses the language of community, both capture pools of experts, with global reach.

³⁵ Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, ‘Privatization in practice: Power and capital in the field of global security’, in Adler and Pouliot (eds), International Practices, pp. 310–31.

³⁶ Adler, ‘The spread of security communities', p. 201.

³⁷ Adler, Emanuel, World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Barkawi, Tarak, ‘States, armies and wars in global context’, in Go, Julian and Lawson, George (eds), Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 64Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ringmar, Erik, ‘Performing international systems: Two East-Asian alternatives to the Westphalian order’, International Organization, 66:1 (2012), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recognition-driven motives likely also shaped states’ decision to send attachés. Doing so was a way to perform sovereignty, or – as in the ambivalent case of British Dominions Canada and Australia – autonomy. We limit ourselves here to the performances observers witnessed, rather than enacted.

⁴⁰ See, for example, Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For an example of field analysis in world politics, see Go, Julian, ‘Global fields and imperial forms: Field theory and the British and American empires’, Sociological Theory, 26:3 (2008), pp. 201–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Thus one recent account in social theory mobilises fields as a general theory of social life. Fligstein, Neil and McAdam, Doug, A Theory of Fields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Because field and practice both belong to the Bourdieusian toolkit, the two are broadly consistent with one another. Ours is a choice of emphasis, not of theoretical exclusion.

⁴² Similarly, we focus on practices rather than norms because we are concerned foremost with continually adjusted and often preconscious social activity, as against more formal, rigid, or systematic rules. This is consistent with recent developments in scholarship critical of norms talk. Pratt argues scholars should jettison norms as bounded entities, in favour of the ‘normative configuration, defined as an arrangement of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value orientation, and avenues of contestation’. Pratt, Simon Frankel, ‘From norms to normative configurations: A pragmatist and relational approach to theorizing normativity in IR’, International Theory, 12:1 (2020), pp. 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See similarly Wiener, Antje, ‘Enacting meaning-in-use: Qualitative research on norms and international relations’, Review of International Studies, 35:1 (2009), pp. 175–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More obliquely, a shift away from norms talk may help address concerns about Eurocentrism and the ‘spread’ of Western ideas. See the critique of norms talk in chapters in Epstein, Charlotte (ed.), Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Duque, ‘Recognizing international status’.

⁴⁴ Research on status in IR understands status hierarchies in terms of relative ‘positionality’, taking status stratification as a point of analytical departure. Mattern, Janice Bially and Zarakol, Ayşe, ‘Hierarchies in world politics’, International Organization, 70:3 (2016), pp. 637–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, particularly, chapters in Paul, T. V., Larson, Deborah Welch, and Wohlforth, William C. (eds), Status in World Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We follow this literature in understanding status as social and relational: it does not reduce to relative military capacity, and is constituted through relations between states. Duque, ‘Recognizing international status’; Renshon, ‘Status deficits and war’. On perception and great power status, see Wohlforth, William C., The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zala, Benjamin, ‘Great power management and ambiguous order in nineteenth-century international society’, Review of International Studies, 43:2 (2017), pp. 367–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Adler-Nissen, Rebecca and Pouliot, Vincent, ‘Power in practice: Negotiating the international intervention in Libya’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:4 (2014), pp. 889–911CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pouliot, International Pecking Orders. As Pouliot shows, hierarchies can be durable at the individual level. While the status changes we document are somewhat incremental, they nonetheless represent considerable achievements. Pouliot, International Pecking Orders; Pouliot, Vincent, ‘Against authority: The heavy weight of international hierarchy’, in Zarakol, Ayşe (ed.), Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 113–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ The case may thus help indicate how practices contribute to international change. Ted Hopf, ‘Change in international practices’, European Journal of International Relations (2017).

⁴⁷ We draw on a combination of communities of practice and Bourdieusian practice theory. See methodological guidelines in Bueger, Christian and Gadinger, Frank, International Practice Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 35–44, 51–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ On theory-building ‘plausibility probes’, see discussion in George, Alexander L. and Bennett, Andrew, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Kowner, Rotem, Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), p. 236Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ For configurational or analyticist research methods, and an explanation of their case-specific use, see Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 123–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Pouliot, Vincent, ‘Methodology: Putting practice theory into practice’, in Adler-Nissen, Rebecca (ed.), Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 49Google Scholar.

⁵² These constraints are not insurmountable. See discussion of ethnographically oriented historical research in MacKay, Joseph and Levin, Jamie, ‘Hanging out in international politics: Two kinds of explanatory political ethnography for IR’, International Studies Review, 17 (2015), pp. 171–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ See discussion of ‘ego-documents’ in Bueger and Gadinger, International Practice Theory, p. 151.

⁵⁴ Such Eurocentric readings are often associated with the English School. For their standard articulation of the expansion of international society, see, for example, Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See an English School critical reconstruction in Suzuki, Shogo, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan's Encounter with European International Society (London: Routledge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent revised English School accounts, see Dunne, Timothy and Reus-Smit, Christian (eds), The Globalization of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Phillips, Andrew, War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Steinberg, John W., ‘The operational overview’, in Steinberg, John W., Menning, Bruce W., van der Oye, David Schimmelpenninck, Wolff, David, and Yokote, Shinji (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 106Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Camiller, Patrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 124Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Wilson, Sandra, ‘The Russo-Japanese War and Japan: Politics, nationalism and historical memory’, in Wells, David and Wilson, Sandra (eds), The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–05 (New York, NY: St. Martin's, 1999), pp. 160–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Japanese also revolutionised wartime medicine, reducing ‘their losses through disease to a quarter of the number killed in battle’ – in an era when soldiers were more likely to die of illness than violence. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, p. 194.

⁵⁹ Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, p. 445.

⁶⁰ On the observers’ conclusions, see sources in Porter, Military Orientalism, pp. 229–30, fns 4–7; Ferris, John, ‘Turning Japanese: British observation of the Russo-Japanese War’, in Chapman, John W. M. and Inaba, Chiharu (eds), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05: Volume II, The Nichinan Papers (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2007), pp. 122, 128–9Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Neumann, Iver B. and Pouliot, Vincent, ‘Untimely Russia: Hysteresis in Russian-Western relations over the past millennium’, Security Studies, 20:1 (2011), pp. 105–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the racialised hierarchy of the nineteenth-century international system, proximity to Europe and to whiteness signalled presumptive superiority. Barder, Alexander D., ‘Scientific racism, race war and the global racial imaginary’, Third World Quarterly, 40:2 (2019), pp. 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 118–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Lieven, Dominic, The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution (New York, NY: Penguin, 2015), p. 65Google Scholar.

⁶³ For a synoptic overview of operations, see Steinberg, ‘The operational overview’.

⁶⁴ Inaba and Kowner, ‘The secret factor’, p. 89.

⁶⁵ Accepted standards of conduct required they be separate: moving observers between sides would produce the appearance of passing information. Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 261.

⁶⁶ Ignatyev, Lieutenant-General A. A., A Subaltern in Old Russia, trans. Montagu, Ivor (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1944), p. 171Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, pp. 119–20.

⁶⁸ General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, vol. 3; Pershing, John J., My Life before the World War, 1860–1917: A Memoir, ed. Greenwood, John T. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 229Google Scholar. Russia's welcome of British military observes is all the more striking given that the UK had actively contemplated taking a more direct role in the conflict. Indeed, both the cases of the Anglo-Japanese and Franco-Russian alliance included provisions for military support in the event of a wider conflict.

⁶⁹ Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, pp. 155–6.

⁷⁰ That elite status likely reflected upper class backgrounds. The Canadian observer was credentialed with little more than an elite boarding school education, a commission, and a letter from the Prime Minister. Directorate of History, ‘Canada's First Military Attaché’ (Ottawa: Canadian Forces Headquarters, 1967), pp. 5–6.

⁷¹ Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, pp. 154–5.

⁷² Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 262.

⁷³ Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, p. 156.

⁷⁴ On informal sociability in diplomatic settings, see Deepak Nair, ‘Sociability in international politics: Golf and ASEAN's Cold War diplomacy’, International Political Sociology (2019).

⁷⁵ Pershing, My Life before the World War, 1860–1917, p. 229.

⁷⁶ Reichmann, Carl, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann, Seventeenth Infantry, Observer with the Russian Forces’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), vol. 1, p. 102Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Much the same is true of Schuyler. Walter S. Schuyler, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Walter S. Schuyler, General Staff, Observer with the Russian Army’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, pp. 101–02. Reichmann also reported all arriving observers were to call on those of other nationalities already present: ‘This prompt call is semi-official and semi-social, is de rigeur, and should not be shirked.’ Reichmann, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann’, p. 175.

⁷⁸ General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War.

⁷⁹ Some states sent attachés to signal their membership in the international system. Canada sent its first ever military observer, H. C. Thacker, with the British, to Japanese forces. Directorate of History, ‘Canada's First Military Attaché’. Canadian officials debated how his deployment signalled ambiguous status as a dominion of the British Empire. See Hitsman, J. MacKay and Morton, Desmond, ‘Canada's first military attaché: Capt. H. C. Thacker in the Russo-Japanese War’, Military Affairs, 34:3 (1970), pp. 82–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Australian observer, John Charles Hoad, seems also to have been sent for largely political reasons. Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 120; Kowner (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5, p. 148.

⁸⁰ E. Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, p. 633; for example, Joseph E. Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, pp. 124, 143, 217, 221.

⁸¹ Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences’, p. 635; for example, Valery Havard, ‘Report of Col. Valery Havard, Assistant Surgeon-General, U.S.A., Observer with the Russian Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 32; William V. Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson, Corps of Engineers, Observer with the Russian Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 173.

⁸² The extent of information sharing was such that William Judson claimed that ‘Military attaches are less dangerous only than war correspondents. Many of them will be ill disposed for one reason or another. Some will try to “make records” in getting out information, and some may even try covertly to furnish information to the press.’ Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson', p. 162. See discussion of squabbles in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 120.

⁸³ Schuyler, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Walter S. Schuyler', p. 105. He went on to describe the other attachés’ kit in detail: notebooks, map cases, dispatch boxes, measurement tools, and so on (pp. 105–06).

⁸⁴ Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson'.

⁸⁵ Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 262.

⁸⁶ Ignatyev, A Subaltern in Old Russia, p. 173.

⁸⁷ Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 156. Though, see Waters, Home's successor, who claimed he merely took ill and returned home. Waters would later succeed Gerard, who died of pneumonia in 1905, before the war's end. Waters, W. H. H., ‘Secret and Confidential’: The Experiences of a Military Attaché (London: John Murray, 1926), pp. 287, 298Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ They also differed from civilian diplomatic communities in being entirely male. In European diplomacy, the role of spouses, traditionally wives, was central. On gender and diplomacy, see chapters in Cassidy, Jennifer A. (ed.), Gender and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ Hamilton, Ian, A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 28Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Ibid., pp. 153–9.

⁹¹ Pershing, My Life before the World War, 1860–1917, p. 226.

⁹² C. M. Crawford, ‘Diary of the Officers attached to the Third Japanese Army from 29 July 1904 to the Fall of the Fortress’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, p. 395.

⁹³ Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 121.

⁹⁴ See extended discussion in Porter, Military Orientalism.

⁹⁵ Quoted in Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 152.

⁹⁶ Quoted in Hitsman and Morton, ‘Canada's first military attaché', p. 83. Not bound by the rule to observe one side only, some journalists decamped to the Russians. Reporters were not much liked by the observers. The American observer Judson noted that ‘In my opinion the only safe way to deal with this question is to give out information through some official channel, at the capital of the country, on a sufficiently liberal scale to satiate public curiosity … [A]ny determination to prevent correspondents from accompanying the field army would be so unpopular as to be impracticable.’ Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson', p. 162.

⁹⁷ Peyton C. March, ‘Reports of Capt. Peyton C. March, General Staff, Observer with the Japanese Army’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 55.

⁹⁸ For example, Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences', p. 633.

⁹⁹ Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, p. 35. See similarly Edward J. McClernand, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Edward J. M'Clernand, First Cavalry, Observer with the Japanese Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 82.

¹⁰⁰ McClernand, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Edward J. M'Clernand’, p. 94.

¹⁰¹ Troubridge, quoted in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 129. On ‘military orientalism’, see Porter, Military Orientalism.

¹⁰² MacDonald, quoted in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 129.

¹⁰³ Porter, Military Orientalism, p. 93.

¹⁰⁴ Before the war, foreign attachés were ‘carefully “shepherded”’ in Tokyo. Colonel Charles Ross, An Outline of the Russo-Japanese War 1904, 1905 (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 83.

¹⁰⁵ Thus, Dostoyevsky could write, in 1881, that ‘In Europe we were only poor recipients of charity and slaves, but we come to Asia as masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we are also Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will entice our spirit and draw us thither once the movement has gained momentum.’ Quoted in Kappeler, Andreas, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History, trans. Clayton, Alfred (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 207–08Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ Ignatyev, A Subaltern in Old Russia, pp. 171–2.

¹⁰⁷ Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 156.

¹⁰⁸ March, ‘Reports of Capt. Peyton C. March', p. 7.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 14.

¹¹⁰ W. H. H. Waters, ‘General Report on the experiences of the Russo-Japanese War’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, pp. 133–4.

¹¹¹ Historical Section of the German General Staff, The Russo-Japanese War, p. 370, fn. 1.

¹¹² Kuropotkin appears to have taken no interest in the observers, mentioning neither them nor Ignatyev in his memoir of the war – despite having been an observer himself in his youth, with the French, in Algeria. Kuropatkin, A. N., The Russian Army and the Japanese War, ed. Swinton, E. D., trans. Lindsay, A. B. (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1909), pp. 102–03Google Scholar.

¹¹³ Oliver Griffin, ‘Perceptions of Russia in German military leadership during the war’, in Kowner (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5, pp. 352–5.

¹¹⁴ The Japanese Army was based on the German model, and the Germans saw the war as a test of it against Russia – a view that assumed a good deal of relative Japanese competence and effectiveness. Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 169.

¹¹⁵ Griffin, ‘Perceptions of Russia in German military leadership during the war’, p. 358.

¹¹⁶ Reichmann, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann’, p. 174. Havard, also American, nonetheless offers a detailed and largely appreciative account of Russian military food and mess practices. Havard, ‘Report of Col. Valery Havard’, pp. 23–8.

¹¹⁷ Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 122.

¹¹⁸ Hamilton quoted in ibid., p. 131.

¹¹⁹ Hamilton nonetheless allowed that ‘They have however one very fine military quality. They are not easily discouraged or demoralized.’ Ibid.

¹²⁰ Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, p. 35.

¹²¹ Thus Porter finds British perceptions were orientalist, ‘but not in the sense that they depicted the Japanese in a derogatory way … Their receptiveness to Japanese examples enabled them to rise above dismissive and racist attitudes.’ Porter, Military Orientalism, p. 109.

¹²² See discussion in Porter in ibid., pp. 229–30, fns 4–7.

¹²³ Adler, ‘The spread of security communities’, p. 196.

¹²⁴ Okakura Tenshin, quoted in Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, p. 175. The war was also a prominent focus of attention for Japanese pacifists. Wilson, ‘The Russo-Japanese War and Japan’, p. 161.

¹²⁵ MacMillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, NY: Random House, 2001), pp. 316–21Google Scholar.

¹²⁶ Zarakol, After Defeat.

¹²⁷ The case thus tracks with much recent work in practice scholarship, in refusing a strict disjunction between stability and change. This is not about order, but about ordering: about treating the production of stability and change as deeply related rather than divergent processes. See Adler, World Ordering; Bueger and Gadinger, International Practice Theory, pp. 100–06.