Zwischen Empire und Kontinent: Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg

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Notes

1 One of the leading advocates of this position is Brendan Simms. See Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (London: Allen Lane 2013). The importance of Germany in the British calculus is also acknowledged by Thomas Otte. See T.G. Otte, ‘The Foreign Office and Defence of Empire, 1856–1914’, in Greg Kennedy (ed.), Imperial Defence: The Old World Order 1856–1956 (London: Routledge 2008), esp.22–3.

2 John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power, 1874-1914 (London: Sceptre 2000); Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Basic Books 1999); and Keith M. Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904–1914 (Cambridge: CUP 1985). For a marginally more nuanced revisionism, see Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995).

3 To give but one example, Neilson’s assessment of the priorities of the Royal Navy is based on Foreign Office papers, Cabinet papers and a few private letters in the Selborne papers. Relevant Admiralty records are nowhere to be found. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar, 120–1.

4 Alternative views can be found in Shawn T. Grimes, Strategy and War Planning in the British Navy, 1887–1918 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell 2012); David Morgan-Owen, ‘“History is a Record of Exploded Ideas”: Sir John Fisher and Home Defence, 1904–1910’, International History Review 36 (2014), 550–72; Christopher M. Buckey, ‘Forging the Shaft of the Spear of Victory: The Creation and Evolution of the Home Fleet in the Prewar Era, 1900–1914’, PhD, Univ. of Salford, 2013.

5 The debate so far consists of: Christopher M. Bell, ‘Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–1914’, War in History 18 (2011), 333–56; Nicholas A. Lambert, ‘On Standards: A Reply to Christopher Bell’, War in History 19 (2012), 217–40; and Christopher M. Bell, ‘On Standards and Scholarship: A Response to Nicholas Lambert’, War in History 20 (2013), 381–409.

6 Morgan-Owen, ‘“History is a Record of Exploded Ideas”’, 563–4.