Kathleen Burk and the History of Diplomacy

Abstract

Professor Kathleen Burk has worked on some of the key themes in the history of diplomacy for more than three decades. Foremost amongst them has been the role of financial strength in the projection of power, and other key themes have included the role of the individual in making state policy; the concept and practice of “imperialism”; and the importance of non-state actors, such as banks, businessmen, and even tourists in the interplay between nations. As this article demonstrates, she has attempted throughout to strike a historiographical balance, moved more by her empirical sense of the evidence than the fashions that have come and gone during her career. She worked on transatlantic relations before “Atlantic History” came to the fore; transnationalism before the movement of ideas across frontiers became an obsession; and imperialism before the recent recrudescence of interest in this arena too. In this special issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft, Professor Burk's former colleagues, collaborators, and pupils demonstrate how they have adopted and adapted her techniques: from the history of decolonisation to histories of charities to human rights, and covering topics as diverse as British defence policy and twentieth century Americans' concepts of what “Europe” is or might become.

Notes

1. K. Burk, “Obituary: Betty Kemp,” Guardian (12 July 2007).

2. K. Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven, 2000), p. x.

3. K. Burk, Morgan Grenfell, 1838–1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford, 1989), p. 154.

4. The quotation is from A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria–Hungary (Harmondsworth, 1981 edition.), p. 250.

5. K. Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 (London, 1985), p. 195.

6. K. Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London, 2007), pp. 565–72, 270–5, 118–24.

7. K. Burk, “An American Academic in London,” The Financial Times, 9 June 2007.

8. A.J.P. Taylor, “The Rise and Fall of Diplomatic History,” in idem., ed., Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Harmondsworth, 1979 edition), p. 167; A.J.P. Taylor, Essays in English History (London, 1976), pp. 79–103, 199–203.

9. M. Beloff, “The Special Relationship: An Anglo–American Myth,” in M. Gilbert, ed., A Century of Conflict: Essays for A.J.P. Taylor (London, 1966), p. 152.

10. See the account of the loan imbroglio of 1916 in Burk, Sinews of War, pp. 86–9, for the views of all three policy actors.

11. K. Burk, “A Merchant Bank at War: The House of Morgan, 1914–18,” in P.L. Cottrell and D.E. Moggridge, eds., Money and Power: Essays in Honour of L.S. Pressnell (London, 1988), p. 155.

12. K. Burk, “Cityscrape,” The London Review of Books, 14/13(9 July 1992): pp. 5–6.

13. Burk, Morgan Grenfell, pp. 21–2, 29.

14. Burk, Sinews of War, p. 89.

15. K. Burk, “Great Britain in the United States, 1917–1918: The Turning Point,” International History Review 1/2(1979), p. 408.

16. K. Burk, “Financing Kitchener's (and Everyone Else's) Armies,” in K. Neilson and G. Kennedy, eds., The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System (Aldershot, 2010), pp. 274–75.

17. Burk, Morgan Grenfell, pp. 150–56.

18. K. Burk, “Economic Diplomacy Between the Wars,” Historical Journal, 24/4(1981), p. 1003.

19. K. Burk and M. Pohl, Deutsche Bank in London 1873–1998 (Munich, 1998), e.g., p. 122.

20. K. Burk, “The House of Morgan Redivivus? The Abortive Morgan International, 1972–73,” Business History, 33/3(1991), pp. 177, 180, 183–84, 190. This article is also printed in G. Jones, ed., Banks and Money: International and Comparative Finance in History (London, 1991), pp. 177–95

21. See, for different emphases, P. Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of London's Investment Banks (Harmondsworth, 2001); S.N. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850–1990, new edition (Cambridge, 2005); N. Ferguson, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (London, 2010).

22. Burk, Sinews of War, pp. 16–17.

23. Burk, Old World, New World, pp. 438–39.

24. M. Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2008); M. Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London, 2011).

25. J.C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “On the Diversity of Knowledge and the Community of Thought: Culture and International History,” in J.C.E. Gienow-Hecht and F. Schumacher, eds., Culture and International History (New York, 2003), pp. 3–26. See also A. Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in M.J. Hogan and T.G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2004), esp. pp. 254–56. The importance of “cultures” is, furthermore, implicit in the periodisation of “modernity” in C.S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review, 105/3(2000), pp. 813–14.

26. B.A. McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy and the Marshall Plan (Oxford, 2008), p. 194.

27. K. Burk, “The Anglo–American “Special Relationship” in the Atlantic Context during the Late 1940s and 1950s,” in M. Mariano, ed., Defining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (London, 2010), pp. 149–50; K. Burk, “Is There an Anglo–American Alliance? Or a Pact? Or an Agreement? Or Anything?,” in M.P. Yeager and C. Carter, eds., Pacts and Alliances in History: Diplomatic Strategy and the Politics of Coalitions (London, 2012), esp. pp. 127–28.

28. K. Burk, “Money and Power: The Shift from Great Britain to the United States,” in Y. Cassis, ed., Finance and Financiers in European History 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 362–65.

29. K. Burk, “The Marshall Plan: Filling in Some of the Blanks,” Contemporary European History, 10/2(2001), pp. 272–73.

30. See, for instance, T. Bale, “Dynamics of a Non-Decision: The ‘Failure' to Devalue the Pound, 1964–1967,” Twentieth Century British History, 10/2(1999), pp. 192–217; S. Newton, “The Sterling Devaluation of 1967, the International Economy and Post-War Social Democracy,” English Historical Review, 125/515(2010), pp. 912–45. G. O'Hara, Governing Post-War Britain: The Paradoxes of Progress, 1951–1973 (Basingstoke, 2012), esp. pp. 89–90, reflects on these themes.

31. Burk, Taylor, pp. 8–9, 66.

32. Burk, “Merchant Bank at War,” p. 156.

33. Burk, Morgan Grenfell, p. 22. Italics in original.

34. Burk, Taylor, Appendix, pp. 418–19. The calculation utilised www.measuringworth.com/exchange/.

35. For instance, Ibid., p. 31.

36. A. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography (London, 1994), p. 9–11.

37. K. Burk, “An Oxford Don at War: A.J.P. Taylor, 1939–1945,” in K.G. Robertson, ed., War, Resistance and Intelligence (London, 1999), p. 21.

38. Burk, Taylor, pp. 27–28, 88–9.

39. Ibid., p. 87.

40. Burk, “Oxford Don at War,” p. 19.

41. Burk, Sinews of War, pp. 222–23.

42. K. Burk, “A Yoke That's Wearing Thin,” Times Higher Education (6 December 1996).

43. Private information via email, 30 July 2012.

44. Correspondence with Professor David French, 21 June 2012. Emphasis in original.

45. Communication with the author via email, 6 July 2012.

46. Private information via email, 18 June 2012.

47. Communication with the author via email, 25 July 2012.

48. Private information via email, 19 June 2012.

49. T.W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 95/4(2009), pp. 1067–69; M.H. Hunt, “Ideology,” in Hogan and Paterson, American Foreign Relations, pp. 234–35.

50. Burk, “Kemp,” 12 July 2007.

51. Burk, Old World, New World, pp. 348–51.

52. Most famously in D.T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998); but see recently on such movements D. Laqua, Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (London, 2011) and, for an earlier period, N. Perl-Rosenthal and E. Haefeli, “Introduction: Transnational Connections,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10/2(2012), pp. 227–38.

53. W.H. McNeill, “World History and Globalization,” in A.G. Hopkins, ed., Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Global (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 285–6.

54. Burk, Old World, New World, pp. 558–59.

55. Taylor, “Ranke,” in idem., Grandeur, p. 115; idem., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1878–1918 (London, 1957), p. 574.

56. Communication with the author via email, 15 July 2012. The phrase “When in doubt, take it out” apparently became so associated with Professor Burk that the departmental administrator suggested adopting it as her screensaver.

57. Zeiler, “Bandwagon”: especially pp. 1062–71.

58. Cf. respectively C. Dorn and K. Ghodsee, “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: Communism, UNESCO, and the World Bank,” Diplomatic History, 36/2(2012), pp. 373–98; A. Iriye, “Environmental History and International History,” Diplomatic History, 32/4(2008), pp. 643–6.

59. K. Burk and D. Geary, “Editorial,” Contemporary European History, 1/1(1992), pp. 1–2.

60. K. Burk, “What is Diplomatic History?,” History Today (July 1985), p. 41.

61. Burk, Sinews of War, p. 224.

62. See K. Burk, “The Lineaments of Foreign Policy: The United States and a ‘New World Order,' 1919–39,” Journal of American Studies, 26/3(1992), pp. 386–87, 391, reprinted as K. Burk, “Lineaments of Foreign Policy,” in A. McGrew, ed., Empire: The United States in the Twentieth Century (Buckingham, 1994), pp. 1–18.

63. A.E. Eckes and T.W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 4–5.

64. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, p. xxiv.

65. Burk, Old World, New World, 279, pp. 18–21.

66. K. Burk, “The Origins and Early Development of the Eurobond Market,” Contemporary European History, 1/1(1992), pp. 65–71.

67. K. Burk, “Symposium: The 1976 IMF Crisis,” Contemporary Record, 3/2(1989), especially 39–40; idem., “Witness Seminar: ‘Big Bang': The October 1986 Stock Market Deregulation,” Contemporary British History, 13/1(1999), pp. 100–32.

68. K. Burk, The First Privatisation: The Politicians, the City and the Denationalisation of Steel (London, 1988), pp. 1, 146–7.

69. K. Burk and A. Cairncross, “Goodbye Great Britain”: The 1976 IMF Crisis (London, 1992), pp. 14–16.

70. K. Burk, “Election Diary,” London Review of Books 14, no. 8 (23 April 1992), p. 21.

71. See online content at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20071022.shtml, and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/7559254.stm

72. Private information via email, 30 June 2012.

73. K. Burk, “A Village Discovers Its History,” History Today (February 1985): pp. 44–7; idem., The Parish of Long Wittenham, 1800–1920 (Long Wittenham, 1984).

74. K. Burk, “Bishop Birinus, the Early English Church and the Re-Conversion of Long Wittenham,” Chronicle: The Journal of the Long Wittenham Local History Group 6 (1992), pp. 3–9; idem., “Wars From the Iron Age to the Norman Conquest,” Ibid., Group 8 (1995), pp. 1–7.

75. K. Burk, “Colonial America, the Founding Fathers and Wine,” The World of Fine Wine, 3(2004), pp. 70–4; K. Burk, “Thirst for Knowledge,” Prospect (20 August 2002).

76. K. Burk and M. Bywater, Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine (London, 2008), pp. 12–15, 236–7.

77. See, for instance, D. Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Invention of Madeira Wine,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29/2(1998), pp. 197–219; J. Simpson, “Cooperation and Conflicts: Institutional Innovation in France's Wine Markets, 1870–1911,” Business History Review, 79/3(2005), pp. 527–58.

78. Burk, “Lineaments”: p. 391; idem., “Lineaments,” in McGrew, ed., Empire, p. 17.