The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 by T. G. Otte (review)

Readers of a certain age must be forgiven if the first thing that pops into their heads when they encounter a book title such as The Foreign Office Mind is the image of the irrepressible “Sir Humphrey Appleby” and his civil service colleagues going about the business of keeping cabinet ministers from actually running the country. However, this book is not a burlesque that contributes to that charming nonsense. It is a densely packed, massively researched, and very learned volume (with 2,000 footnotes evidencing the author’s use of his sources). The reader must pay attention. In sum: this is a very good book, and any historian with an interest in the gears and escapements on the inside of the Foreign Office machine is well advised to read it.

While T. G. Otte does not expect us to believe that there was a monolithic (and ossified) “Foreign Office Mind” in place in 1865 and virtually unchanged in 1914, he does remind us that the senior clerks in King Charles Street, as well as those who served in the embassies and legations throughout the world, shared similar backgrounds and training that made it likely that they would fit in: they were almost uniformly scions of the upper or upper-middle classes and products of one of the Clarendon schools. Otte explains that the “Foreign Office Mind” evolved to reflect generational changes as the Palmerstonians gave way to the high Victorians, who themselves finally retired and left the Office in the hands of the late Victorians and Edwardians (who were more likely to have attended university, as well as a public school).

These generations differed in approach, we are told: the Palmerstonians reflected their namesake and were a confident and expansive lot compared with the high Victorians who advised their political masters to play their cards closer to the vest. The Edwardians were a tougher and sometimes even aggressive crowd. But the problems with which they wrestled over this half-century, as politicians came and went, remained relatively constant: how would this trade-dependent island Empire retain her happy position in a Euro-centered world of competing great powers? How could she maintain the balance of power among the great players: ever-threatening Russia, ambitious Germany, elderly Austria-Hungary, volatile France, and hungry Italy? Then there was the seemingly endless problem of what to do about the perennially ailing Ottoman Empire—a nuisance, but a necessary one given that the alternatives (which almost certainly included war over the spoils) were worse than the unsavory task of propping up the emaciated corpse.

Then, of course, imperial Britain gloried in being a global power and required a Foreign Office that dealt with friends and rivals while considering her own imperial affairs, often on the “geostrategic periphery” (399). Russia was a largely Asian power, deeply engaged in the infamous “Great Game” in South Asia and the Near East. France had her interests in Africa and the Ottoman Empire; Austria-Hungary and Russia seemed forever on the verge of a clash in the Balkans. While they had meanings on many levels, the ententes of 1904 and 1907 that represented a greater involvement of Britain in continental affairs, it must be remembered, were essentially colonial agreements.

These years also saw the deterioration of confidence in a foreign policy embracing isolation, “splendid” or otherwise, which Otte examines in his third chapter. Politicians forged the troublesome path that led to arrangements first with Tokyo, and then with Paris and St. Petersburg, but the Foreign Office professionals and ambassadors had to do the spade work.

Yet another concern for Foreign Office senior staff was the issue of continuity. To be taken seriously by the other powers, to retain gains made in the past and to achieve worthy goals in future, there had to be continuity. “It...