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  • British World Policy and the Projection of Global Power, c.1830–1960 ed. by T. G. Otte
  • Richard Toye
British World Policy and the Projection of Global Power, c.1830–1960. Edited by T. G. Otte (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 326 pp. $29.99

This book, published in honor of the late Keith Neilson, tackles the issue of Britain's world power status, and its decline, from a variety of interesting angles. Its scope is more ambitious than the dates in the title suggest, as both Otte's chapter about the Foreign Office (fo) and Kathleen Burk's about Britain's economic networks in South America deal with the period since 1800. The geographical coverage extends beyond "the British world" to include Japan as well as Russian views of Britain. Some, although by no means all, of the twelve chapters engage directly with Neilson's work. For example, John H. Maurer, in his assessment of the British response to Imperial Germany's naval expansionism before 1914, concludes, "As Keith Neilson argued, Britain was no weary titan but a formidable Great Power, fully capable of competing in the international rivalries of that troubled age and beating back challengers, its leaders committed to playing the leading role on the world stage" (172).

One of the volume's strengths is the way in which the contributors negotiate the balance between recognizing the reality of Britain's long-term relative decline and acknowledging the ways in which the country continued to exercise its muscle even as its options shrank. Douglas E. Delaney's chapter about the Imperial General Staff and the Dominions in the interwar years is especially illuminating in this respect. This was an era of financial stringency when the Empire was also subject to forces that weakened Whitehall's (already limited) control. Yet although Dominion politicians had little appetite to continue the burden sharing of World War I in time of peace, inexpensive and politically opportune techniques continued to facilitate coordination of the various armed forces, including the sharing of information, exchanges of officers, and intelligent use of Staff Colleges. Thus, "in spite of the near-breakneck demobilization that followed the First World War, widespread war-weariness, declining defence budgets, and growing dominion autonomy, the British general staff managed to keep some long-proven strands of military cooperation intact" (228). This situation was of value when war came again in 1939.

Such an approach is useful because historians' attention can often be monopolized by episodes of drama and crisis at the expense of the study of the workaday or routine behavior that underpinned the successful projection of power. Otte's chapter about the FO, which is exemplary in this respect, deals with the FO's internal procedures surrounding the accumulation of policy-relevant knowledge. On the one hand, it developed a reasonably efficient system for processing paper, but on the other, as business grew in both speed and volume, the organization was sometimes stretched to its breaking point. Enormous backlogs piled up. Moreover, as one civil servant sagaciously observed in 1891, "You cannot invent a machine into which documents can be put at one end and conclusions ground out at the other by turning a handle" (99). [End Page 316]

The same is true of the writing of history; happily, all the authors in the book succeed in applying common sense and wisdom to the fruits of their archival industry. They do not, however, engage in any methodological reflection or interdisciplinary inquiry. Because historians are prone to assume that the use of archives is well understood and without need of explicit justification, they sometimes undersell their own work. In her chapter, "Views of War, 1913 and 1949: Second Thoughts," Zara Steiner (who died not long after this book was published), however, remarks about changing assumptions within the historical profession since she first approached the topic of attitudes about the outbreak of World Wars I and II in a seminar paper of 1972: "The original paper was critically received; many members of the seminar believed that historians should not deal with the issue of public opinion" (174). In this way, the book obliquely raises the interesting question of what...

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