First Published in 2004. Throughout the half-century between the Crimean War and the outbreak of the First World War, few countries confronted successive British governments with the complexity of problems posed by the Ottoman Empire. This study attempts to attain three main objectives. The first is an analysis of the growth and development of British policy at two levels: the Embassy and the Foreign Office. The second is an assessment of the influence of various embassies on decision-making in the Foreign Office. The third is an estimate of the influence of European and Imperial considerations upon the formulation of Britain's policy towards the Ottoman Empire.
Keith Wilson is Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds.; This book is intended for undergraduate history courses: broad 20th century European history, First World War, military history, war studies, international and diplomatice history, school libraries.
First published in 1967, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism is essentially the political history of Italy, concerned with both domestic and foreign policy and their interaction. Designed in chronological order, the book is divided into four parts: the consolidation of Italy after its unification; the stresses and strains the country went through; the expansion of liberalism; and the onset and development of fascism. This seminal book on the history of Italy will be of interest to students of history and political science.
On the eve of the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful socialist party in the world. German Social Democracy through British Eyes examines the SPD's rise using British diplomatic reports from Saxony, the third-largest federal state in Imperial Germany and the cradle of the socialist movement in that country. Rather than focusing on the Anglo-German antagonism leading to the First World War, the book peers into the everyday struggles of German workers to build a political movement and emancipate themselves from the worst features of a modern capitalist system: exploitation, poverty, and injustice. The archival documents, most of which have never been published before, raise the question of how people from one nation view people from another nation. The documents also illuminate political systems, election practices, and anti-democratic strategies at the local and regional levels, allowing readers to test hypotheses derived only from national-level studies. This collection of primary sources shows why, despite the inhospitable environment of German authoritarianism, Saxony and Germany were among the most important incubators of socialism.
Much of today’s international order can be traced to the experimentations with governance that occurred in central Europe immediately after World War I. And though Western governments did not bring about the creation of Poland on their own or determine all of its eventual borders, their attempts to do so left many lingering grudges and made the years immediately following the war a crucial period in Polish and international history. Passion and Restraint examines how British, French, and American foreign policymakers interacted with Poles and the idea of an independent Poland during this period. Western policymakers knew little about Poland in 1914, but by war’s end they were drawing the new country’s borders, sending humanitarian aid, and imposing minority protections. Attitudes regarding national character and emotional restraint were central, intertwined themes in British, French, and American diplomacy during this period of Polish rebirth, and policymakers’ opinions of national character evolved based on personal experiences, political conditions, and dominant understandings of the Polish people in the early twentieth century. Amid these changing attitudes, policymakers emphasized the necessity of Polish emotional restraint. Demonstrating how emotions and stereotypes were integral to diplomatic decision-making, Passion and Restraint brings attention to these often-overlooked historical factors, advancing a new lens for the study of Polish, European, and international history.
The military was the key political institution in early twentieth-century Turkey. Its duty was to save the state a responsibility buried deeply in its ethos and tradition and this was reflected in the young Turk movement. This book examines the historical conditions under which the Ottoman-Turkish military tradition was established, the role it played (especially in the Young Turk era) and the way it set the scene for the transformation from empire to nation-state, the Republic of Turkey. The book opens with a controversial interpretation of a speech by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1909 calling for the disengagement of the military from partisan politics. Then, after the methodological and broad social and historical settings provided in Parts One and Two respectively, the longest section (Part Three) covers the tumultuous events of the period 1908-1913 in close detail, and in a lively historical narrative with accompanying commentary. The epilogue looks forward through the transition years of the National Struggle to the military tradition in modern Turkey and other Ottoman successor states.
The thematic collection of papers WAR, PEACE AND NATIONBUILDING (1853– 1918) aims to explore the processes unfolding during peacetime, wartime and conclusion of agreements, when individuals, nations and empires were forming their identities. The intention is to present, through a scientific perspective, the social, political, diplomatic and cultural changes in European societies from the start of the Crimean War until the Versailles Peace Conference, which marked the end of the First World War.
American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939 was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Scholars concerned with the diplomatic history of the United States have largely neglected the subject of American relations with the Middle East during the four decades before World War I. With this study, Professor DeNovo fills the gap by describing and assessing the United States' cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations with Turkey, Persia, and the Arab East in that period. He traces, chronologically and topically, the activities of such American interest groups as Protestant missionaries, educators, philanthropists, archaeologists, businessmen, and technical advisers, as well as the official actions of their government. The account falls roughly into three chronological periods. The first section traces the interest groups through the pre-World War I years of political and cultural stirring in the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Special attention is given to the Chester Project for railroad development in Turkey. The second part deals with the upheavals accompanying World War I and the tasks of peacemaking from the Mudros armistice through the Lausanne settlement of 1923. The latter chapters detail the rise of the Turkish national movement, the deepening Persian and Arab nationalism, and the accommodation of American cultural and economic groups to these conditions. The author points out that before World War II began, Americans had acquired a significant interest in Middle Eastern oil and had become emotionally involved in the Arab-Zionist tension. In 1939 the United States was on the verge of a new phase in its Middle Eastern relations when that region would become more intimately linked to America's national security.
During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today. The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.
