The nature of international diplomacy and Britain’s world role changed immeasurably after the end of the First World War, and this book shows how the various men who headed the Foreign Office during the interwar years sought to operate in the shifting political and bureaucratic environments that confronted them. British Foreign Secretaries in an Uncertain World examines the careers of each of the interwar Foreign Secretaries, including Lord Curzon, Ramsay MacDonald and Anthony Eden. Using an extensive range of primary sources both published and unpublished, official and private, Michael Hughes provides a detailed assessment of how these men approached their role and how influential they were in international diplomacy. The book also looks at the Foreign Secretaries’ successes or failures within the British political system, analysing how influential the Foreign Office was under each Secretary in determining British foreign policy. A fascinating book with a unique focus, British Foreign Secretaries in an Uncertain World takes a rigorous look at a key topic in British history.

Her Majesty's government in the United Kingdom have decided to publish the most important documents in the Foreign Office archives relating to British foreign policy between 1919 amd 1939 in three series: the 1st ser. covering from 1919-1930, the 2d from 1930-39, the 3d from Mar. 1938 to the outbreak of the War.

This book analyses the issue of Czech-German relations within Czechoslovakia between 1933 and 1938. Following Adolf Hitler’s accession to the office of Chancellor, the German minority in Czechoslovakia began to progressively mobilise and gradually radicalise such that the majority of them supported the Sudeten German Party in the 1935 elections and played a large part in the end of the First Czechoslovak Republic three years later.

Danubian Europe presented constant and serious security risks for European peace and stability and, for that reason, contrary to conventional wisdom, it commanded the attention of British diplomacy with a view to appeasing local conflicts. Britain and Interwar Danubian Europe examines the manner in which the Foreign Office perceived and treated the antagonism between the Little Entente, comprised of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, and Hungary, on the one hand, and revisionist Bulgaria and her neighbours in the Balkans, on the other, and the impact that these local conflicts had in connection with Franco-Italian rivalry in Central/South-Eastern Europe. With Hitler's accession to power, Danubian Europe was viewed in Whitehall in relation to its place in the prospective policy for preserving Austrian independence and containing German aggression. Dragan Bakic argues that the British approach to security problems in Danubian Europe had certain permanent features which stemmed from the general British outlook on the new successor states -the members of the Little Entente- founded on the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy. This book shows that it was the lack of confidence in their stability and permanence, as well as the misperceptions about the motives and intentions of the policies pursued by other Powers towards Central/South-Eastern Europe, which accounted for the apparent sluggishness and ineffectiveness of the Foreign Office's dealings with security challenges. Based on extensive, original archival research, this is a fascinating volume for any historian keen to know more about the 20th-century history of East-Central Europe or British foreign policy in the interwar years.