This new volume examines the influence of trade and empire from 1689 to 1815, a crucial period for British foreign policy and state-building. Jeremy Black, a leading expert on British foreign policy, draws on the wide range of archival material, as well as other sources, in order to ask how far, and through what processes and to what ends, foreign policy served commercial and imperial goals during this period. The book is particularly interested in the conceptualization of these goals in terms of international competition, and how the contours and contents of this conceptualization altered during this period. Trade, Empire and British Foreign Policy, 1689-1815 also analyzes how the relationships between trade, empire and foreign policy were perceived abroad and how this contributed to an analysis of Britain as a distinctive state, and with what consequences. This book will be of much interest to students of British imperial history, diplomatic history and international history in general.

First published in 1977 this book attempts a comprehensive and impartial account of British foreign policy from 1905 to 1916.

Previous accounts of the British Foreign Office have left the impression that the diplomatic service was an insignificant appendage of the Foreign Office. Jones's study redresses the balance, demonstrating that the diplomatic service was an equal if not senior partner with the Foreign Office in the execution of British foreign policy. After a brief introduction to the history of diplomacy, Jones follows the changes wrought in the service by the intense political and social pressures of the nineteenth century. Against the background of the growth of the Victorian Civil Service and the emergence of Great Britain as a world power in the age of the Pax Britannica, Jones traces the demise of the family embassy, and of a diplomacy deeply rooted in patronage, and the corresponding development of the professional, bureaucratic elite of the Edwardian era. In case studies of the Near Eastern crisis of 1839-41, the Mason Sliddell Affair of the American Civil War, and the Dogger Bank Crisis of 1904, the volume sets forth the working environment of an embassy, both before and after the communications revolution following upon the introduction of the telegraph. Also examined are the social structures of the unreformed diplomatic service and the later, professional service. The volume will be of interest to historians of diplomacy and foreign policy, to political scientists, and to students of social change.