Volume One of the Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee draws upon a range of released and classified papers to produce the first, authoritative account of the way in which intelligence was used to inform policy. For almost 80 years the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has been a central player in the secret machinery of the British Government, providing a co-ordinated intelligence service to policy makers, drawing upon the work of the intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments. Since its creation, reports from the JIC have contributed to almost every key foreign policy decision taken by the British Government. This volume covers the evolution of the JIC since 1936 and culminates with its role in the events of Suez in 1956. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, British politics, international diplomacy, security studies and International Relations in general. Dr Michael S. Goodman is Reader in Intelligence and International Affairs in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is author or editor of five previous books, including the Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (2013).

In its early years the United States Consular Service was a relatively amateurish organization, often staffed by unsuitable characters whose appointments had been obtained as political favours from victorious presidential candidates—a practice known as the Spoils System. Most personnel changed every four years when new administrations came in. This compared unfavourably with the consular services of the European nations, but gradually by the turn of the twentieth century things had improved considerably—appointment procedures were tightened up, inspections of consuls and how they managed their consulates were introduced, and the separate Consular Service and Diplomatic Service were merged to form the Foreign Service. The first appointments to Britain were made in 1790, with James Maury becoming the first operational consul in the country, at Liverpool. At one point, there was a network of up to ninety US consular offices throughout the UK, stretching from the Orkney Islands to the Channel Islands. Nowadays, there is only the consular section in the embassy and the consulates general in Edinburgh and Belfast.

The Nile today plays a crucial role in the economics, politics and cultural life of ten countries and their more than 300 million inhabitants. No other international river basin has a longer, more complex and eventful history than the Nile. In telling the detailed story of the hydropolitics of the Nile valley in a period during which the conceptualisation, use and planning of the waters were revolutionised, and many of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century – Churchill, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Eden, Nasser and Haile Selassie – played active parts in the Nile game, this work will stand as a case study of a much more general and acute question: the political ecology of trans-national river basins.

Until now scholars have looked for the source of the indomitable Tommy morale on the Western Front in innate British bloody-mindedness and irony, not to mention material concerns such as leave, food, rum, brothels, regimental pride, and male bonding. However, re-examining previously used sources alongside never-before consulted archives, Craig Gibson shifts the focus away from battle and the trenches to times behind the front, where the British intermingled with a vast population of allied civilians, whom Lord Kitchener had instructed the troops to 'avoid'. Besides providing a comprehensive examination of soldiers' encounters with local French and Belgian inhabitants which were not only unavoidable but also challenging, symbiotic and uplifting in equal measure, Gibson contends that such relationships were crucial to how the war was fought on the Western Front and, ultimately, to British victory in 1918. What emerges is a novel interpretation of the British and Dominion soldier at war.

This guide covers the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the establishment of the Ministry of Defence in 1964. It includes the records of the Board of Ordnance, military intelligence and military aviation.

This work investigates how various sacred spaces in Ottoman and Republican Turkey interfaced with British foreign policy. It considers how these spaces impacted upon British prestige in the context of its dealings with Turkey chiefly, as well as other Great Powers. The period covered is from the demise of the Levant Company in 1825, to the deconsecration of the Crimean Memorial Church in Istanbul, in 1976. Other sacred spaces discussed include the British Embassy Chapel, the Crimean War cemeteries, various British churches and cemeteries in Izmir, the Gallipoli cemeteries, connected with the campaign of 1915, and the Phanar, the Ecumenical Patriarch's home in Istanbul. The book considers how, and to what extent, the Foreign Office in London, and its staff in Turkey, intervened to secure those spaces, and why the politics of the Patriarchate intruded into the Foreign Office's geo-strategic considerations. It considers the limits of that support, and how dealings over sacred space intermeshed generally with British policy towards Turkey. It further explores the motives, not just of diplomats and consuls, who were instrumental in establishing or safeguarding those spaces, but also the aims of other organisations and of expatriate Britons, who were similarly involved. It also considers instances where such support became attenuated or was withdrawn. The book is unique in illuminating, in a broad fashion, the role of sacred space in the context of Anglo-Turkish relations, and British power projection in the Near East.