From the late imperial period until 1922, the British and French made private and government loans to Russia, making it the foremost international debtor country in pre-World War I Europe. To finance the modernization of industry, the construction of public works projects, the building of railroads, and the development of the military-industrial complex, Russia's ministers of finance, municipal leaders, and nascent manufacturing class turned, time and time again, to foreign capital. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onwards, Russia's needs were met, first and foremost, by France and Great Britain, its allies, and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. Russia's continued access to those ready lenders ensured that the empire of the Tsars would not be tempted away from its alliance and entente partners. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign policy and domestic society in all three countries. The Russian state was so heavily indebted to its western creditors, rendering those western economies almost prisoners to this debt, that the debtor nation in many ways had the upper hand; the Russian government at times was actually able to dictate policy to its French and British counterparts. Those nations' investing classes-which, in France in particular, spanned not only the upper classes but the middle, rentier class, as well-had such a vast proportion of their savings wrapped up in Russian bonds that any default would have been catastrophic for their own economies. That default came not long after the Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government who felt no responsibility, whatsoever, for the debts accrued by the tsars for the purpose of oppressing Russia's workers and peasants. The ensuing effect on allied morale, the Anglo-French relationship, and, ultimately, on international relations in the twentieth century, was grim and far-reaching. Jennifer Siegel narrates a classic tale of money and power in the modern era-an age of economic interconnectivity and great power interdependency-involving such figures as Lord Revelstoke, chairman of Baring Brothers, the British and French Rothschild cousins, and Sergei Witte, Russia's authoritative finance minister during much of this age of expansion. For Peace and Money highlights the importance of foreign capital in policymaking on the origins and conduct of World War I.

A collection of secret British cabinet documents, Foreign and War office memoranda and their cryptic annotations, looking at the creation of a Zionist homeland out of the Palestine Protectorate.

This study of the outburst of theory and criticism in the early years of the Russian Revolution from an intelligentsia which was soon to be suppressed, presents works covering the entire political spectrum. It aims to provide an understanding of the complexities of the Revolution and its aftermath.

Pavil Gavrilovich, later Sir Paul, Vinogradoff [1854-1925] is well known in Russia principally as a historian and abroad as a legal historian and comparative lawyer. Few in either Russia or abroad are aware that Vinogradoff also wrote on public international law. This volume collects four of his most important contributions to this field: The Legal and Political Aspects of the League of Nations (1918), The Reality of the League of Nations (c. 1919), The Covenant of the League: Great and Small Powers (1919) and History of the Law of Nations, a series of six lectures delivered at the University of Leiden in 1921.

The seeds of conflict throughout the Middle East were sown in the first 60 years of the 20th century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the USA - discovered the imperatives for intervention that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was then, too, that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged; and then that their management by the West earned abiding resentment.;Sowing the Wind tells of how and why this happened. The subject is painful and essentially sombre, but John Keay illuminates it with lucid analysis and anecdotes. This is that rarest of works, a history with humour, an epic with attitude, a dirge that delights.;Here are unearthed a host of unregarded precedents, from the Gulf's first gusher to the first aerial assault on Baghdad, the first of Syria's innumerable coups, and the first terrorist outrages and suicide bombers. Pre-Balfour to post-Suez, the familiar landmarks loom afresh from the obscure antics of lobbyists and the agonizings of administrations.;Little known figures - junior officers, contractors, explorers, spies - contest the orthodoxies of Arabist giants like T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Glubb Pasha and Loy Henderson. The generals - Townshend and Allenby, Gouraud and Catroux, Wavell and Spears, Eisenhower and Patten - mingle memorably with maverick travellers and femmes both fatales and formidables. Four Roosevelts juggle with the fate of nations. Authors as alien as E.M. Forster and Arthur Koestler add their testimony. And in Antonius and Weizmann, the Mufti and Begin, Arab is inexorably juxtaposed with Jew. Pertinent, scholarly and irreverent, Sowing the Wind provides an ambitious insight into the making of the world's most fraught arena.