This book examines strategic and diplomatic issues concerning Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, together with espionage, sabotage, and propaganda operations of foreign powers trying to manipulate Ireland. Focussing on continental European powers such as Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, and to a lesser extent Russia, the book is based on research in diplomatic and military archives, notably in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Vienna. The research unearthed many unknown documents which in turn produced some unexpected revelations. During the Boer War, the French envisaged a landing in Ireland to strike at Britain. They had also financed the activities of certain Irish nationalists. The Germans and the French battled in the United States in order to control the influential Irish-American community. The comparison of documents found in archives in London and Berlin shows that some British officials let the Easter Rising of 1916 deliberately happen, the aim being the decapitation of the Irish republican movement. The book also reveals the existence of hitherto relatively unknown characters which played their part in the course of Irish history. The correspondence between George Freeman in New York and Professor Theodor Schiemann in Berlin sheds light on Germany's interest in Irish and Irish-American republican movements. France's diplomatic icons, Paul and Jules Cambon, became increasingly aware of the Irish world's threat after the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904.

The first full analysis of the international thought of the British statesman A. J. Balfour (1848-1930).

The period between 1885 and 1939 was a pivotal half century in British history, in which the Victorian political system yielded to a system far more recognisably modern, in response to popular pressure for social reform and the implications of global superpower status. Dr Davis relates these political developments to the background of social and economic change and to the consequences of Britain's position as an imperial power. Drawing extensively upon the new historical scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, John Davis presents an original analysis of political change in a crucial period of Britain's recent past.

IRISH HOME RULE considers the preeminent issue in British politics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book separates moral and material home rulers and appraises the home rule movement from a fresh angle, distinguishing between physical force and constitutional nationalists.

The Great War is a collection of seven original essays and three critical comments by senior scholars dealing with the greatest conflict in modern history to its time - the 1914-18 World War. The Great War is edited by the distinguished historian of the First World War, R.J.Q.Adams.

This book sheds a disconcerting light on a familiar history, contending that ethnoracial considerations and especially British-American ethnocentrism have often taken priority over morality, ideology, and other factors in determining U.S. foreign policy.