Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, UK
This essay argues that Britain was generally a conservative force in European diplomacy even while regarding itself as a more liberal polity than any of the other states. It did not want war, as it sought no continental territory and benefited enormously from peace and commercial growth. It had little enthusiasm for European alliances unless its interests were profoundly threatened. Traditionally, the main potential threat was a single rival dominating the Atlantic and Channel coasts. After 1798, an additional fear was losing control of the eastern Mediterranean and the route to India. The essay shows how these priorities determined the major decisions of the period, including reluctant participation in three major wars. They created a perpetual dilemma about how far to work with France, Britain’s historic rival but also the European power most likely to accept its main objectives.
British priorities and French wars
Britain’s island status ensured that European tensions did not affect it as directly as they affected the continental powers. Its territory was much less vulnerable to attack, as long as it suppressed internal problems (especially in Ireland) to the extent needed to stop foreign powers exploiting them, and as long as its navy was strong enough to protect its shores and supply routes. So it did not need the expense of a large standing army, and this fact profoundly influenced domestic politics and political culture. Nor did it have any ambitions for continental territory, which would create the very problem that it was released from. Britain was on the winning side in two European wars of this period, in 1815 and 1856, without making gains, except for naval bases. The Georgian kings of Britain did, in fact, have a continental kingdom, Hanover – although in 1837, on the accession of Queen Victoria, this passed to the Duke of Cumberland, because Hanover observed the Salic Law, which prioritised male succession and descendants. However, its effects on British policy in this period were limited, as the monarchs had separate ministers to advise them.
Britain behaved as a great world power throughout these years, because of the confidence it gained from its economic strength, its previously acquired imperial territories, and the global naval power that bound the two together. British shipbuilding capacity led the world in the era of wooden vessels and then, after 1860, of iron ones. Britain’s worldwide trading potential grew tremendously because of steam power, mass production in textiles and metals, and the thirst of other countries for British capital investment. In the 1820s, the government lightened the restrictions on British international trade imposed by high tariffs and shipping laws; then, in the 1840s, it abolished most of them (Howe 2004). Successive British foreign secretaries, pre-eminently Lord Palmerston, devoted a lot of time to encouraging global free commerce. This policy incorporated a war on the international slave trade, supported by a separate department in the Foreign Office from 1824 (Middleton 1977).
Britons generally assumed that this growth in world trade under British auspices was of universal benefit, spreading prosperity and stability. It followed that the maintenance of global peace was much more beneficial than battles for new territory. British (and European) commercial expansion in South America, the Ottoman Empire, and China would introduce Western improvements without the need for formal imperial structures. When the nineteenth-century world was at peace, it was a Pax Britannica (Chamberlain 1988). This meant that while British politicians tended to see the world as an evolving organism, they also tended to think that the object of diplomacy should be to preserve stability and the status quo, wherever this was compatible with that organic evolution. British diplomats’ objectives were fundamentally conservative, even if phrased in the vocabulary of progress. Crucially, it was usually not difficult to find some other powers willing to support such a cautious policy.
Even in wartime, against a Napoleon dominant across the continent, Britain’s global naval power provided a lot of protection for its fundamental interests. At Trafalgar in 1805, the destruction of the main rival fleets, the French and Spanish, underlined British control of the seas. The history of Napoleon’s Continental System between 1806 and 1812 – his attempt, at the height of his power, to shut Britain out of European markets – showed that the country was able to ride the storm of what in theory was almost a pan-European trade embargo. The British navy bombarded Copenhagen to keep open the Baltic, invaded Iberia, and pushed to increase markets outside Europe. Although Napoleon’s plan had been to crash the British economy, continental countries suffered more, and his system collapsed. In the 1820s, British naval strength was as great as the next three powers combined. Thereafter, its naval strategy relied on penning rival fleets in their harbours and blockading them into submission in the event of war. It was an effective deterrent (Lambert 2018).
These various British priorities made European alliances mostly unattractive: they would involve more commitment and expense than benefit. When they were necessary at all, the preference was to limit them in terms of commitment and duration. Not surprisingly, this severely checked other powers’ trust in Britain, leading to repeated jibes about ‘perfidious Albion’. As Britain lacked a large army, its contributions to the eighteenth-century continental wars had mostly been financial, in the shape of subsidies, particularly to Austria or Prussia, to pay regular troops or mercenaries. These subsidies were subject to the uncertainties of parliamentary approval.
All the same, British foreign policy did have one fundamental aim: to prevent the continent, and especially the other side of the Channel, from falling into the hands of one power. Traditionally, that meant opposing French attempts to control the Scheldt and Rhine waterways and the rest of the Low Countries. The British Crown’s ties with Dutch and Hanoverian princes since 1688 reinforced that consensus on the importance of the north-west European coast.
The consequence was that Britain was quickly drawn into the French wars of 1792–1815, initially because France invaded the Austrian-owned southern Netherlands in 1792. Britain and France went to war in January 1793. By 1795, the Austrian Netherlands had been incorporated into France, and the Dutch provinces to the north had become the Batavian Republic. Politicians now had to learn the importance of winning public approval for the war effort, in order to get parliamentary consent for tax increases and the underwriting of government loans. This was not straightforward, but the greater problem was a lack of allies willing and able to deliver on national objectives. Britain financed the Flanders campaign of 1793–94 and contributed an expeditionary force to the Austrian-led coalition against France, but could not prevent its defeat. In 1799, during the War of the Second Coalition, Britain tried an invasion of the Batavian Republic together with Russia, which also failed. Ten years later, during the Fifth Coalition, 40,000 men took part in the disastrous Walcheren Expedition attempting to free the Scheldt and Antwerp. It was only once Napoleon had been repulsed from Russia and beaten at Leipzig in 1813 by a great continental collaboration that the two parts of the Netherlands were liberated from French control and reconstituted as an independent kingdom, in 1814. In the same year, the anti-French coalition was finally successful across Europe – in its sixth incarnation.
The story of the Low Countries showed Britain’s relative impotence as a continental land power, and its dependence on coalitions with other states which possessed much greater military resources. It also showed the limits of sea power in general. However, during the war Britain had discovered another key objective, which naval power helped to secure: dominance in the Mediterranean. Napoleon had occupied Egypt in 1798 in order to threaten British India, but Nelson had destroyed his fleet at Abukir; British troops had then expelled the French from Egypt in 1801 and reinvaded it briefly in 1807 in order to underline British interest in it as a thoroughfare. Britain had acquired the great harbour of Malta in 1800, Sicily between 1806 and 1815, and the Ionian Islands in 1815, to add to its existing base in Gibraltar. After 1815, Britain’s naval power in the Mediterranean allowed it to defend its Asian imperial interests and simultaneously to be a major player in southern European politics.
After more than 20 years of warfare, the European settlement of 1814–15 was bound to focus on means of cooperating to secure peace in future. For Britain, and its Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, the primary aim of such cooperation was to end what he regarded as the selfish rivalries of the other powers that had allowed Napoleon to flourish for so long, and in particular to head off any risk that France and Russia might now combine on a revisionist agenda. This idea of a Concert of Europe was defensive and limited (Clarke 1989). In Austria and Russia, however, there was more interest in upholding a different conception of the status quo, which placed more emphasis on stopping the spread of revolutionary principles – of liberalism and nationalism – in Central Europe and maintaining the dominance of the great empires. Their cooperation had already led to the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century. The Vienna settlement extended Russian and Austrian power deep into Italy and the Balkans; their rulers talked about interfering wherever necessary to maintain stability. As Castlereagh knew, wars for such purposes would not be acceptable to the British parliament (Bew 2011, 456, 478–82).
The Eastern European powers’ claim to interfere extended also to Iberia (Spain and Portugal), which had been the other great battleground of the late war period. Here, however, France and Britain were even more interested. France and Spain had operated a Bourbon alliance against Britain (and its ancient ally Portugal) for much of the eighteenth century, in the Americas as well as in Europe. Britain’s main military contribution to Napoleon’s defeat had been Wellington’s campaign between 1808 and 1813, together with Portuguese and Spanish patriots, against Napoleon’s power base in both countries.
Britain, France, the Concert, and the East, 1815–60
British diplomacy in the 20 years after 1815 focused on its two main concerns on Europe’s Atlantic coast, Iberia and the Low Countries. Britain insisted that they be stabilised by dialogue with France, shutting out Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and thus limiting the practical reach of the Concert. Britain’s basic objective was to restrain French territorial ambitions in both regions, and so to turn both into independent buffer territories, but in the process it also discovered the benefits of working with its traditional rival.
After 1815, naval activity in the Atlantic made Britain a force that could not be ignored in the politics of mainland Spain and Portugal, and of their South American imperial territories, which now sought independence from European armies. By 1826, this was achieved almost everywhere in South America, and British ships took some of the credit, as well as a great deal of the new countries’ commerce. The creation of these nations in Spanish America seemed a symbolic victory for liberalism as well as for British naval power. Similarly, Britain sent troops to Portugal in 1826 as a signal of resistance to joint Franco-Spanish pressure on it. France had invaded Spain in 1823 in order to suppress the liberal movement there; French troops were not fully withdrawn until 1828. Then, in the late 1820s, disputes within the royal families in Spain and Portugal turned into civil wars between a ‘clerical’ and a ‘liberal constitutional’ party. In 1830, liberal governments took power in both Britain and France; in 1834, they signed a Quadruple Alliance with the constitutional parties of Spain and Portugal, which was a warning to Russia and Austria not to interfere on the clerical side. Tensions in both Iberian countries continued through the 1830s, creating some political fallout in Britain and France. Eventually, the constitutionalists won both civil wars, which British public opinion regarded as a step forward. In practice, there were limits to the ability of a Protestant liberal country like Britain to sway local Catholic politicians, but this did not invalidate its more basic achievement: to keep any power other than France out of Spain, and to prevent France from imposing too obvious a dominance there (Hayes 1975).
The problem in the Low Countries was the unwillingness of the mostly Catholic old Habsburg lands to accept incorporation in the new Kingdom of the Netherlands. Once they rebelled in 1830, the British government quickly decided that the best route to regional stability, and to avoiding French or other great power domination, was to create a separate independent state, Belgium. Britain managed the subsequent settlement of the question overwhelmingly with France, whose liberal regime accepted the principle of independence. This averted the risk of Prussian intervention and eventually forced the Dutch to accept the new arrangement. Then, in 1839, all the European powers guaranteed the independence of Belgium in a Treaty of London, thus re-establishing international security throughout the region for several decades (Hayes 1975).
By the mid-1830s, there was great satisfaction in both Britain and France, especially among liberals, at the benefits of this diplomatic collaboration. It seemed to encourage the spread of constitutional principles, enshrined in the Belgian constitution of 1831. It limited the risk of war and allowed economies in defence spending throughout Western Europe (Bartlett 1963). The dominant parliamentary culture in Britain and France contrasted starkly with the tone of the heavily armed autocracies of Central and Eastern Europe. From now on, it became an unwritten principle of British foreign policy that France was a more reliable ally than any other great power – as long as it accepted the British worldview about the benefits of peace and stability. But the risk remained – in reality, and even more in the imagination of suspicious politicians like Palmerston – that France might not accept this and instead rediscover its historic identity as an aggressive, revisionist Catholic power. This risk intensified with the emergence of Napoleon III as Emperor in the 1850s, leading to invasion scares in Britain in 1852 and 1859; but even at other times, public and press opinion in both countries could easily be inflamed against the other (Parry 2001). Despite that, French support was a significant boost to British diplomatic clout in Europe. Conversely, at times of French uncooperativeness or weakness, Britain struggled to have much weight.
The Anglo-French relationship was potentially most powerful, but also most fragile, in Britain’s new major area of interest: the Mediterranean. It was hardly surprising that France should jib at British naval power there, given past tensions and new imperial ambitions in Algeria. France also had a natural interest in recovering the weight in Italy that it had lost to Austria in the Vienna settlement, and a long history of expecting influence at the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. Moreover, the Greek revolution of 1821 tantalised those in France who urged revision of the 1815 settlement: it might facilitate collaboration with Russia to explore the partition of the Ottoman Empire. A major aim of British policy over Greece in the 1820s was to limit the risk of French revisionism and instead to work with French politicians who, like the British Cabinet, wanted to give the Greeks self-government while minimising the international ramifications, and particularly to limit the benefits to Russia of so obviously weakening the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans (Schroeder 1994). The Greek crisis lasted through the decade: the most serious consequence was not Greek independence in itself, since all the powers continued to have influence at Athens, but the damage to the Ottoman Empire, whose collapse now seemed imminent.
The Eastern crisis of 1839–40, in which France refused to participate in a British-led Concert intervention to restore Ottoman rule in Syria, was a moment of major tension between the two countries. Would the French be tempted into Napoleonic revisionism? But the British argument won out. France thereafter saw the benefit of pursuing similar policies to Britain in the Ottoman Middle East: that is, for the two powers to work together to press the Ottomans to improve their government of Christians in Syria, and simultaneously to bolster the commercial development of Egypt and its practical independence even though it was nominally under Ottoman sovereignty (Parry 2022). Their divergence in 1840 was owing to a difference of opinion on a vexing question: how to respond to Russian influence over the Ottoman Sultan. Afterwards, Britain and France generally cooperated to try to limit that influence. They had less success than they hoped, making them both increasingly alarmed about Russian military power in the East.
The fundamental difficulty that Britain and France faced in Ottoman lands, and also in Italy, was that the revolutions of 1848 profoundly destabilised the whole of southern and eastern Europe. Austria and the Ottoman Empire both fell back on military force to suppress unrest, while Russia made clear that it expected order to be upheld throughout the region. In response to this unpromising situation, foreign policy was a cause of division in British politics in the late 1840s and 1850s, between most Liberals and most Tories. Tories did not want to undermine the European Concert and believed that Britain should acknowledge Russia’s legitimate interests in the Balkans and Austria’s in northern Italy, in the interests of international stability. Liberals, led by Foreign Secretary Palmerston, believed that economic and social progress in northern Italy had terminally weakened the prospects of Austrian rule there, and that the attempt to prop it up made Austria too dependent on Russia. They also believed that the Ottomans’ misgovernment of Balkan Christians allowed Russia to meddle there too much, and that the Sultan and his ministers should instead give more civil rights to his Christian subjects, in return for the protection of Western Europe. They hoped that reform-minded ministers at Constantinople might pursue this agenda, while the state of Piedmont might expand to create a stable liberal constitutional northern Italian kingdom – a new Belgium. After 1848, Palmerston won a lot of support from MPs and newspapers for these policies. Nonetheless, by 1850 the liberal visions had been shown up as unrealistic. Moreover, Louis Napoleon had come to power determined to assert French interests against Russia and Austria in both places. In response, British policy in Italy became more conservative, but at Constantinople Britain supported France and the Sultan against Russia’s aggressive demands for protection rights over Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire. It did so partly because of enormous public and press hostility to Russia, and partly in the hope of keeping French ambitions subordinate to British ones by restraining the freedom of action of Napoleon (now Napoleon III). The result was the Crimean War of 1854–56. Conflict could not be prevented, because neither Russia nor France, nor even Britain, was willing enough to back down from assertive positions once taken.
Russia’s defeat in the war was caused as much by the blockade strategy of Britain’s Baltic fleet as by Anglo-French military successes in the Crimea, and significantly restricted the practical power of its navy for several decades (Lambert 1990). In 1856, Anglo-French pressure led to an international guarantee to preserve the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire, in return for which the Sultan promised equal legal and civil rights for Christians, which British liberals hoped would stabilise the Balkans. Western capital, mainly from Britain and France, now poured into Ottoman lands, attracted by high interest rates.
Meanwhile, the decline of Russo-Austrian power in Italy facilitated the process by which an independent Italian constitutional monarchy emerged in 1860–61 under Piedmont’s leadership. This was widely seen as a triumph for British diplomacy, especially since the ministers responsible, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, took advantage of Napoleon III’s inconsistent behaviour on the issue, so that the new state was shaped by British more than French support. In response to the emergence of an independent Italy, and the re-establishment of the Greek monarchy with a new constitution in 1863, Britain signalled its confidence in regional stability by ceding the Ionian Islands to the new Greek state in that year. Britain and France cooperated in several parts of the world after 1856, not least to open up China to Western commerce. In 1860, the two countries also agreed a major commercial treaty which significantly lowered French tariffs and seemed to pave the way for a freeing of trade throughout the developed world. Several other countries followed suit in the mid-1860s. It seemed that even Napoleon III was acknowledging the benefits of British tutelage. Meanwhile, Palmerston’s government decisively increased naval spending in order to adjust to the ironclad shipping revolution, and Napoleon never challenged British global naval supremacy again (Parry 2006, 234–5).
Despite the temporary shock of the Indian Rebellion (1857), most British people now assumed, looking at British dominance in world trade, and influence in Western Europe and the Mediterranean, that the world was becoming more liberal, commercially and politically, under British diplomatic and naval leadership. The early 1860s were the high point of British confidence about the direction of global affairs. It took some time for this complacency to wear off, although evidence was already emerging that a less confident view might be more appropriate.
Britain and the new Europe, 1860–1914
In the ten years after 1860, Germany was unified, as a result of three wars, with Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870). This development soon profoundly altered the rhythms of European diplomacy by introducing a major new power and creating opportunities for new alliance patterns. Although the Mediterranean naturally continued to be an important diplomatic arena, which British naval power could influence, the emergence of Germany, with an increasingly hyperactive diplomatic strategy and a peacetime army of half a million men, placed the focus more and more on relations between the major powers on the main European land mass.
However, the full effects of this shift took time to become apparent. The initial consequence of German unification was to add to Britain’s sense that political changes on the continent could not really threaten national interests. European developments in the decade after 1862 were not easy to interpret, but Germany was a Protestant and potentially a liberal constitutional power, which seemed more committed to stability and the European balance than Napoleon III, now plainly bent on revisionism. He was widely blamed for the Franco-Prussian war and lost power as a result of it. Germany also seemed supportive of free trade principles (although it joined in the shift back towards protectionist tariffs from the late 1870s). Britain did not intervene in any of the wars of German unification, and in 1866 and 1870 it was unclear why it should, or on which side, once the neutrality of Belgium was respected. The government had talked of supporting Denmark in 1864 (although the Queen was pro-German), but the collapse of the European Concert meant that no other power was willing to do so (Sandiford 1975). It was only in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war (and after Russia obtained Germany’s permission to sail its fleet once more in the Black Sea) that a sense emerged that Europe was becoming a more testing place, and that Britain could no longer simply assume global peace and low military expenditure. This sense contributed to the electoral reaction of the early 1870s against William Gladstone’s seemingly complacent government, which had sought to reverse Palmerston’s defence spending increases (Parry 2006).
Then a multifaceted crisis about the future of the Ottoman Empire blew up in 1875–78. There was consensus that its future definitely involved British interests. There was much less agreement on how best to secure them. European public opinion was appalled by the evidence of renewed Ottoman brutality against Balkan Christians, and many British people joined in the agitation to give them practical independence, which was achieved (for most) at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. This effectively marked the end of the liberal project of the 1840s and 1850s to pressure the Ottomans to reform their governance. Many other Britons, however, were more alarmed at Russia’s war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877–78, seeing it as evidence of a heightened Russian threat to India. Benjamin Disraeli’s government claimed that its role in the settlement of 1878 restored British prestige throughout the East, although in reality German influence was crucial in limiting Russian gains. Britain persuaded the Sultan to allow it to occupy Cyprus, symbolising its strength in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Russia and Germany both expressed willingness to reopen discussions about further partition of the Ottoman Empire, and to allocate Egypt to Britain. This generosity was driven by a hope that it would make Britain and France fall out. Loans to Western capitalists had driven the Egyptian government to bankruptcy, and Britain and France intervened jointly in 1878 to impose a policy of financial austerity. This created severe unrest, and in 1882 Britain mooted a military intervention to restore order. This also might have been a joint affair, but when the French government demurred, Britain bombarded Alexandria and invaded Egypt on its own. This was clearly done in order to secure the route to India, but Gladstone claimed to be acting purely temporarily, on behalf of a European Concert. Sceptical observers were proved right: British troops did not leave Egypt until 1956.
Britain’s occupation of Egypt had severe diplomatic consequences. It alienated both the Ottomans and France. It led Britain into establishing an East African security zone for the defence of India that eventually included Sudan, Somaliland, and the lands to the south. It triggered the ‘Scramble for Africa’ among the European powers, which did so much to heighten imperial tensions. It gave France and Russia a clear reason to cooperate against Britain – as well as against an increasingly powerful Germany. In 1887, Lord Salisbury’s government made Mediterranean Agreements with Italy and Austria, protecting the status quo there against revisionist powers, and especially against Russian meddling in the Balkans (Lowe 1965). These various tensions created a defence panic in Britain that led to the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which pledged Britain to increase the navy to the strength of the next two powers put together (Mullins & Beeler 2016). At one level, this was Salisbury’s way of heading off a full Anglo-German alliance against Britain’s main naval rivals. Even so, in response, France and Russia negotiated a defence treaty in stages between 1891 and 1894. In 1898, France nearly went to war with Britain over Sudan.
It took until 1904 for Britain and France to resolve the tensions created over Egypt, with an entente that secured British predominance in East Africa in return for recognising France’s sphere in Morocco. This was after Britain had endured the enormous expense of a South African war brought on by the celebratory imperialism of the popular press. In its aftermath, it was clear that the cost of maintaining Britain’s worldwide empire against all rivals was unsustainable. There must be limits to spending. After 1900, Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne decided to share defence burdens with other countries. Pacts were made with Japan and informally with the United States, but the Anglo-French entente was the one with the most far-reaching consequences (Friedberg 1988).
Sir Edward Grey, who became Foreign Secretary in the Liberal government that was in office from 1905 to 1916, aimed to make similar diplomatic overtures to Russia. He wanted to treat it as a normal power, not the demonic aggressor that loomed large in the fevered imaginations of radical moralists and Indian military men. He argued that Asia offered easily enough scope for Russia to expand without damaging British interests. A Russian entente would secure India and keep its defence budget in check. It would also strengthen Britain’s hand in negotiations with Germany, which was hoping to perpetuate Anglo-Russian tension in order to force Britain to accept German friendship. The resulting entente, of 1907, was possible because of Russia’s temporary humiliation in the Japanese war of 1905; and it led to a hard-nosed treatment of Persia, dividing it between British and Russian spheres of influence.
Grey hoped that all the powers would remain rational and conservative diplomatic players, but Germany in particular wanted to pursue a revisionist agenda (Kennedy 1980). Russian weakness after its defeat by Japan encouraged German ambitions. French concern about the rise of German power led to requests to Russia but also to Britain for more assistance. In several crises between 1905 and 1911, Germany tested the Anglo-French relationship, and Grey consistently gave France moral support and hints of military cooperation. He claimed that this did not mean hostility to Germany. Liberal backbenchers and newspaper editors were not convinced. Meanwhile, Russia was also increasingly nervy about international affairs. Just as defeat in 1856 and international pressure after 1878 had pushed Russia to expand in Asia rather than the Balkans, the Japanese victory of 1905 and the entente of 1907 over India redirected its ambitions back to south-east Europe. Russia (like Britain) had no tradition of accepting long-term constraints on its independence of action. By 1913–14, reviving Russian ambitions in the Balkans made Germany more insecure. In return, Germany hoped that Britain’s own anxieties about Russia might persuade it to opt for continental neutrality (Otte 2020).
When the Balkan crisis of 1914 erupted, some in the British Cabinet were tempted by talk of neutrality, but Grey had no doubt that Britain would have to join in if a European war resulted. The British could not risk a German victory leading to dominance in Europe and possible seizure of the French empire. In any case, Britain was under an obligation to defend the French Atlantic coast against Germany in return for France’s naval support in the Mediterranean, which had become a French zone soon after 1904. Nor could Britain tolerate a joint Franco-Russian military triumph, which would exclude it from the Mediterranean and jeopardise Egypt and India. Given current imperial strains, there was no global logic to making Russia an enemy, while to make one of France would fatally undermine Britain’s position. This was all in addition to the treaty commitment to defend the neutrality of Belgium, a commitment which symbolised what the European balance meant to Britain strategically.
Britain had too many global interests for other states not to cast covetous eyes on its possessions. Any war of the powers was bound to expose those possessions; that it was sparked off by rivalries in the distant Balkans was irrelevant. The isolation that so many Liberals wanted was not compatible with remaining a global force. Although Britain’s empire was mostly a long way away, the state of Europe fundamentally affected its health. This was an unpalatable truth, since Britain’s power to affect the state of mainland Europe was limited. Discussion of Grey’s policy is still shot through with the insistence that more action from him would have brought Europe to reason, or alternatively that by doing too much he inflicted damage on the country that isolation could have avoided. Both arguments are unrealistic. Germany was committed to Austria whatever Britain might do. Similarly, Britain had little clout with Russia, whose calculations were made on the assumption that Britain would not join a war. Britain could not have persuaded Russia to change policy without giving a much stronger commitment in return (Otte 2016).
The First World War showed what some British policymakers had long feared: that the spiralling military costs and economic consequences of a major European war would affect British power out of all proportion to any possible benefits. In fact, the war’s duration and intensity did more damage than they could have imagined: in previous conflicts, Britain’s limited involvement had often allowed its economy to prosper. In general, Britain had been able to choose the degree of its involvement in Europe, and had never had to take full responsibility for the direction of European affairs, to the annoyance of continental politicians from Napoleon and Metternich to Bismarck. At the same time, the British press was used to overestimating the country’s independence and weight in the world. Nineteenth-century Britain’s commercial and naval power was so visible that it was, and remains, easy to forget that it also always had limits.
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