British Diplomacy And Turkish Independence

Since the early twentieth century the resident embassy has been supposed to be living on borrowed time. By means of an exhaustive historical account of the contribution of the British Embassy in Turkey to Britain s diplomatic relationship with that state, this book shows this to be false. Part A analyses the evolution of the embassy as a working unit up to the First World War: the buildings, diplomats, dragomans, consular network, and communications. Part B examines how, without any radical changes except in its communications, it successfully met the heavy demands made on it in the following century, for example by playing a key role in a multitude of bilateral negotiations and providing cover to secret agents and drugs liaison officers.

This book draws on the latest archival releases – including those from the secret world of British intelligence – to offer the first comprehensive analysis of Anglo-Turkish relations during the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on Turkey's place in the changing relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union.

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.