7

Imperial rivalries

The immediate causes of the First World War lay in Europe, and the imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes cut across the European alignments of the Great Powers. Nevertheless, nearly a century of imperialist expansion had left its mark on the way in which people looked at international relations and on the language in which they discussed foreign policy. To each of the countries that were engaged in the war, empire meant something different, but, especially in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, nearly all governments were convinced with different degrees of enthusiasm that, in the words of a French statesman, ‘to remain a great nation or to become one, you must colonize’.¹ Or, in the words of Herbert Asquith, the British prime minister when war broke out in 1914, colonial expansion was ‘as normal, as necessary, as inescapable and unmistakeable a sign of vitality in a nation as the corresponding processes in the growing human body’.² Each move to acquire new colonies had complex and differing causes; historians have written extensively about the various types of imperialism and have shown that, although in many cases hopes of economic gain were an important element in the initial impetus to colonize, the possession of colonies produced its own dynamism, so that the safeguarding of frontiers or the exclusion of rivals from vacant territory came to be regarded as important for their own sake.³ The colonies themselves were quick to develop local vested interests that started what have been called ‘sub-imperialisms’: French officers and proconsuls in Algeria pressed for the acquisition of Morocco so as to make the control of rebel tribesmen easier by stopping them taking refuge across the frontier; the South African businessman Cecil Rhodes, at one time prime minister of Cape Colony, was determined to expand British influence in southern Africa and to win the territory that later bore his name; the Australians by the time of the First World War were anxious to gain possession of the German colonies in the Pacific if only to stop the Japanese from getting them. Moreover, the end of the era of free trade meant that, especially for the British, areas that became the colonies of protectionist countries such as France would no longer automatically be open to British trade; this provided an additional argument for the acquisition of vacant or disputed territories.

The imperial rivalry between France and Britain appeared to be one of the most stable, and predictable, elements of international politics in the late nineteenth century. Bismarck had encouraged France to look outside Europe for its future instead of seeking to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt. The antagonism from Britain’s continuing occupation of Egypt following 1881 had led Salisbury and Rosebery to cooperate with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, especially in the Mediterranean, where they made secret agreements that produced a kind of de facto membership in the Triple Alliance.⁴ The French government, believing that colonial expansion might produce greater power from increased wealth and population, focused its attention on North Africa and Indo-China. The government was encouraged in this renewed colonial vision by a powerful lobby group, the Comité d’Afrique Francaise, which included military men and bureaucrats in addition to traders and investors.⁵ The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a significant expansion in French territorial possessions, and an even more dramatic increase of investments abroad. The growing colonial commitment also led to a series of crises with Britain that almost led to war, first over Siam, then over the Sudan. The confrontation with Britain at Fashoda led the French to reconsider the political stakes involved in competing head-on with Britain and, by 1904, to the settlement of disputes in what became known as the Entente Cordiale. This did not mean the abandonment of the colonial vision and a new focus on Europe, but rather a revised version of it. French investments outside Europe continued to grow, not only in the empire itself, and not only in Russia, but also throughout the world. Although its share of world exports was declining, France was often the first country people turned to when they were seeking investors: so desperate was the government of Guatemala for French investment in 1907 that it attempted to conjure up an image of stability and responsibility by arranging for Agence Havas and other news services to reprint articles from Guatemalan newspapers praising President Manuel Estrada Cabrera to show how respected and esteemed he was, thereby reassuring French entrepreneurs and investors.⁶ The integration of government and investment, of policy and practice in France did not go unnoticed.

Many British businessmen became increasingly vociferous in their complaints of unfair competition and began to question the practices of mid-Victorian trade and finance that had – apparently – produced unrivalled wealth and prosperity. What some historians have called the ‘imperialism of free trade’ relied not upon direct political control but upon opening territories to the ‘free flow’ of goods and investments.⁷ Of course, it was sometimes the case that countries had to be forced to open their ports to British traders – for example, in the two China Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60. However, throughout the nineteenth century both Britain and France had been extending their colonial empires: France conquered Algeria and occupied Tunisia and won large and rich territories in Indochina; Britain had acquired among other areas Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya and occupied Egypt, as well as consolidating and extending its rule in India and seizing Burma. But in the last two decades of the nineteenth century the pace of imperialist competition increased, especially in Africa and the Far East, and those powers that possessed no colonies, notably Italy and Germany, began to feel that they should have some, on general grounds of prestige and to provide a rallying point for national feelings at home.

The economic motives for colonization had been varied: the protection of the interests of European bond-holders in Egypt or Tunisia, hopes of making a fortune from gold and diamonds in South Africa, the exploitation of local crops – cocoa or coffee or rubber or palm oil, the desire for markets for European goods (‘The Waganda are clamouring for shoes, stockings and opera glasses and are daily developing fresh wants’, Cecil Rhodes’s brother wrote hopefully of Uganda in 1893),⁸ and possibilities of profitable investment in railways or telegraph systems. Many of these could be satisfied without the exercise of direct rule; however, traders often found, as in parts of east and west Africa, that they needed government help to deal with the hostility of the inhabitants or to defend their settlements against slave traders or the representatives of other European powers; and their governments, sometimes reluctantly, felt obliged to take over. The pressure groups able to influence governments were not necessarily those of the greatest economic importance. British trade with China, for example, was only a small percentage of Britain’s total overseas trade, but the great China merchants, Jardine Matheson or Butterfield & Swire, possessed an influence with the British Foreign Office out of proportion to their commercial importance.

Massive investment did not necessarily lead to direct imperial control: even though British investment in South Africa grew from almost nil in 1870 to £200 million by 1900, even here it was the strategic threat that could be posed by a rich and strong Transvaal, supported by Germany, that could have challenged British hegemony throughout Africa and especially at the Cape that really mattered in the British decision to seize control.⁹ Still, P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins argue in an impressively researched work that it was the financial and the service sectors in Britain that provided the greatest impetus to interest in empire. The ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of the City had, by the later nineteenth century, become more dynamic and profitable than the older trade in industrial goods; moreover, the gentlemen of the City wielded much greater political influence than did their counterparts of the industrial heartland in the English midlands.¹⁰ In France, where imperialism never became a popular cause to the extent it was in Britain, a comparatively small groupe colonial of people with a direct interest – economic, strategic or sentimental – in the French Empire was able largely to determine the policy of successive governments.¹¹ The distinguishing feature of the ‘new imperialism’ in France was the French government’s acceptance of the credo of this group that colonial expansion could not be left to the free play of social forces but demanded intervention by the authorities; thus, this new conception of the role of the state in colonial affairs was the core of the transition from the informal imperialism of individual traders, entrepreneurs and investors to the formal imperialism of the state, with its administrators and military forces.¹² One such military man, Louis-Hubert Lyautey, the first resident general in Morocco, who would become a marshal of France and the most famous of soldier-administrators, saw the colonies as the way of the future for France, an opportunity to rescue the French people from décadence, from ‘decomposition and ruin’. The divisiveness produced by the Dreyfus affair provided further proof to him of the necessity of the colonial initiative:

In this internal dissolution it is more and more apparent to me that in the colonial life alone is concentrated all the vitality of our country. It is only there that one finds disinterested, healthy, and, in consequence, fruitful efforts. I grasp for it like a shipwrecked person who does not want to drown. It is the only workshop of French energy that exists.¹³

Competition for empire

The German move to obtain colonies in Africa had been the initiative of a few Hamburg merchants hopeful for markets and assisted by explorers and adventurers. This had been taken up by Bismarck in 1884 as a way of winning nationalist votes in the Reichstag elections. In fact Bismarck, who had no long-term interest in the expansion of Germany outside Europe and who looked on colonial activity purely in the light of its effect on European diplomatic alignments or on domestic opinion in Germany, soon gave up the colonialist cause; however, an influential pressure group had been started which, after Bismarck’s fall in 1890, was able to add its voice to the growing chorus of nationalist organizations pressing for a German Weltpolitik. Their ambitions were supported by the realities of Germany’s changing position: by 1914 Germany’s merchant fleet was second only to Britain’s, accounting for some 13 per cent of total world tonnage.

The challenge from Germany was new; that from Russia was not. Throughout the nineteenth century Britain’s position in India had made it vulnerable to encroachments by Russia in Central Asia. And the Russians, in this age of empire, regarded their expansion and control of territories on the periphery of their empire as natural and necessary. Prince Gorchakov, the Russian foreign minister from 1856 to 1882, expressed this sense quite clearly when he described Russia’s situation in Central Asia as being

the same as the position of any civilized state which comes into contact with a semi-barbarous people… . In such cases the interests of frontier security and of trade relations always require that the more civilized state acquires a certain power over its neighbours.¹⁴

This principle, if adhered to, would make it inevitable that the frontiers of the Russian and British Empires in Asia would some time meet – an inevitability that the German strategists behind the Neue Kurs were relying upon. During the 1890s the main imperial rivalries had been between Britain and France in Africa and Britain and Russia in Asia. Britain and France had been close to war in 1898 over their claims to the upper Nile; Anglo-Russian antagonism in Asia had been a continuing factor in international relations at least since the 1830s, and it increased at the end of the century when it was clear that China was becoming the object of a struggle for influence among the European powers.

To some extent imperial interests did not always coincide with European alignments. The French did not succeed in persuading their Russian allies to give them active support against the British in Africa, and they were prepared to cooperate with the Germans in China in 1895 in order to weaken Britain’s predominant influence there. All the imperialist states, including a newcomer to their number, Japan, were ready to work together in 1901 when the Boxer rising in China appeared to threaten all the foreign powers that had been exploiting Chinese weakness for their own purposes. Within a decade, however, this preoccupation with colonial ambitions and rivalries had ceased to be the main feature of the international scene. In 1904 Britain reached a colonial settlement with France and in 1907 made an agreement on several outstanding imperial issues with Russia. One historian, Keith Wilson, has argued that it was the British preoccupation with the imperial challenge posed by Russia to the empire in India that pushed them into the ententes and ultimately into the coalition against Germany. The argument here is that Britain lacked the resources to meet the Russian challenge in Asia and therefore wished to reach a negotiated settlement of their differences – but that the road to such a settlement went through Paris and that the French, implacably opposed to Germany, aimed to draw Britain into the arrangement against the Germans. Thus, it was not imperial rivalry with Germany, but with Russia, that pulled Britain into continental affairs and ultimately into war in 1914.¹⁵ The underlying cause of the European realignment was still imperialism, but it was an imperialism of a rather different kind from the direct colonial rivalry of the 1890s. The disputes that arose in the decade before the war did not arise simply out of a contest for territorial acquisitions. Although the Germans had set out to become a Weltmacht, this ambition was defined as much by political influence as colonial possessions. During the Moroccan crisis of 1905 the leading official at the German foreign ministry, Friedrich von Holstein, convinced Chancellor Bülow that if Germany allowed its interests there to be trampled on it would soon face more dangerous challenges elsewhere. Holstein wanted to use this ‘colonial’ crisis in order to diminish the threat of encirclement – and the way to do this was to show France that its interests in Morocco could best be obtained by going through Berlin rather than London.¹⁶

The British government had now realized that Britain was an imperial power on the defensive whose resources were not necessarily sufficient to protect its vast possessions. For Britain, the euphoria produced by the great imperial pageant in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was giving place to doubts – not so much about Britain’s right to rule (since most British people, encouraged by the growing popular press, were still convinced that, in Joseph Chamberlain’s words, ‘the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen’¹⁷) but rather about Britain’s ability to maintain its place as the strongest imperial power in the face of other challenges. This change was in part the result of the war in South Africa, which brought home to many people the cost of empire in a way no earlier colonial campaigns had done and which had shown that there were limits to British military strength. The war in South Africa had also provided a focus for doubts about the methods of British imperial rule and had led, not only to criticism by radicals but also, especially among some of those responsible for carrying out the post-war settlement in South Africa, to the assertion of new ideals for the British Empire that would convert it into an association of free peoples, as far as the white colonies were concerned, while admitting that the other colonies might eventually be granted some sort of self-government.

The most grandiose plan for imperial reorganization had been put forward by Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary at the time of the Diamond Jubilee. Chamberlain wanted to unite the white-populated colonies in a new imperial federation while also developing an economic union – a Zollverein – that would make the whole empire a free-trade area hedged around by tariffs against the world outside. In this he had the support of the Lancashire cotton merchants, hitherto the backbone of British imperial trade and colonial expansion: the vast China market was being lost to the United States, Japan and even India; the Middle Eastern market was increasingly threatened by Germany and Italy; their ability to compete was diminishing, and they blamed their difficulties on unfair trading advantages enjoyed by their competitors.¹⁸ For some time the idea of a closer union between the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in order to meet the challenges posed by Russia, Germany and the United States enjoyed growing support.¹⁹ However, while important elements of Britain’s domestic economy were being persuaded that a reform of the imperial economy was necessary, Chamberlain’s proposals proved unacceptable both to the dominions and to adherents of free trade. Australia and Canada, which had obtained complete self-government, were reluctant to give up any of their sovereignty and were suspicious of any proposal that might involve assuming greater responsibility for the cost of imperial defence, and vested interests in free trade were still too strong within Britain itself to permit protectionist policies from succeeding politically. Nevertheless, Chamberlain’s suggestions revealed clearly some of the preoccupations of a British Empire faced with new strategic and economic challenges. He told the Colonial Conference of 1897 that:

If Federation were established, all these questions … would be settled by whatever was the representative body of the Federation, and among them, and in the very first rank, must of necessity be the question of Imperial defence. Gentlemen, you have seen something of the military strength of the Empire; you will see on Saturday [at the naval review off Portsmouth] an astonishing representation of its naval strength by which alone a Colonial Empire can be bound together… . Now these fleets and this military armament are not maintained exclusively or even mainly, for the benefit of the United Kingdom, or for the defence of home interests. They are still more maintained as a necessity of Empire, for the maintenance and protection of Imperial trade all over the world.²⁰

Five years later, when the colonial prime ministers were again in London for the coronation of King Edward VII, Chamberlain expressed his beliefs about the economic future of the Empire.

If we chose … the Empire might be self-sustaining; it is so wide, its products are so various, its climates so different that there is absolutely nothing which is necessary to our existence, hardly anything which is desirable as a luxury which cannot be produced within the boundaries of the Empire itself… . [But] the Empire at the present time … derives the greatest part of its necessities from foreign countries, and exports the largest part of its available produce … also to foreign countries.²¹

This contrast between the ideals and the reality of the British Empire, between the emotional feeling that the empire must be preserved and strengthened and the realization of Britain’s dependence on world trade and an open economy for its prosperity explains many of the dilemmas in British policy in the years before 1914. The commercial links with the empire were undoubtedly important – in 1902 they reached their highest point with about 38 per cent of British exports going to British possessions – but these imperial links were only part of the overall pattern of British trade, while many of the colonies, the necessity of retaining which was taken for granted, were in fact economic liabilities rather than economic assets. The idea of the economic advantages of empire was more important than the reality in convincing the British in 1914 that the maintenance of their imperial position was worth the risk of war.

Chamberlain and the people who were spreading a new concept of empire at the turn of the century saw the British Empire as a means of ensuring British economic prosperity at a time when Britain’s industrial supremacy seemed increasingly challenged – not only by Germany but also by the United States. They stressed the British right to rule and the superiority of the British race over all others. British schoolchildren were brought up on tales of heroic military actions against inferior and barbaric peoples – ‘treacherous natives’ or members of ‘lower races’ who ‘are greatly influenced by a resolute bearing’.²² The cruelty and bloodshed of colonial wars were forgotten in the praise given to brave soldiers or disinterested colonial officers who administered impartial justice to vast populations in remote provinces, bearing ‘the white man’s burden’, in the famous phrase of Rudyard Kipling, the writer who reflected most accurately the myths and realities of imperial power. In Britain, the cry of ‘the Empire in danger’ might unite forces of the Left and the Right as cries of ‘the Fatherland in danger’ or ‘the Republic in danger’ did in the other Great Powers of Europe. Although the war with the Boer republics in South Africa engendered some opposition from the Left at home, many socialists and ‘lovers of peace’ – as Robert Blatchford, the popular and outspoken editor of The Clarion, described himself – threw their support behind their soldiers:

I am also an Englishman. I love my fellow men of all nations … but I love England more than any other country… . England’s enemies are my enemies… . I am not a jingo, I am opposed to war. I do not approve of this present war. But I cannot go with those Socialists whose sympathies are with the enemy. My whole heart is with the British troops… . I am for peace and for international brotherhood. But when England is at war I’m English. I have no politics and no party. I am English.²³

But the sense of British superiority that the existence of the empire had helped to create over many generations was by the beginning of the twentieth century accompanied by an anxiety that the British were losing the martial and administrative gifts that had won the empire on which it was believed, rightly or wrongly, Britain’s prosperity depended. Joseph Chamberlain preached that the empire could become economically self-contained while at the same time other imperialists were calling for greater efficiency in government, sometimes linking this with the need for a racial policy to encourage the development of the imperial qualities of the British race. The nation, according to Karl Pearson, who had moved from a chair of mathematics at University College, London, to a new chair of eugenics specially founded for him, must be ‘an organic whole … kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw materials and food supply’.²⁴ Not all those involved in the eugenics movement advocated war and empire as necessary for civilization and progress; some found it possible to combine a humanitarian imperialism with pacifism, arguing that, although struggle was indeed the essential precondition for continuing human evolution, warfare was often wasteful, inhumane, unpredictable and uncontrolled. They accordingly proposed eugenics as a way of exerting human self-control over biological processes.²⁵ Whereas demands for increased efficiency, closer links within the empire and improved preparations for war, including conscription, were taken up by various groups in Britain, and can be regarded as symptoms of the anxiety that the British Empire was now facing unprecedented challenges that could only be met by far-reaching social reforms at home, most of the public took the empire for granted without question. As the newest of the popular daily papers whose success was based on reinforcing the prejudices of their mass of readers, the Daily Express, asserted in its opening editorial in April 1900, ‘Our policy is patriotic; our policy is the British Empire’.²⁶

The imperial imagination

The British Empire had entered into the consciousness and the folklore of the British people at many levels, both popular and sophisticated, and the images of empire that they formed were often contradictory. On the one hand there was a community of free nations, with the white colonies sending their young men to help the mother country in her hour of need in the South African War when over 30,000 men from the colonies had volunteered for service;²⁷ on the other hand there were the non-European peoples over whom the British assumed the right to rule, above all in India. If one wants to reconstruct a picture of what the empire seemed like to ordinary people in Britain, one has to think in terms of a whole series of overlapping or superimposed images. Empire was justified in pseudo-Darwinian language as an essential element in the perpetual struggle for survival, but it was also defended on humanitarian grounds. Benjamin Kidd, in Control of the Tropics (1898), advocated an Anglo-Saxon imperialism that should administer the world’s tropical resources as a trust for civilization as a whole. All the imperial powers would have accepted with a greater or lesser degree of sincerity the doctrine expressed by a Belgian Catholic philosopher and archbishop: ‘Colonization seems in the plans of providence to be a collective act of charity which at a given moment a superior nation owes to the disinherited races and which is like an obligation resulting necessarily from cultural superiority.’²⁸ This picture of Europe’s cultural mission is overlaid and mixed up, especially for the British, with less pretentious images and sentiments: stories of military life in the colonies, or the brass tray from India and the wooden African stool brought home by a relation who had served as a soldier or administrator. For the British the fact that many soldiers in the regular army had served abroad and especially in India meant that these links and souvenirs were not limited to the upper and middle classes alone. How deeply the enthusiasm for empire affected the working classes in Britain – it certainly hardly touched those in France – is still a matter of controversy. One study of public opinion during the South African War²⁹ has suggested that at least some sections of the urban working class were quite indifferent to the empire or the war in South Africa and that, as one observer put it, the mere mention of the British Empire ‘excites laughter as a subject to which no sincere man would dream of alluding’.³⁰ Yet the Royal Naval Exhibition in London in 1891 attracted nearly 2^½ million visitors, and naval recruitment rose substantially after it,³¹ while the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 – first proposed in 1913, but postponed because of the war and turned into a demonstration of the empire’s strength and resources after the ordeal of war – was visited by nearly 18 million people.³² The assessment of past public opinion is a historical problem notorious for its difficulty; but the outbreaks of popular enthusiasm during the South African War and the fact that in 1914 opposition to the war was very limited suggest that, even if it was promoted by the government and press, the idea of empire and the necessity for the defence of the empire was widespread throughout all classes. Such criticism as there was concerned the methods of colonial rule rather than the possession of empire itself.³³

The conception of the British Empire as an essential element in British life and British prosperity and a central point in British patriotism, and the belief that its preservation was literally a matter of life and death, account for the widespread fear before 1914 of Germany’s vague claims to world power. For Britain in 1914 the threat to the empire that Germany appeared to represent was not a threat to any particular colony – and indeed, as we shall see, right down to the outbreak of war there was always room for agreement between the two countries on specific colonial questions – but rather a general challenge that the German navy appeared to be making to Britain’s strategic lines of communication and its worldwide trade. The old preoccupation with protecting the routes to India that had dominated much of British foreign policy in the nineteenth century was still a powerful factor in British calculations, only now the threat came from Germany rather than from Russia. The preservation of the ‘freedom of the seas’ for British trade and British imports of food and the safeguarding of the sea links with the empire were an essential part of British imperialism, and were stronger motives in the minds of the statesmen of 1914 than the acquisition of further British colonies or even the defence of existing colonial possessions. The premise that there was a deep, widespread, imperialist ‘culture’ in Britain has recently been challenged.³⁴ The extension of the empire only became once more a possibility after the outbreak of the war, with the conquest of Germany’s African colonies and especially with the plans for the partition of the Ottoman Empire; in these discussions Britain’s main rival was France rather than Germany. It was because the German challenge to Britain’s imperial position was a general one rather than a specific set of territorial demands that it seemed so dangerous.

The first phase of German colonial expansion was casual and fitful. Bismarck’s map of Africa, he famously declared, was in Europe; in other words, he had little interest in colonies or colonization for their own sake. But he was prepared to use Africa as part of his European strategy: threatening to wield the ‘bâton Egyptien’ against the British if they failed to behave in Europe, encouraging the French to divert their attention from Europe to North Africa and encouraging the Russians to concentrate their acquisitive proclivities on east Asia instead of southern Europe. But Bismarck’s political map included Germany and he was, by the 1880s, prepared to encourage, or at least assist, German businessmen in some of their African designs.³⁵ In 1884, for example, Bismarck met with Adolph Woermann of the large Hamburg firm that had been trading along the West African coast in the 1850s and 1860s and established itself as the leading merchant firm in what would become the Cameroons. As a result of this meeting Bismarck authorized a mission to sign treaties of protection with native chiefs there, in Togoland and South West Africa. This was no grand design for a colonial empire, only one of his minor manoeuvres in German politics; only when the firms involved refused to take any part in administering these territories did the government appoint a governor.³⁶ The kaiser’s view of Germany’s colonial future was, typically, more ambitious but even more confused. Neither he nor his advisers had precise goals in mind when they embarked on Weltpolitik. Tirpitz’s idea was, as we have seen, to make the German fleet so strong that Britain would not risk a war with Germany and would have to give way to German demands, but what these demands would be was never very clear. There was much talk about Germany’s need for a ‘place in the sun’ and a feeling that the German navy was an essential symbol of German power. Even if one of the motives for creating a large German navy was a desire on the part of some of Germany’s rulers to create a sense of national unity and provide a means of reinforcing their social control, many intellectuals and publicists saw in Germany’s imperialist ambitions a genuinely idealistic task that would transcend the power politics involved. Germany was to liberate the world from the weight of British naval hegemony, and the smaller nations would rally to Germany’s side of their own accord as the champion of a new and freer international order.³⁷ Weltpolitik or imperialism in this very general sense – and this was one of the reasons why it could serve as a unifying force for many different groups in German society – seemed to give a new purpose and a new mission to the German state. This is well summed up in two remarks by Max Weber. He said in 1893:

It is the heavy curse of being the next generation (Epigonentum) which burdens the nation from bottom to top. We cannot again bring to life the naive enthusiastic energy which inspired the preceding generation, because we are faced with other tasks. We cannot use them to appeal to grand sentiments common to the entire nation as was the case when it was a question of creating the unity of the nation and a free constitution.³⁸

The way out was as he suggested two years later in his famous inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg:

We must grasp the fact that the unification of Germany was a juvenile prank (Jugendstreich) which the nation committed in its old age and, because of its expense, would have better left undone, if it was to be the conclusion and not the starting point of German world power politics.³⁹

The trouble with this restless ambition to be a world power and to challenge Britain’s worldwide hegemony was that these aims were so vague that it was unclear how they were to be achieved, and where. Many Germans also refused to face the implications involved in such a challenge, apparently believing that a new role in the world could be assumed without danger. Some of the more naive members of the German public thought of the navy in terms similar to the Catholic professor of theology at Bonn who said:

Peace is indeed the positive and direct will of God, war only a divine affliction and punishment; … But God’s peace will one day come… . Until that day may the German fleet ride on the waves of truth, justice and freedom, an escort of patriotic goodness and industry.⁴⁰

These sentiments were bringing Germany into competition not only with Britain but also with the United States – a ‘world policy’ was gradually creating more spots around the world in which Germany might find itself confronting entrenched interests. Seeking to find a role for itself in Latin America, Germany attempted to turn the US policy of the ‘Open Door’ against the Americans; German interests ought to have equal access to trade and investment opportunities. The United States refused to recognize that any such right existed, asserting the Monroe Doctrine and the Lodge Corollary of 1911 in rejecting any foreign acquisitions that threatened US security in the western hemisphere.⁴¹ The building of the Panama Canal created new opportunities and new sources of conflict: some Central American republics saw Germany’s awakening awareness of the possibilities there as an opportunity for them to find a counterpoise to US domination, and therefore welcomed or even encouraged German participation in their affairs. However, such participation aroused US apprehensions; the Americans in 1910 insisted that Germany deny officially any interest in acquiring the Galápagos Islands and began formulating naval plans to meet the growing German threat.⁴² The attitude of Germans on the spot in the Americas was not noticeably different from that of other European imperialists in Africa or Asia; the German minister in Costa Rica advocated frequent visits by German warships ‘to tame the arrogant, absent-minded Latin-Indian race’. Such visits, he believed, would bring ‘the power of the Empire once again before the eyes of the Central American republics’.⁴³

Among the leaders of Germany there was a division of opinion about how the new German imperialism could be realized: some people believed that it was possible to achieve Germany’s goals by peaceful means – ‘Deutsche Weltpolitik und kein Krieg’ (‘world policy and no war’) as Richard von Kühlmann, the counsellor in the German embassy in London, put it in a pamphlet he published under a pseudonym in 1913⁴⁴ – through an agreement with Britain and some reduction in the pace of German naval building, and some of the industrialists believed that Germany’s economic strength would be sufficient to ensure Germany’s predominance, at least in Europe (‘Let us have yet another three to four years of peaceful development and Germany will be undisputed master of Europe’, the industrialist Hugo Stinnes said in 1911⁴⁵). But there were many others who believed that Germany’s bid for world power would eventually mean a war with Britain and were prepared to face this and, in some cases, even welcome it.

German colonialism was sometimes a successful part of Sammlungspolitik as well, rallying together the disparate political elements within Germany in the common cause of promoting the German version of civilization.⁴⁶ Socialists joined liberal merchants and conservative militarists in supporting Germany’s mission in Africa when a series of revolts among the native Herero peoples in South West Africa produced a German response that almost led to their extinction: 60,000 Hereros were killed, against only 659 Germans; it was, in fact, General Schlieffen who convinced Bülow that they had either to be annihilated or forcibly removed from the country if Germany was to establish a secure position in the colony.⁴⁷ The prevailing ethos in Germany viewed colonial peoples as unruly, lightly or ungoverned, whereas German colonizers represented a stable, civilizing force.⁴⁸ Although some in the SPD attacked the methods of control and governance that were used, most, like August Bebel, did not question the basic principle of colonialism: ‘I have not held a speech in favor of the Hereros; I have repeatedly emphasized that they are a wild people, very low in culture.’⁴⁹

With the German ambition to be a Weltmacht expressed in so many different ways, it is not surprising that foreign assessments of Germany’s aims, both at the time and subsequently, have varied. One German imperialist writer summed up the problem clearly in 1912:

The main reason why our position sometimes makes such an uncertain, even unpleasant, impression when seen from outside Germany lies in the difficulty of presenting any easily comprehensible, as it were tangible, aim for the policies demanded by German ideas.⁵⁰

There was, for example, a split between the ambitions of the populist Pan-German League and the German industrialists involved in colonial enterprise, in spite of the fact that both groups believed that the German Empire must be a world, imperial power. The Pan-Germans looked to places such as Brazil to promote their idea of a New Germany: the climate was pleasant, the land fertile, the natives were friendly and thousands of Germans had already settled there. As one put it in 1906:

Brazil is a distant, chaotic country of 16,000,000 people but it controls a rich and fertile empire … that could become as important as the United States if only people of German rather than Latin stock were to rule it.⁵¹

South West Africa was another place seen by the Pan-Germans as a place for German settlers to colonize rather than a place where high-living capitalists could reap rich profits. The German government sympathized with the mining companies there and promoted colonization only because of public pressure to do so; in 1903 a formal colonization policy was established for the colony but the colonial department was never sympathetic to settlement colonialism, preferring to promote profitable mining activities.⁵²

Within the general movement in Germany towards Weltpolitik there were specific groups and individuals who thought in conventional terms about increasing Germany’s colonial possessions and dreamed of a German Mittel-Afrika to complement the German Mitteleuropa that others hoped to establish. Others, particularly those involved in finance and the export of capital, supported the worldwide expansion of German commercial activity without necessarily supporting the acquisition of territories and the international confrontations to which this almost inevitably led. The Hamburg banker Max Warburg, for example, advocated Weltpolitik through the export of capital: he was instrumental in assisting the Japanese government to float a loan to finance the war with Russia in 1904 and he promoted investment in Morocco, Portuguese Angola and China – leading him to claim that ‘no banking house in Germany has interested itself so determinedly for Germany’s activity in the colonies than ours’ even though this brought ‘little return’.⁵³ He was horrified when, during the July Crisis, Germany appeared headed for war and he desperately attempted to assure that this would not involve war with Britain. The supporters of this idea included those with a direct interest in the existing German colonies, either because they thought there were profits to be made in Africa or because they themselves were involved in the actual administration of the colonies or because they thought that a deal about Africa might begin a process of détente with Britain. In the German foreign ministry there were people, notably Paul von Wolff Metternich, the ambassador in London from 1902 to 1912, and Richard von Kühlmann,⁵⁴ who insisted that Germany’s position as a world power could only be achieved with the support of Britain. The price of this support would have to be some concessions in the naval arms race, but this might, it was hoped, bring in return a political agreement with Britain by which Britain would remain neutral in a European war, and also a deal by which Britain would trade colonial territory in return for an end to the naval rivalry. These indeed were the themes of the discussion when Haldane visited Berlin in February 1912, and the failure of the Haldane mission showed how limited the possibilities of an Anglo-German agreement were. It at once became apparent that the British government was not seriously interested in a political agreement to remain neutral, and that the German admiralty was determined to press on with the latest proposals for a further naval increase.

Imperial diplomacy

The Germans’ chief hope of extending their African empire lay either in acquiring part of the Belgian Congo or in implementing the secret agreement made with Britain in 1898 that allowed for the partition of the Portuguese colonies if the financial situation of Portugal became so bad that it had to dispose of its empire in return for a loan. In the discussions during and after the Haldane mission, the British government indicated that they had no objection to the Germans gaining territory in the Congo and that they were prepared to revise the 1898 treaty about the Portuguese colonies in such a way that the German share would be increased. It was characteristic of the misunderstandings about what had actually been agreed in the discussions between Haldane and Bethmann Hollweg that the Germans seem to have thought that Haldane had also promised them outright some British colonial territory, the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba off the east coast of Africa, an idea that Grey soon disposed of, declaring that substantial compensation would be required for such a concession. (Haldane had also said that the Germans could have as part of their share of Portugal’s colonial possessions the Portuguese half of the Indonesian island of Timor, and had to be reminded by the Foreign Office that the Portuguese had already promised it to the Dutch.)

Concessions over Belgian and Portuguese territory were not hard for the British to make. The British public, and especially supporters of the Liberal Party, had been shocked by recent revelations of misgovernment and cruelty in both the Belgian Congo and the Portuguese colonies, and anyway as far as the Congo was concerned there seemed to be no evidence that the Belgians were thinking of giving it up. Even though the British Foreign and Colonial Offices despised the Portuguese (the editors of the British Documents on the Origins of the War, as late as 1938, after quoting a remark of Grey’s that ‘these colonies are worse than derelict as long as Portugal has them’ felt obliged to omit the next few words ‘for reasons of international courtesy’),⁵⁵ they were somewhat inhibited in their negotiations with the Germans. This was because, immediately after the agreement of 1898, they had formally reaffirmed treaties of alliance with Portugal going back to the seventeenth century that obliged the king of England ‘to defend and protect all conquests and colonies belonging to the Crown of Portugal against all their enemies, as well future as present’,⁵⁶ and in 1912 were still giving the Portuguese the impression that they wanted Portugal to keep its empire. The British ambassador in Berlin expressed the reservations widely felt in the Foreign Office when he wrote:

It rather makes my blood run cold when we talk to Germany about the shortcomings of our Portuguese allies. Is it quite playing the game? Of course, it is quite true what we say about them – but is it quite right or even politic to say it to the Germans?⁵⁷

Although eventually an agreement was reached revising the 1898 partition scheme in Germany’s favour, its status remained in doubt since the British insisted that both the Anglo-German treaty and the Anglo-Portuguese agreements should be published – a proposal to which the Germans had not agreed by the time war broke out. The question of an agreement to divide the Portuguese colonies, though actively pursued by the two colonial offices, was only central to German policy if it could be coupled with a British pledge of neutrality in Europe.⁵⁸ This was something that the British were not prepared to give, especially as the French government, encouraged by the British ambassador in Paris, were making their suspicions and distrust of any Anglo-German détente quite clear. For once the kaiser was perhaps right when he summed up the results of the Haldane mission: the English, he wrote

have conceded nothing at all in Europe… . On the other hand they have referred us to African colonies belonging to other powers and they naturally don’t know whether these powers will voluntarily give them up: but they certainly won’t risk their good relations with them for our sake.⁵⁹

The idea that a colonial agreement between Britain and Germany might lead to a general improvement in their relations with each other – as in the case of the Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian agreements – did not come to anything because their imperial rivalry was wider and more intangible than could be resolved by bargaining over specific colonial and territorial questions. The conversations were kept going as long as they were because the two colonial offices were interested in agreement, and the members of the British colonial service had a genuine respect for the Germans as colonial administrators and certainly preferred them to the French as possible neighbours in Africa. There were also members of the British government, notably Haldane and Lewis (‘Lulu’) Harcourt, the colonial secretary, who still believed that an agreement with Germany was both possible and desirable, while, on the German side, some influential politicians and officials, including Bethmann himself, thought that his survival as chancellor depended on his achieving some sort of political agreement with Britain. But he was not prepared to achieve this by abandoning Germany’s imperial ambitions. Bethmann was a true believer in Weltpolitik: he believed that Germany must expand in order to survive in the twentieth century, specifically in Africa and Asia Minor – but he rejected Tirpitz’s argument that this would be possible only when the fleet became strong enough to deter the British. Rather, Bethmann believed that an alliance with Britain would enable Germany to establish a great colonial empire by acquiring Portuguese, Belgian and Dutch colonies, while an agreement over the Baghdadbahn (the railway to run from Berlin to the Persian Gulf) would lead to a division of spheres of influence within the Ottoman Empire.⁶⁰

The Anglo-German negotiations about the partition of the Portuguese colonies were conducted at the same time as discussions about British participation in the construction of the Baghdad railway, discussions in which Britain’s local aims of establishing economic control and political influence in Mesopotamia were by 1914 increasingly subordinated to its wider diplomatic and strategic needs.⁶¹ The story of the project to construct a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf is a complex one that brings out many aspects of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century: the interaction of economic and strategic interests with diplomacy; the way in which a weak state – Turkey – could play stronger powers off against each other; and the extent to which imperial interests cut across European alignments. In 1889 a German group, headed by the Deutsche Bank, had won a concession to build the first section of a railway across Anatolia, and in 1899 they had obtained from the Ottoman government approval for the next stage. In 1903 the German promoters were backed by the German government and the kaiser who, ever since his visit to Constantinople in 1898, posed as the friend and protector of Turkey and the Islamic world, but they were short of capital for such a large and expensive project and tried to raise money in London and Paris. The result has been well summarized by A.J.P. Taylor: ‘In France the financial forces favoured participation, political motives were against it; and the politicians won. In Britain, the politicians were favourable, the financiers hostile; and the financiers won.’⁶² The French government, that is to say, was doubtful about cooperation with the Germans, partly because the Russians were strongly opposed to the idea, partly because they believed that the Baghdad railway might damage existing French railway interests in Syria, partly because they were conscious of the intense rivalry for Turkish orders between Krupp and the French armament firms, and so were determined to oppose any extension of German economic influence. Consequently, the French government did all it could to stop those French bankers who thought there might be money to be made out of participation in the railway.

In Britain, on the other hand, the Conservative government, and especially the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, believed that involvement in the extension of the railway would improve communications with India and strengthen Britain’s position in the Persian Gulf. The fundamental division, however, was between those people in Britain who were hoping to improve relations with Russia and those who hoped that cooperation with Germany would help to check Russian ambitions in the Middle East. The prime minister, Arthur Balfour, had responded enthusiastically to the kaiser when he outlined the scheme to him in 1899 because he believed that a German presence there would establish a counterpoise to Russia; he also encouraged cooperation with Italy in Africa and with Germany in Venezuela as part of the same strategy.⁶³ Those who feared Russia first and foremost and those who regarded Germany as a greater danger were both aware that the balance of power was changing, but there was as yet uncertainty about how Britain should react. The influential publicists who were already worried about German Weltpolitik were supported in the Cabinet by Joseph Chamberlain – partly perhaps from personal pique as he had been away in South Africa and resented decisions taken in his absence – and also by many members of the public who were still upset by the anti-English campaign in the German press during the Boer War. ‘We are still suffering’, Lansdowne wrote, ‘from an insensate hatred and suspicion of anything which can be described as of German origin and these feelings will not die out in a hurry – it is ridiculous and to my mind humiliating’.⁶⁴ As a result of the anti-German campaign in the conservative press supported by influential political figures, the British financiers at this point withdrew from the Baghdad railway project, while the government limited itself to a formal declaration of its determination to keep the Persian Gulf as a British sphere of interest.

In the agreement of 1907 the British and Russian governments settled their respective spheres of influence in Persia so that any direct Russian threat to the Gulf seemed to have been removed. However, the internal situation in Turkey changed as a result of the Young Turk revolution in 1908. The new popular, ‘democratic’ government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was determined to re-establish Turkish authority in the Gulf by challenging the quasi-autonomous status of the sheikhs there, as well as the privileged position of the British resident at Baghdad – ambitions that threatened to disrupt Britain’s strategy in the Middle East.⁶⁵ Ironically, this brought Britain and Germany closer together, as they both feared that they were losing their influence at Constantinople. Plans were being made and capital sought for the final stretch of the Baghdadbahn from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. There was now a basis for an Anglo-German bargain: the German promoters of the railway needed more money; they also needed British approval on the international board that controlled the Turkish customs dues, since the Turks were going to have to raise additional revenue by raising tariffs if they were to be able to pay the sums they were obliged to guarantee to the Baghdad Railway Company for every kilometre of track completed.

Moreover, the original agreement between Britain, France and Russia to maintain a joint opposition to the Baghdad railway scheme seemed to be breaking down. In 1910, when the tsar visited Potsdam and there was a brief improvement in Germany’s relations with Russia, the Russians had withdrawn their objections to the completion of the railway and had their own plans for linking it to Tehran and a new railway in north Persia. Russian interests were economic and oil-related: a railway link with the Persian Gulf would enable Russia to ship oil from Baku much more cheaply, and thus compete more effectively with their competitors in Asia (Royal Dutch Oil, Shell, Burmah and, most especially, America’s Standard Oil – which dominated with 80 per cent of the market). However, a trans-Caucasus pipeline to the Gulf was deemed to be even more efficient, reducing Russia’s shipping costs to one-third by avoiding the expensive route through the Black Sea and Suez. Thus had the Russian minister of finance, Sergei Witte, made Russia’s loan to Persia in 1902 contingent upon the granting of a pipeline concession.⁶⁶ Ironically, those who had pushed for the concession were not Russian strategists or imperialists, but non-Russian financiers: the Rothschilds and the Nobels, who had invested in Russian oil development.

The British had not always opposed German imperial expansion; in the 1890s they had actively encouraged the first German railway schemes in the Middle East as a method of countering Russian expansion to the south.⁶⁷ German naval building and the entente with Russia changed British perceptions of the strategic situation, however, while the growing importance of oil was changing the constellation of economic interests. Oil was not yet a significant strategic commodity; in fact, it was investors and entrepreneurs who tried to convince strategists of its value, rather than strategists who tried to persuade businesses and governments to secure these vital interests for the future. When oil was struck in Mesopotamia in 1908 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was quickly formed to exploit it, but the principal market for oil was limited to kerosene and oil lamps – and the oil that had been discovered was too poor a quality for these uses. Thus, the company tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the Royal Navy that it was the fuel of the future, with the result that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy when the British government stepped in to save it by purchasing shares. Private investors were unwilling to run the risks involved in such a venture. Here again, the government’s decision to intervene was not made on the basis of far-sighted reasons of imperial or strategic rivalry with the Germans – or even the Russians – in the Middle East, but in order to protect the better established and more important British Burmah Company from the possibility of unfriendly foreign competition: if the Burmah company’s prospects were jeopardized, it could imperil the safest supply of oil for British India. Thus, whereas ‘imperial’ interests might have dictated that the British government should compete with the expansion of German interests wherever these appeared, ‘commercial’ ones inclined the British to cooperate with the Germans to protect their investments. British and German investors combined forces in establishing the National Bank of Turkey to promote the exploitation of Mesopotamian oil and the complementary Baghdad railway project. Britain’s ententes with Russia and France appeared to have had little effect on imperial policy in the Middle East.

In essence, the British government had decided that by taking part in an international scheme for the completion of the Baghdad railway they would preserve their own interests in Turkey and prevent either the Germans or the Russians having too much influence, even if it meant giving up their claims to an exclusive economic position in Mesopotamia. The Germans accepted the fact that they lacked sufficient capital to build the railway on their own, and that they were in no position to overcome well-established British interests in Mesopotamia. The German chancellor and foreign ministry – though not always the kaiser or those German businessmen who thought that foreign competition in Turkey could be eliminated – realized the limitations on their freedom of action in the Middle East and were prepared to do a deal with the British. The British made it clear that their main aim in the area was the securing of the Persian Gulf and the maintenance of British influence in the south of Persia. On this basis protracted and complicated negotiations could be carried out concerning British participation in the Baghdad railway and the question could be treated on its own without reference to the wider rivalries between the two countries.

Although oil was inconsequential as a strategic resource before the First World War, its role was changing dramatically, and almost daily. It had taken several decades to develop the technology required for extracting, refining and transporting the oil to market. But in 1912 the British admiralty was finally persuaded by the arguments of those in the oil industry and decided to start converting some of the fleet from coal to oil fuel and to construct new oil-fired dreadnoughts; by 1914 some 25,000 tonnes of oil a month were being imported from south Persia.⁶⁸ Oil was about to become a strategic as well as a commercial product, though the implications were only just beginning to be realized. The British, after negotiations between the Turkish government and the various international groups that held concessions to drill for oil, succeeded in winning a controlling share in the oil companies operating in Mesopotamia and Persia. Although the German financial groups involved finally failed to win more than a 25 per cent share of the exploitation of oil deposits in Turkey, this was less because of a failure of the two governments to agree than because of the chronic German shortage of capital. The Turkish government was also able to exploit the fact that the American Standard Oil Company was now offering to pay cash for a transfer to them of the oil concessions whose legal status was undoubtedly confused, if not dubious, so that the British and German governments and financiers quickly settled their differences in the face of this new threat.

Although the British and Germans succeeded in reaching agreement over their economic and strategic interests in Turkey in spite of their wider imperial rivalry, it remains uncertain who got the better bargain, because, however these agreements might have worked out in peacetime, war broke out within two months of the initiating of the Baghdad railway agreement (and the railway itself was still hundreds of miles from Baghdad).⁶⁹ The Turkish government was increasingly concerned that its obvious weakness, after its defeats at Tripoli and in the Balkan Wars and the loss of nearly all its European territory, made Turkey vulnerable to a threat of partition, and the government became convinced that there was more to fear from Russia than from Germany. On 2 August, the day after the German declaration of war on Russia, the Turks signed a hastily negotiated secret treaty of alliance with Germany in return for a guarantee of their territorial integrity against Russia; in November they came into the war on Germany’s side.

The Anglo-German negotiations about the Baghdad railway showed, like the bargaining about the Portuguese colonies, that it was still possible to find a basis for specific agreements even within the framework of the wider rivalry between the two countries; in any case, ordinary diplomatic and economic relations continued right up to the outbreak of war, and it was only at the last minute (and not always even then) that they were subordinated to preparations for war. Nevertheless the case of Turkey, like that of China a decade earlier, and the complex story of Anglo-German cooperation and rivalry there suggest that here was an area in which imperialist rivalries among the European Great Powers were contributing to the instability that made the outbreak of war possible. The existence of a large but fragile state tempted stronger powers to stake a claim for spheres of influence and economic control, though the Ottoman Empire was the object not only of encroachment by the European Great Powers but also of the aspirations of national independence among its non-Turkish subjects. The result was a continuous crisis from 1908 onwards. The Turkish officers who made the Young Turk revolution of 1908 because they hoped to modernize the Ottoman state and prevent its disintegration inadvertently inaugurated the process that was to lead to the final collapse of the empire in 1918. The immediate consequences were the annexation by Austria-Hungary of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 before the new Turkish government could assert its formal suzerainty over the provinces that Austria had occupied since 1878. Similarly, the last formal ties between Bulgaria and Turkey were broken and the union of Crete with Greece was finally achieved. These developments increased Turkish suspicions of the subject nationalities they still controlled, Arabs and Armenians as well as the Balkan Christians; hopes that the revolution might lead to the conversion of the Ottoman Empire into a genuinely multinational state in which non-Muslims and non-Turks would have equal rights were quickly disappointed, as the new regime, after a series of military coups and counter-coups, developed into an increasingly repressive military dictatorship. At the same time, the political instability of the years 1908–13 not only encouraged the Balkan states to combine to drive Turkey out of Europe; but it also made the Great Powers, especially Russia (although even the Austro-Hungarian government, as if it did not have enough to worry about, played with the idea of acquiring a colony in Asia Minor), think about the partition of Turkey.⁷⁰

The first step that was to lead to the general crisis in the Balkans was the Italian attack on the Turkish provinces of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, perhaps the most direct and open act of imperialist expansion in the years immediately before the war. Ever since the unification of Italy, some Italian nationalists had dreamed of an empire in North Africa that would show that the new Italian state was the true heir to the Roman Empire. They had been disappointed when France won the protectorate over Tunisia in 1881; they had been bitterly humiliated when the Italian army was defeated by the Ethiopians at Adua in 1896 – where they had been outnumbered 100,000 to 20,000, and at which 70,000 of the Ethiopians carried repeating rifles, supplied mainly by France.⁷¹ As French ambitions in Morocco became apparent, so successive Italian governments thought that Italy might claim the only remaining territory in North Africa not yet controlled by a European state – the Turkish provinces of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, which the Italians took to calling by the Roman name of Libya, as though to stress a bogus historical claim.

The French government, as part of its policy of trying to weaken Italy’s links with the Triple Alliance, had indicated in 1900 and reiterated in 1902 that it would have no objection to Italy acquiring Turkish territory in North Africa. At the same time, Italian economic interest in Tripoli was increasing: from 1907 onwards the Banco di Roma was investing heavily in various enterprises there, and through its links with politicians as well as with the Roman Catholic Church it was able to exercise considerable political pressure. Moreover, the leading exponents of an extreme nationalism were now organizing themselves effectively in pressure groups such as the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana and the Dante Alighieri Society, reinforcing the views of many Italians that Italy had too long been regarded as a museum living on its past for tourists and must now assert itself as a modern Great Power. The nationalists and the members of the Istituto Coloniale also exaggerated the attractions of Libya as a colony:

Tripoli opens her arms and is waiting, the land is the same as that of Tunis, if not more fertile: the climatic conditions are the same; minerals there must be… . What is needed is a government which acts or is willing to assist action.⁷²

Italy was, it was claimed by Enrico Corradini, one of the most rhetorical of the nationalist spokesmen, ‘the proletarian nation’, an underprivileged country confronting the rich and powerful imperial states, and Italy’s pressing social problems and the economic backwardness of the south could only be solved by the acquisition of colonies.

In this atmosphere, the Agadir crisis and the French claim to Morocco provided an opportunity for the Italian nationalists and those with economic interests in Tripoli to press the government to act – especially as a few weeks earlier the inauguration in Rome of the vast and pompous monument to King Victor Emmanuel II had seemed to symbolize Italy’s new international pretensions. As it was less than a year since the foreign minister had declared that ‘The Turks have still not succeeded in understanding one thing, although it is very clear. Italy does not wish to take Tripoli and desires that it remains Ottoman’,⁷³ it was with some reluctance that by July the government, under pressure from parliament, nationalists and the Banco di Roma, was talking of military action. The prime minister, Giolitti, was a reluctant imperialist and even more reluctant militarist. He argued that the effort involved in expansion abroad would squander Italy’s limited resources and would produce an authoritarian, repressive regime at home, contrary to his vision of a ‘Liberal Italy’. In this he was supported by the vast majority of Italian industrialists and businessmen, a position summarized by the general secretary of the Lega Industriale di Torino, Gino Olivetti, when he condemned war as a ‘monstrous phenomenon’ and ‘a brutal destruction of men and riches’.⁷⁴ Nevertheless Giolitti, needing support from the nationalists in parliament for his proposals to establish universal male suffrage and to nationalize health insurance, reversed his ground, accepting the colonial imperative in Libya as a ‘historical fatality’.⁷⁵ He had foreseen that the consequences would go far beyond the gaining of a colony for Italy, as he had declared in April 1911:

Tripolitania is a province of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire is a European great power. The integrity of what remains of the Ottoman Empire is one of the principles on which the equilibrium and peace of Europe is based… . Can it be in the interests of Italy to shatter one of the cornerstones of the old edifice? And what if after we have attacked Turkey, the Balkans begin to stir? And what if a Balkan war provokes a clash between the two power blocs and a European war? Can it be that we can shoulder the responsibility of putting a match to the powder?⁷⁶

Giolitti’s gamble would backfire at home as well: instead of placating the nationalists the Libyan adventure would whet their appetite for more.

At the end of September an ultimatum was sent to Turkey and plans were hastily improvised to send an Italian force to Tripoli. This arrived in the first half of October and quickly occupied Tripoli and other towns on the coast, using for the first time in a war an aeroplane for reconnaissance and to drop grenades on the enemy.⁷⁷ However, an epidemic of cholera quickly reminded the soldiers of the realities of a colonial campaign, while the Arabs in the interior maintained a resistance that was to last for more than 10 years. But the war was not just a colonial campaign: it was a war against the Ottoman Empire, which, however decrepit, was not prepared to acknowledge defeat immediately. To the alarm of the other European powers, the naval war spread to the eastern Mediterranean. The Italian fleet bombarded the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles and seized the Dodecanese Islands. In July 1912 negotiations between Italian and Turkish representatives began in Switzerland; however, it was only the mobilization of the states of the Balkan League at the end of September, taking advantage of Turkey’s predicament, that finally forced the Turks to sign a treaty accepting Italy’s gains before turning to face the even greater strains of the First Balkan War. It was not only Turkey and the Balkan states that were directly affected by the Italian actions. During the war with Italy the Turks had closed the Straits; the result was a substantial fall in Russia’s foreign trade during the latter part of 1911 so that those Russians who believed that control of the Straits must be the main aim of their foreign policy had fresh evidence to support their view.

Certainly Italy’s imperialist war was one of the sparks lighting what one historian called ‘the long fuse’ linking the outbreak of the First World War to remote origins in the Balkans.⁷⁸ Perhaps ironically, it was also Italy’s dramatic step that gave a new impetus to socialist opposition to imperialism and militarism: the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) called for demonstrations condemning Italy’s aggression both against Turkey and against all imperialist policies. The day the Italian government announced the annexation of Tripoli in November, large demonstrations took place in all European capital cities – and afterwards organized socialist parties put new energy into the ‘peace offensive’ promoting the anti-war movement among the working class.⁷⁹ But outside socialist circles in Italy the war for imperial expansion did, as Giolitti had feared, bring together groups previously hostile to one another, now united in their zeal for expansion. As a result the Libyan adventure revealed and reinforced tendencies in Italian society that gained strength over the next few years and steadily undermined Giolitti’s position.⁸⁰

Empire and the European crisis

The outbreak of war in 1914 was not caused by immediate imperialist rivalries, and Germany’s aspirations for colonial territory might well have been achieved by agreement with Britain if the Germans had been prepared to abate their claims to naval hegemony and world power. Nevertheless, weak independent states such as Morocco and the Ottoman Empire itself were a constant temptation to imperialist or would-be imperialist powers so that Franco-German rivalry in Morocco and Italian ambitions in Tripoli could produce crises in 1911 that added to the instability of the international system. By 1914, however, specifically colonial conflicts in North Africa or the Middle East were subordinated to a wider pattern of international ambitions and apprehensions.⁸¹ The crisis over Morocco was solved by a compromise colonial agreement between France and Germany that left neither side wholly satisfied, but the importance of the crisis lay less in the specific redistribution of African territory than in the general exacerbation of mutual suspicion between France and Germany and the intensification of the arms race, supported by a new wave of nationalist propaganda on both sides of the frontier. By 1914 the psychological consequences of a generation of imperialism were more important than the actual territorial gains or losses.

The older imperial rivalries had not disappeared, but they had been pushed into second place by the new alignment caused especially by German ambitions to take its place among the world powers. A mass of detailed disagreements still troubled relations between Britain and France in spite of the Entente Cordiale – arguments, for example, over the international status of Tangier or economic interests in Syria – and these were to become worse once the war had started and the possibility of a partition of the Ottoman Empire revived old suspicions and aroused new ambitions. Yet again and again both in London and Paris the need for mutual support against Germany led, if not to a solution of these differences, at least to an agreement to overlook them temporarily. British relations with Russia were more difficult. Although the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 appeared to resolve the conflicting claims on the borders of the two empires – in Afghanistan and Tibet and Persia – local rivalries and old distrust that went back for generations still caused problems.⁸² The agreement had been criticized in both countries, particularly because the recognition of British and Russian spheres of influence in Persia coincided with a revolution there in which both sides tried to win British or Russian support.⁸³ Both Russian and British military men felt that too many concessions had been made in the interests of a diplomatic agreement, while in Britain many of Grey’s Liberal supporters – and also the British minister in Tehran – were outraged by what they regarded as a betrayal of the liberal movement in Persia when the British government acquiesced in a Russian-backed counter-revolution. Yet in spite of moments of tension, as when in 1908 the Russian commander of the Shah’s Cossack Brigade ordered his troops to surround the British legation in Tehran, Grey and the Foreign Office consistently sacrificed local interests in Persia and the Far East to a wider cause of maintaining the entente with Russia. Yet British attitudes to Russia remained ambiguous: Russia was an essential ally against Germany, but some senior Foreign Office officials also feared that Russia, once it had recovered completely from the disasters of 1905, might again become Britain’s main imperial rival. ‘The Russians could be exceedingly awkward in the Mid and Far East and could seriously shake the British position in India’, Sir Arthur Nicolson, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, wrote in April 1913. ‘This is to me such a nightmare that I would at almost any cost keep Russian friendship.’⁸⁴ There was in Nicolson’s mind always a lurking fear that, unless Britain was prepared to appease Russia over what he regarded as minor matters, Russia might do a deal with Germany and confront the British Empire with a threat that it might be too weak to survive. Other advisers of the British government, although recognizing a potential threat from a revived Russia, thought that the agreement with Russia should be renegotiated so as to safeguard Britain’s interests, especially in Persia. The argument between those who in the spring of 1914 thought that now was the time to stand up to Russia’s claims and those who, like Nicolson, believed that friendship with Russia must be preserved at all costs to enable Britain to confront the Germans, was never resolved since it was overtaken by the events of July 1914. Perhaps, however, it suggests that the leaders of the British Empire, overstretched as they believed it to be, had still in 1914 not all made up their minds where the threat to it was ultimately coming from.

Britain’s relationship with India was central to the idea of empire and had been the key to British foreign policy for more than a century. The fact of British rule over this vast empire was often taken for granted and not often subjected to calculations about profit and loss, but India was still one of Britain’s main markets and still a fruitful field for the investment of capital as well as a direct source of government revenue. At the same time, the Liberal government was having to face the fact that at a time when there was talk, at least with respect to the older white colonies, of the Empire eventually being transformed into an association of self-governing dominions, the system of government in India was becoming more and more anomalous, while the nationalist movement was growing, even if it was not yet the threat it was to become 10 years later. Nevertheless, the construction of a grandiose new capital at New Delhi and the spectacular Durbar held by the new King-Emperor George V in 1911 suggested that British rule was as firmly based as ever, and it was still widely taken as axiomatic that, as Lord Curzon wrote in 1901, ‘If we lose [India] we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power’.⁸⁵

With the agreement with Russia in 1907, one of the main threats to India’s external security seemed to have been removed, even if the government of India and the soldiers were rather reluctant to recognize the fact. Germany could never threaten India in the way in which Russia could, though there were fears that the Baghdad railway, if Britain could not exercise some control over it, might become a vehicle for the expansion of German influence. When in 1911 the Russians withdrew their objections to the railway in return for a link between the main line and Tehran, the old British anxieties revived in a new form: ‘It would be a very serious matter’, Grey wrote

if Germany obtained any control of this branch. For in times of Pan-Islamic excitement, it might be used to mobilize German-trained Mussulman forces. Germany, who held no Mussulman subjects, was not embarrassed by Pan-Islamism, but it might be very serious to Russia and England.⁸⁶

The kaiser, in his role as self-appointed protector of Islam, had indeed hinted from time to time that a war with Germany could lead to the loss of India, and on 30 July 1914, in a blind outburst of hatred against Britain, he wrote:

Our consuls and agents in Turkey and India must inflame the whole Mohammedan world into a wild rebellion against this hated, lying, unscrupulous nation of shopkeepers; for even if we must bleed to death, then at least England shall lose India.⁸⁷

Although the British were not unaware of this danger, a direct German threat to India was never taken very seriously, and even after the war had started German plans to inflame the world of Islam against Britain did not have much success. On the other hand, the danger of a revival of the Russian threat to India was very much in the minds of British officials, many of whom believed that just for this reason Russian friendship must be retained at all costs; indeed, the Russians, in their proposals in June and July 1914 for a strengthening of the ties between the two countries and especially for a naval agreement, were hinting that a more formal alliance might include a Russian guarantee of the security of India. Here once again the discussions were overtaken by the July Crisis and the outbreak of war, so we do not know how Anglo-Russian relations might have developed. It has indeed been suggested that it was anxiety about India that brought Britain into the war on Russia’s side as the only way of preventing a renewed Russian threat to India should Russia win a war in which Britain had remained neutral.⁸⁸ This is attributing too much consistency and foresight to a divided British government and a Foreign Office that was by no means unanimously clear where the main danger to the British Empire lay, but it reminds us how often British governments were thinking of their European policy in imperial terms.

The immediate motives that led governments to decide to go to war in 1914 were not directly imperialist and the crisis they faced was a crisis in Europe, but earlier imperialist policies had contributed to the frame of mind in which decisions were taken. For Russia the lure of Constantinople and the Straits was an important motive in its Balkan policy, to which Asian ambitions were temporarily subordinated. For Germany vague aspirations to world hegemony had contributed to the decision to construct a navy that was inevitably seen by Britain as a challenge. Britain who, as the German ambassador in London remarked, ‘has the best colonies and doesn’t need a war with us to acquire more’, had nevertheless come to accept the British Empire as something that had to be preserved at any cost.⁸⁹ The French, by accepting the need urged by the parti colonial to gain control of Morocco, had added a colonial dimension to their resentment against Germany in Europe, while the Germans, by deliberately provoking the Agadir crisis, contributed to the growth of nationalist agitation in both countries and the acceleration of the arms race, and thus added to the growing international tension in 1912–14, tension in the growth of which the collapse of Ottoman rule in Europe under the impact of Italian imperialism and Balkan nationalism had also played a major part.

Imperialist thinking had always accepted the risk of war and regarded armed struggle as an essential part of imperial expansion, even though in fact imperialist wars had hitherto for the most part been limited in scope. By 1914 this intensified the crisis in which German ambitions, French grievances, Russian expansionism, British anxieties and Austrian fears led to the decision that war was inevitable if vital national interests were to be preserved. That decision could not have been possible if the prevailing mood in Europe had not been ready to accept and even welcome war; to the creation of that mood the rhetoric even more than the reality of imperialism had contributed much.

References

· 1  Léon Gambetta, quoted in Henri Brunschwig, Mythes et Réalités de l’lmpérialisme colonial francais (Paris 1960), p. 9. See also James Joll, Europe since 1870 (3rd edn, London 1983), Ch. 4.

· 2  Quoted in H.C.G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists (Oxford 1973), p. 153.

· 3  See especially Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (London 1980); D.K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830–1914 (London 1973); R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London 1968); for a brief summary, see Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Europe’s World: Power, Empire, and Colonialism’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), A Companion to Europe, 1900–1945 (Oxford 2006), pp. 119–34.

· 4  See Cedric J. Lowe, Salisbury and the Mediterranean (London 1965) and Gordon Martel, Imperial Diplomacy: Rosebery and the Failure of Foreign Policy (London and Toronto 1986).

· 5  See Christopher M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “Colonial Party”: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885–1914’, Historical Journal 14 (1971), pp. 99–128; ‘The Groupe Colonial in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1892–1932’, Historical Journal 17 (1974), pp. 837–66.

· 6  Thomas D. Schoonover, The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820–1930 (Wilmington, NC 2000), p. 120.

· 7  See D.C.M. Platt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy 1815–1914 (Oxford 1968); R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 6 (1953); D.C.M. Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’, Economic History Review 21 (1968); ‘Further Objections to an “Imperialism of Free Trade” ‘, Economic History Review 26 (1973).

· 8  Quoted in W.L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York 1951), p. 123.

· 9  G.N. Sanderson, ‘The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics’, in Roland Oliver and G.N. Sanderson (eds), Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 6 (Cambridge 1985), pp. 153–4.

· 10  P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London 1993), pp. 227–473.

· 11  J.P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York 2006).

· 12  Quoted in William A. Hoisington Jr., Lautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York 1995), p. 20.

· 13  H.L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa 1880–1914 (Westport, CT 1996), p. 180.

· 14  Quoted in Peter Waldron, The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917 (Basingstoke 1997), p. 104.

· 15  Although intriguing, the argument is ultimately unpersuasive. See the essays by Wilson in The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy (Cambridge 1985) and Empire and Continent: Studies in British Foreign Policy from the 1880s to the First World War (London 1987). Keith Neilson’s conclusions concerning the relationship between Britain’s Russian and German policies are more convincing: Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford 1995); see especially p. 371.

· 16  David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904–1914 (Oxford 1996), p. 67.

· 17  11 November 1895, quoted in J.L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, Vol. III (London 1934), p. 27.

· 18  Andrew Marrison, British Business and Protection 1903–1932 (Oxford 1996), pp. 179–80.

· 19  Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton 2008); and see Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (New York 2011) and Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ 2010).

· 20  Garvin, Joseph Chamberlain, pp. 187–8.

· 21  Julian Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, Vol. IV (London 1951), p. 436. For an account of the movement for tariff reform and imperial federation, see Wolfgang Mock, Imperiale Herrschaft und Nationales Interesse (Stuttgart 1982).

· 22  Quoted in V.G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815–1960 (London 1982), pp. 156, 158.

· 23  Quoted in Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge 1998), p. 60.

· 24  Quoted in Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social and Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (London 1960), p. 41.

· 25  Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War (Cambridge 1994), p. 85.

· 26  Quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, p. 57.

· 27  See Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester 1992), especially p. 312.

· 28  Quoted in Paul Mus, Le Destin de l’Union francaise (Paris 1954), p. 18.

· 29  Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working Class Attitudes and Reaction to the Boer War 1899–1902 (London and Toronto 1972).

· 30  Quoted in Price, Imperial War, p. 73.

· 31  W. Mark Hamilton, ‘The Nation and the Navy: Methods and Organization of British Navalist Propaganda 1889–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London 1978), pp. 92 ff.

· 32  The Times, 1 Nov. 1924.

· 33  Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (New York 2010)

· 34  See Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford 2004) and Brad Beaven, Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (New York 2012).

· 35  Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (Oxford 2008).

· 36  W.O. Henderson, The German Colonial Empire 1884–1919 (London 1993), pp. 46–9.

· 37  See Ludwig Dehio, ‘Thoughts on Germany’s mission 1900–1918’, in Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century (Eng. tr., London 1959).

· 38  Marianne Weber, Max Weber: ein Lebensbild (Tübingen 1926), p. 138. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik (Tübingen 1958), p. 35; also Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York 1970), pp. 106–7.

· 39  Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Munich 1921), p. 29. See also Mommsen, Max Weber, p. 78, and Mitzman, Iron Cage, pp. 137–47.

· 40  Winfried Philipp Englert, Das Flottenproblem im Lichte der Sozialpolitik (Paderborn 1900), quoted in Eckart Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik (Berlin 1930), pp. 369–70.

· 41  Thomas Schoonover, Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821–1929 (London and Tuscaloosa, AL 1998), p. 139.

· 42  Nancy Mitchell in The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC 1999) argues that the threat of German expansion into the Americas was never real, that it was trumped up – especially by US naval interests – to extend the principle of the Monroe Doctrine.

· 43  Quoted in Mitchell, Danger of Dreams, p. 143. For a study of racial ideas and stereotypes in Germany see David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA 2011).

· 44  Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf 1969), p. 378. See also Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Nationalism, Imperialism and Official Press Policy in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Philippe Levillain and Brunello Vigezzi (eds), Opinion Publique et Politique Extérieure 1870–1915 (Rome 1981), p. 380.

· 45  Heinrich Class, Wider den Strom (1932), p. 217, quoted in Egmont Zechlin, ‘Motive und Taktik der Reichsleitung 1914’, in Wolfgang Schieder (ed.), Erster Weltkrieg: Ursachen, Entstehung und Kriegsziele (Cologne 1969), p. 197.

· 46  Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (New York 2010).

· 47  Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict (Iowa City 1985), p. 77.

· 48  Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (Oxford 2013).

· 49  Quoted in Helmut Walser Smith, ‘The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904–14’, in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, MI 1998), p. 107.

· 50  P. Rohrbach, Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (1912), p. 202, quoted in Dehio, Germany and World Politics, p. 78, n. 1.

· 51  Quoted in Mitchell, Danger of Dreams, p. 113.

· 52  Richard A. Voeltz, German Colonialism and the South West Africa Company, 1894–1914 (Athens, OH 1988), p. 86.

· 53  Niall Ferguson, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927 (Cambridge 1995), p. 85.

· 54  See Gregor Schollgen, ‘Richard von Külhlmann und das Deutsch-Englische Verhältnis 1912–14’, Historische Zeitschrift 230 (1980).

· 55  G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origin of the War 1889–1914, Vol. X (London 1936), Part II, No. 226, p. 224. (Hereinafter referred to as BD.)

· 56  BD 1, No. 119, p. 85.

· 57  BD VI, No. 579, pp. 750–1.

· 58  See P.H.S. Hatton, ‘Harcourt and Solf: The Search for an Anglo-German Understanding through Africa 1912–14’, European Studies Review 1 (1971), pp. 123–46.

· 59  Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Friedrich Thimme, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, Vol. XXXI (Berlin 1936), No. 11474, p. 210.

· 60  David E. Kaiser, ‘Germany and the Origins of the First World War’, Journal of Modern History 55 (1983), p. 463.

· 61  See Stuart A. Cohen, British Policy in Mesopotamia 1903–1914 (London 1976).

· 62  A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford 1954), pp. 410–11, fn. 2.

· 63  Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge 1997), p. 131.

· 64  Quoted in George Monger, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy 1900–1907 (London 1963), p. 122.

· 65  Joseph Heller, British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire 1908–1914 (London 1983), p. 48. For a case-study on Anglo-Turkish relations see Spencer Mawby, ‘A Crisis of Empire: The Anglo-Ottoman Dispute over the Aden Frontier, 1901–1905’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 18 (2007), pp. 27–52.

· 66  Firuz Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia 1864–1914: A Study in Imperialism (New Haven, CT and London 1968), p. 330.

· 67  Gordon Martel, ‘The Near East in the Balance of Power: The Repercussions of the Kaulla Incident in 1893’, Middle Eastern Studies 16 (1980), pp. 23–41.

· 68  Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956 (London 1963), p. 122.

· 69  Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express. The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power 1898–1918 (London 2010). For a survey of Russian aspirations to inherit pieces of the Ottoman Empire see Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge 2011).

· 70  See F.R. Bridge, ‘Tarde venientibus ossa: Austro-Hungarian Colonial Aspirations in Asia Minor’, Middle Eastern Studies (1970), pp. 319–30.

· 71  Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 (Bloomington, IN 1998), p. 160.

· 72  Quoted in Richard Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy before the First World War (Cambridge 1979), p. 138.

· 73  Quoted in Bosworth, Least of the Great Powers, p. 134.

· 74  Franklin H. Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–1934 (Cambridge 1996), p. 86.

· 75  Quoted in Bosworth, Least of the Great Powers, p. 163.

· 76  F. Malgeri, La Guerra di Libia 1911–12 (Rome 1970), pp. 98–9, quoted in S.M.O. Jones, ‘Domestic factors in Italian intervention in the First World War’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London 1982), p. 61. See also Bosworth, Least of the Great Powers, p. 148.

· 77  Kiernan, European Empires, p. 128.

· 78  Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse (London 1966).

· 79  Solomon Wank, ‘The Austrian Peace Movement and the Habsburg Ruling Elite, 1906–1914’, in Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen (eds), Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville, TN 1988), p. 49.

· 80  S. Jones, ‘Antonio Salandra and the Politics of Italian Intervention in the First World War’, European History Quarterly 15 (1985), p. 158.

· 81  Saho Matsumoto-Best, ‘British and Italian Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1912–14: The Case of Egypt’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 18 (2007), pp. 297–314.

· 82  Evgeny Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo – British Relations in Central and East Asia (Baltimore, MD 2013) and Christopher Wyatt, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy during the Great Game (London 2012).

· 83  See Firuz Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia 1864–1914: A Study in Imperialism (New Haven, CT and London 1968).

· 84  Quoted in Zara S. Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898–1914 (Cambridge 1969), p. 137.

· 85  Quoted in Max Beloff, Britain’s Liberal Empire 1897–1921 (London 1969), p. 91, fn. 4.

· 86  BD X, 1, No. 653, p. 623.

· 87  Karl Kautsky, Graf Max Montgelas and Prof. Walter Schucking (eds), Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, Vol. II (Berlin 1919), No. 401, p. 133.

· 88  For example, by Erwin Hölzle, Die Selbstentmachtung Europas (Göttingen 1975), especially pp. 85–95, 216 ff.

· 89  Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, ‘Wahn oder Wille’ (Jan. 1915), in John C.G. Röhl (ed.), Zwei deutsche Fürsten zur Kriegsschuldfrage: Lichnowsky und Eulenburg und der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs. Eine Dokumentation (Düsseldorf 1971), p. 55.