Securing the Sinews of Sea Power: British Intervention in the Baltic 1780–1815

This article argues that Britain's standing as a maritime nation must be considered if we are to fully understand the objectives behind British foreign policy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on one of the most important challenges successive British governments faced during this period; the need to secure shipbuilding resources. Both British economic prosperity and national security depended upon the continued supply of naval stores. These resources could only be procured from the Baltic region, which meant the region took on a crucial strategic importance for policy-makers. This article will focus on Britain's relationship with the Baltic between 1780 and 1815 tracing Britain's sensitivity to the changing political environment in Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and particularly Russia, and outlining how this came to dictate foreign policy. Britain hoped to rely on diplomacy and economic interdependence to maintain the movement of naval stores from the Baltic; however intransigence from the Baltic powers forced Britain to resort to military measures on three occasions between 1800 and 1815, such was the importance of these shipbuilding resources.     

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.     

The Intervention Crisis of 1862: A British Diplomatic Dilemma?

In the fall of 1862, William Ewart Gladstone opened a cabinet debate whether Great Britain should intervene in the American Civil War. Influenced by the staggering death toll and lack of results, the British cabinet contemplated a humanitarian intervention. Coinciding with the debate was a cabinet crisis in France over French policies toward Italy and more importantly the overthrow of the Greek king. The revolution in Greece reopened the Eastern Question and forced the Palmerston Government to carefully consider its foreign policy. By closely looking at the chronological overlap of the intervention debate, the French cabinet crisis, and the Greek Revolution, this article shows the interplay of the entangled global crises during the fall of 1862 and their impact on trans-Atlantic diplomacy. The British Government had to determine whether the situation in North America or the containment of Russia and the Eastern Question required attention more urgently. The British Government determined that threats closer to home mattered more.     

The Limits of Multilateralism: Making Policy for the Philippines, 1945–1950

On 1 September 1969, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi seized power in Libya, abolishing a pro-Western monarchy and launching a revolution that combined elements of Nasserism and Islamic radicalism. American policymakers quickly came to regard the Libyan revolution as anathema after Qaddafi expropriated U.S. oil companies and forced the Pentagon to relinquish its air base outside Tripoli. Misinterpreting the new regime's increasingly radical nationalism as evidence of Soviet subversion and failing to appreciate the broad appeal of resurgent Islam, the Nixon and Ford administrations froze arms sales to Libya and provided covert support for anti-Qaddafi forces. After Jimmy Carter's bid to improve relations with Libya backfired, tensions escalated dramatically during the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan branded Qaddafi as a terrorist and a Soviet stooge and unleashed the Sixth Fleet and the CIA in an unsuccessful bid to effect regime change in Libya that was punctuated by the U.S. air raid on Tripoli in April 1986. Qaddafi's erratic behavior and his supersized ego, of course, always made dealing with him a diplomatic nightmare, but the blend of covert action and gunboat diplomacy that Nixon preferred and that Reagan perfected only made a bad situation worse.