War Pessimism in Britain and an American Peace in Early 1916

By offering a reinterpretation of an Anglo-American pact known as the House-Grey Memorandum, this article challenges prevailing views about British decision-making in 1916 in the months leading up to the Battle of the Somme. It argues that serious doubts that the war could still be won without American assistance were the defining characteristic of their deliberations. Owing to deep scepticism about the proposed offensive and severe worries about their financial resources, a majority of the key British civilian leaders were prepared to accept a compromise peace mediated by the United States. Yet these efforts failed primarily because of intrigue at the highest levels of British politics, hard-line Conservative opposition and serious diplomatic missteps by American President Woodrow Wilson. In the end, although doubting it would produce any meaningful results, the British civilian leadership allowed the Somme offensive to go forward only because of their failure to unite on another course of action to prevent it. Finally, this study significantly revises existing thinking about American diplomacy during this period by challenging prevailing notions of the practicality and rigidity demonstrated by U.S. leaders in their foreign policy.     

Clarendon,Cavour, and the Intervention of Sardinia in the Crimean War, 1853–1855

The notorious arms trader Sir Basil Zaharoff is remembered as the archetypal ‘merchant of death’. During the First World War, he is alleged to have exercised a malign influence over statesmen in London and Paris. Recently released Foreign Office files now allow us to document Zaharoff's wartime activities on behalf of the British government as an agent of influence in the Levant. The new sources reveal that Sir Vincent H.P. Caillard, the financial director of the arms-maker Vickers, played a key role in making Zaharoff's services available to prime ministers Asquith and Lloyd George. While Zaharoff has often been portrayed as a sinister force, manipulating statesmen into pursuing his financial and political interests, the reality was the reverse. Zaharoff was a convenient tool of two prime ministers rather than a powerful political manipulator in his own right.