Cambridge history of British foreign policy (1783 - 1919) / edited by A. W. Ward and G. P. Gooch
- Cambridge University Press 1939
- vol.1 (628p.)
In offering to our readers the First Volume of The Cambridge History I of Foreign Policy, from tration (1783) to the Peace of Versailles (1919), we have little to add to the announcement put forth by our University Press less than two years and a half ago. The work was designed as a connected narrative of the subject and a consecutive account of its bearing on the political history of this country and empire, and on that of the world at large. As such, it is intended to combine with a strict adherence to historical truth, wherever ascertainable, a national point of view-in other words, an avowed regard for the interests, and above all for the honour, of Great Britain; and the list of contributors to it has been confined to historical scholars who are British subjects by birth. Our work has accordingly not shrunk, and will not shrink as it pro gresses, from seeking to vindicate for British Foreign Policy that claim to consistency which in certain respects has been denied to it by some of its censors, and in others allowed to it only in the way of sarcasm. Its relations to political aims or ideals not confined to a single nation, or to particular groups of thinkers and their followers within it, have been neither overlooked nor, we believe, prejudged whether or not these aims have in the past been submerged with efforts made to accomplish them, and whether or not on the fulfilment
of these ideals depend the future peace and prosperity of the world. Our readers will understand that, in the several chapters of this History, military and naval events, as well as the progress of parlia mentary legislation and administrative changes at home or in other parts of the empire, due to the influence of the Crown, of parties and movements in Church and State, and to the voice of public opinion and the Press, have been kept in constant view, without being themselves discussed. The successive stages of Indian and (British) Colonial history have in no instance been regarded as detached from that of Great Britain and Ireland. The narrative is throughout based on documentary evidence and has, so far as possible, been arranged in chronological sequence, though without any attempt, more especially in certain summarising sections of the later Volumes, to maintain a synchronistic system of dates.