British policy in Persia, 1892–1903—I

Abstract

When Lord Salisbury's long administration came to an end in the summer of 1892, there ended also an era in British diplomacy. This was not immediately apparent because the development of the ‘new course’,2 different from Lord Salisbury's, took more than a decade. Lady Gwendolen Cecil has described Lord Salisbury's policy as ‘neighbourliness’. Dame Lillian Penson has called it ‘practical co-operation’. This policy had by 1892 secured for his country a position of political authority in Europe which was unique, in that it ‘owed nothing to military pre-eminence or that subtle manipulation of international jealousies, which was the chief weapon of Prince Bismarck's genius’. Its weakness was that it was his alone and depended for its success upon personal characteristics which could not be passed on to a successor.3