British Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century: A Survey

Abstract

Il est vray que dans un gouvernement comme celuy d'Angleterre, il ne faut compter sur rien. [Chauvelin (1728)]Eighteenth-century British foreign policy has been a marginal subject for several decades. During that period much good work has been produced, particularly on the diplomacy of the first four decades of the century, but this work has not been integrated into the general scholarship of the period. The textbooks for the century, commonly written by experts in high politics, generally offer a hurried account of foreign policy, that is, a jumble of names and dates that are not related to the problems discussed in the rest of the work. Foreign policy is rarely perceived as a crucial problem of political management or debate. Eighteenth-century scholars complain often, particularly in conversation, about what they regard as the excessively detailed nature of foreign policy studies and their supposed failure to address themselves to problems of general relevance.The strong diplomatic bias of eighteenth-century foreign policy studies has certainly led to the production of many works that have few points of access for the general scholar. The domestic context of foreign policy and, in particular, the extent to which policy was debated are subjects that have received relatively little attention. Partly this is a result of the development of the subject. The great age of foreign policy studies was the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, an age in which history existed to study the growth and exalt the triumphs of the nation-state.