begun, were largely strategic: the road to India
which ran through the Ottoman Empire, Persia
and landlocked mountainous Afghanistan. India
was the greatest possession and jewel of the British
Empire and tsarist Russia was credited by the
British with the ultimate desire of ousting Britain
from India and of seeking to replace Britain as the
paramount power of southern Asia. The defence
of India and Britain’s own supremacy in southern
Asia had been the foremost objective of British
policy in the nineteenth century and remained so
in the new century.
But it became increasingly difficult to defend
the ‘buffer states’ which kept Russia away from
the classic land-invasion route to India. The
Ottoman Empire, once dominated by British
influence, had turned away from Britain. No
British government could easily have come to the
defence of an empire which, under the Sultan
Abdul Hamid, ‘the Damned’, had murdered
defenceless Christian Armenians in Asia Minor. In
Persia, Russia’s influence was steadily advancing.
In 1904 a dramatic change occurred. Russia
became embroiled in war with Japan over China.
Its military weakness became apparent to the
world. Tsarist Russia desperately needed years of
peace after 1905 to recover. The British foreign
secretary, Sir Edward Grey, therefore found the
Russians more ready in 1907 to reach an agree-
ment with Britain to partition their imperial
spheres of interests in the Middle East. But Grey
believed this agreement only provided a temporary
respite.
British security in Europe had been based on
an effective balance of power on the continent. It
had been a part of Britain’s traditional policy to
seek to prevent any one power gaining the
mastery of continental Europe. After the defeat of
Napoleon there seemed to be no serious possi-
bility that any single nation either harboured such
ambitions or could carry them through. But
around 1905 doubts began to arise as to whether
this fundamental condition of safety might not be
passing. Germany’s ambitious plans of naval
expansion were being seriously noted. Germany’s
aggressive reaction in 1905 to the Anglo-French
deal over Morocco aroused graver fears that
Germany might be contemplating another war
against France. Britain gave unhesitating support
to France. From 1905 to 1914 the golden thread
of British policy was to endeavour to preserve the
peace, but in any case to avoid the possibility of
a German hegemony of the continent which
would result from a German victory over much
weaker France.
Accordingly, on the one hand British policy
towards Germany was pacific and the prospect of
helping it achieve some of its imperial ambitions
was held out to it as long as it kept the peace. But
it was warned that should it choose to attack
France in a bid for continental hegemony, it could
not count on the British standing aside even if
Britain were not directly attacked. The Liberal
Cabinet from 1906 to 1914 was not united, how-
ever, though Grey’s policy of growing intimacy
with France in the end prevailed. Several Liberal
ministers were more anti-Russian than anti-
German; strongly pacific, they saw no cause for
war with Germany or anyone. Grey went his own
way of constructing a barrier against the threat of
Germany, supported by the two prime ministers of
the period, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith,
and a small group of ministers. In secret discus-
sions between the French and British military
staffs, military plans were drawn up after the sec-
ond Moroccan crisis of 1911 to land a British
army of 150,000 men in France if Germany
invaded France. At the same time Grey continued
to emphasise that the French should place no
reliance on Britain as there could be no formal
alliance between the two countries. It was a curi-
ous policy dictated partly by differences among his
ministerial colleagues and partly by Grey’s own
desire to play a mediating role in present and
future conflicts. In fact, this compromise between
‘alliance’ and the ‘free hand’ worked quite well
down to the outbreak of war in 1914. Grey made
a notable contribution to calming Europe during
the Bosnian crisis of 1909 and in collaborating
with Germany during the Balkan wars in 1912 and
1913 in order to help preserve European peace.
Nevertheless, alarm at Germany’s intentions
grew in Britain from 1910 onwards. In the public
mind this had much to do with the expansion
of the German navy. Efforts to moderate the
pace – the war secretary, Richard Haldane, visited