Brendan Simms

‘An odd question enough’. Charles James Fox, the crown and British policy during the Hanoverian crisis of 1806

The essay aims to close a longstanding gap in the political historiography of later Georgian Britain by examining the ‘Hanoverian Crisis’ of 1806. Drawing on a broad range of British, Hanoverian and Prussian records, the essay demonstrates that the British–Prussian conflict of that year was caused not – as conventionally assumed – by the closure of the North Sea ports to British shipping, but by the Prussian occupation of George IIIs electoral land of Hanover. The essay then shows how the commitment of the British government to its restitution was largely motivated by the desire of Charles James Fox and the incoming Ministry of All the Talents to build bridges to the crown. This stance was in complete contradiction both to the broad thrust of the new ‘maritime’ foreign policy of the Talents and to Foxs previous policy in matters Hanoverian. Subsequently the implications of this for our understanding of Foxs political biography are assessed. Finally, the essay illuminates the existence of a coherent ‘Hanoverian Faction’ in London headed by Count Munster which together with a highly activist George III was often able to tip the balance in the formulation of British policy .

BRITAIN AND NAPOLEON

The French Revolutionary wars, 1787–1802 . By T. C. W. Blanning. London: Longman, 1996. Pp. xvii+286. ISBN 0-340-56911-5. £15.99. The wars of Napoleon . By Charles J. Esdaile. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. xii+417. ISBN 0-582-05955-0. £14.99. The Younger Pitt: the consuming struggle . By John Ehrman. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xv+911. ISBN 0-09-475540-x. £35. British victory in Egypt, 1801: the end of Napoleons conquest . By Piers Mackesy. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. xii+282. ISBN 0-415-04064-7. £45. Britain and the defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 . By Rory Muir. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+466. ISBN 0-300-06443-8. £29.95. Traditional historians of war and foreign policy in Britain have often been accused – sometimes justly – of all manner of sins, among them Anglo- and Eurocentricity. There is no trace, however, of insularity in the five new publications by John Ehrman, Rory Muir, Piers Mackesy, Charles Esdaile, and T. C. W. Blanning on the struggle with Napoleon. The global sweep of that conflict, to quote Rory Muirs Britain and the defeat of Napoleon , forces the historian to address an ‘interlocking mosaic of problems’ (p. xii), spanning the Baltic to the Cape of Good Hope, and the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean.

Against a ‘world of enemies’: the impact of the First World War on the development of Hitler's ideology

Adolf Hitlers experiences during the First World War have been much discussed, with historians tending to concentrate on his involvement in the fighting and the operational lessons he later claimed to draw. Much less has been written about the impact of the war on his world view, though recent work has tended to suggest that his paranoid anti-Semitism was not yet visible during the conflict. Drawing on this latest research, but also on newly discovered sources and previously underused material, the author shows that Hitlers main preoccupation during the war and its immediate aftermath was the overwhelming power of Great Britain and its American ally. He associated these two powers with the alleged international Jewish economic conspiracy that had crushed the German empire. Hitlers anti-Semitism thus originated in an anti-capitalist, rather than anti-communist, discourse. He blamed Britain and the US for the rigours of the Versailles peace settlement, a moment which was far more politically formative for him than the experience of defeat itself. His encounter with American soldiers in the summer of 1918 also marked his first engagement with the global power of the United States and the start of a belief in the demographic weakness of the German empire which inspired his plans for Lebensraum in the east.

Introduction: World out of balance

This short comment seeks to clarify what unipolar politics as usual is, and how it differs from politics as usual under alternative systemic conditions, especially bipolarity. This is an assessment ‘from within’, accepting Brooks and Wohlforth’s description of unipolar politics as well as their central premises that America’s lonely superpower status faces no immediate threat and that there is little evidence that powerful states are actively seeking to overthrow the current unipolar system. I suggest that a comparative assessment of how alternative distributions of power create different incentive structures for states yields different conclusions and policy prescriptions than those advanced by Brooks and Wohlforth. Most notably, Brooks and Wohlforth do not fully appreciate how the ‘unipolar politics as usual’ that they describe provides states with few incentives to cooperate with their policy prescription that the US reshape the world’s institutional architecture.

Gorazde: the peacekeepers’ tale

This review article of a double CD–ROM focuses on the siege of the Bosnian ‘safe area’ of Gorazde during the period 1994–5. Overshadowed by the attack and massacre at Srebrenica, the defence of Gorazde has received little mention. This is rectified by Gillian Sandford and Mike Price’s CD–ROM, in which British soldiers of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment and the Royal Welch Fusiliers discuss their personal experiences of the siege as well as the nature of their responsibilities as peacekeepers in this ‘safe area’. The soldiers discuss their support of the ‘safe area’ and how they contributed to averting a massacre by defending Gorazde until Bosnian forces were able to defend it themselves.

The Worker Correspondents' Movement in Württemberg during the Weimar Republic: 1928-33:

Surprisingly for a party whose ’High Politics’ have attracted so much attention, the history of the German Communist Party (KPD) at local and regional level remains largely to be written. One way of approaching the history of the KPD at base level is through the medium of the worker correspondents’ movement or Arbeiterkorrespondentenbewegung. A look at the Wfrttembergian worker correspondents’ movement, based on the party organ Suddeutsche Arbeiterzeitung (SAZ), may help to open up some hitherto unexplored angles on the history of the KPD as a whole. Naturally, the importance of such an investigation can, of its nature, only be very limited. In the last analysis, what the Suddeutsche Arbeiterzeitung propagated, or failed to propagate, what its worker correspondents wrote and neglected to write, and what the ordinary party member read, or did not read, every day, affected the destiny of the Weimar Republic only peripherally. Its fate was as is well known decided at a different level