This is a magisterial new account of Europe's tragic descent into a largely inadvertent war in the summer of 1914. Thomas Otte reveals why a century-old system of Great Power politics collapsed so ...disastrously in the weeks from the 'shot heard around the world' on June 28th to Germany's declaration of war on Russia on August 1st. He shows definitively that the key to understanding how and why Europe descended into world war is to be found in the near-collective failure of statecraft by the rulers of Europe and not in abstract concepts such as the 'balance of power' or the 'alliance system'. In this unprecedented panorama of Europe on the brink, from the ministerial palaces of Berlin and Vienna to Belgrade, London, Paris and St Petersburg, Thomas Otte reveals the hawks and doves whose decision-making led to a war that would define a century and which still reverberates today.
With this pioneering approach to the study of international history, T. G. Otte reconstructs the underlying principles, élite perceptions and 'unspoken assumptions' that shaped British foreign policy ...between the death of Palmerston and the outbreak of the First World War. Grounded in a wide range of public and private archival sources, and drawing on sociological insights, The Foreign Office Mind presents a comprehensive analysis of the foreign service as a 'knowledge-based organization', rooted in the social and educational background of the diplomatic élite and the broader political, social and cultural fabric of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The book charts how the collective mindset of successive generations of professional diplomats evolved, and reacted to and shaped changes in international relations during the second half of the nineteenth century, including the balance of power and arms races, the origins of appeasement and the causes of the First World War.
The debate about the purpose (and uses) of studying diplomatic and international history are as old as the subject itself. This article traces the origins and development of diplomatic history as a ...specialized field within history as a wider discipline, before exploring more recent challenges to it. The article seeks to highlight both the scope for, and the opportunities to be found in, cross‐fertilization with ideas derived from cognate disciplines. At the same time, it also seeks to show the conceptual and methodological pitfalls of recent attempts at innovation in the field. It concludes by reasserting the essential importance of politics as the core of international history and by underlining its potential for guiding current policy as well as its limitations in that respect.
Sir Lewis Namier has left a deep, if contested, imprint on studies of eighteenth-century British political history. Namier the student of great power relations, by contrast, has been largely allowed ...to slide into oblivion. It is a curious fate, for in his day his public profile as a commentator on international affairs was very high. This article attempts to reconstruct Namier as a diplomatic historian, the intellectual assumptions that underpinned his work, the manner in which he framed the study of European great power politics, and the methods he employed.
This analysis examines the interplay between academia and officialdom during the First World War and its immediate aftermath. The role of more especially historians prior to and during the Paris ...Peace Conference of 1919 and the degree to which they succeeded-or failed-to affect decision making have been examined in some considerable detail by recent scholarship. Far less attention has been paid to the impact of individual historians' experience of employment in war-time government agencies on their post-war scholarly pursuits. The effect of the war on historical scholarship, in fact, was profound. Not the least, it stimulated the establishment of diplomatic history as a distinct field of academic research and the emergence of the nascent discipline of international relations led by scholars who had served in wartime intelligence.
Digital pathology with whole-slide imaging (WSI) has a large potential to make the process of expert consultation and expert panel diagnosis more rapid and more efficient. However, comparison with ...the current methods is necessary for validation of the technique. In this study, we determined if digital assessment of whole-slide images of hematopathology specimens with a focus on the assessment of lymphoma can be used for consultation and panel diagnostics. Ninety-three histological specimens with a suspicion for lymphoma were assessed both with conventional microscopy and digital microscopy with a wash out period between assessments. A consensus diagnosis was based on full concordance between the pathologists or, in case of discordances, was reached at a joint session at a multi-headed microscope. In 81% of the cases, there was a full concordance between digital and light microscopical assessment for all three pathologists. Discordances between conventional microscopy and digital pathology were present in 3% of assessments. In comparison with the consensus diagnosis, discordant diagnoses were made in 5 cases with digital microscopy and in 3 cases with light microscopy. The reported level of confidence and need for additional investigations were similar between assessment by conventional and by digital microscopy. In conclusion, the performance of assessment by digital pathology is in general comparable with that of conventional light microscopy and pathologists feel confident using digital pathology for this subspecialty.
Sir Edward Grey is remembered largely as Britain's Foreign Secretary when 'the lights went out all over Europe' in the summer of 1914. His record remains contested. From David Lloyd George's crafty ...deception in his wartime memoirs to more recent revisionist historians, writers have sought to blame Grey for the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on substantial research in private and official, British, and foreign archives, this paper will reconstruct Grey's career as Foreign Secretary with an emphasis on his objectives and the means which he employed to obtain them. Crucially, it places Grey's stewardship of British foreign policy within the broader international context, defined by the steep decline and subsequent renaissance of Russian power in the years between 1905 and 1912/13, with the aim of establishing the limitations of British power. More especially the shift in the international balance around 1913/14 shaped towards Russia, and away from Germany, shaped Grey's calculations during Europe's last summer. The July Crisis showed both the strengths and the limitations of Grey's diplomacy, this persistent and subtle pressing for mediation, but also his misreading of Austro-Hungarian policy.
Based on hitherto unused archival material, this article reconstructs the genesis of a clandestine mission to Germany by Sir Edward Grey's private secretary, Sir William Tyrrell, planned for the ...summer of 1914. The mission remained abortive, but it offers fresh insights into a growing sense of détente in Great Power relations on the eve of the First World War. Although the episode involved key officials in London and Berlin, the article emphasizes that, pace many recent scholars of the period, the Anglo-German antagonism was not the central concern of British policy-makers. Rather, relations between the two countries were a function of Anglo-Russian relations, and the revival of Russian power after 1912 provides the proper context to the attempts by British and German officials to place relations between their countries on a friendlier footing. The article thus also calls into question criticisms of the British foreign secretary as irrevocably ententiste, and provides an antidote to assumptions of the First World War as somehow inevitable.
PDF
