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Should international history pay more attention to the human element, to public opinion, to social and cultural contexts? There is a strong case that it should. Too often is it supposed that diplom...

Long widely available, opiates and cocaine came under a raft of prohibitive laws in the United States and Europe from 1914 onward, paving the way for contemporary drug control. Explanations for thi...

Had the Munich Agreement not forestalled it, the Second World War, or at least a European war, would have begun in 1938. According to arguments in defence of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier bought time and avoided embroiling their countries in a conflict for which they were not prepared. The abundant historiography on Munich, nevertheless, continues to lack a complete picture of the balance of forces at the time. This article seeks to establish which side in the looming conflict was actually best positioned. It examines the likely line-up of belligerents, their respective land, sea and air forces and their war plans and strategies. The French and Czechoslovak armies were a more than even match for the Wehrmacht, it argues. An analysis of the German, Czechoslovak and French plans shows that Hitler's projected offensive was a hazardous enterprise that risked becoming bogged down and opening the Reich to a multi-sided invasion. Czechoslovak army strength and defensive capabiliti...

This article explores whether the British decision-makers and public were conscious of the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of the Chinese war of 1839–42, the First Opium War. While most political historians have assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the drug, social historians argue that notions of addiction only arose, in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the abundant press, pamphlet, and parliamentary literature generated by the war debate, this article examines in what terms opium use was characterized. It considers the groups that intervened on both sides of the debate and draws lessons from the arguments they deployed for and against the war. Situating the source literature within the context of early Victorian values and mores, finally, it argues that the British leaders and political nation were aware of the drug's habit-forming properties. Not only was it widely recognized that it was something dangerous that was being introduced, at the point of a gun, into China, but there can be said to have existed, in Britain, a layman's notion of drug addiction.

The Eastern Crisis saw an upsurge in nationalism known as the Rhine Crisis that was a landmark in Franco–German hostility and in the movement towards German unification. The news of the July 1840 treaty met in France with public fury and calls for war. This in turn caused a storm in Germany that saw the composition of the future national anthem, the Deutschlandlied. The Rhine Crisis, a clash of poets and a clash of cultures, also took place on that battleground between Liberalism and reaction that was Germany. Among Germans, this involved alongside atavistic reflexes an agonising choice between French-inspired Liberalism and Austro-Prussian authoritarianism. In turn, this fed into the diplomacy of the Eastern Crisis through key backdoor initiatives from Berlin and Vienna.

This chapter explains how Mehemet Ali became a French protege and conversely a bugbear of the European northern courts. Drawing from the memory of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, helped by Champollion and nascent Egyptology and by his own modernising propaganda, the Pasha became identified as a standard bearer for the French civilising mission and, by extension, a Liberal champion against the ancien regime that was characterised by the Ottoman Empire. He also appealed to many European and British radicals and, in Britain, this created a challenge for a Whig cabinet that was reliant on radical parliamentary support. In the northern courts, this made him anathema: a rebel and an aggressor, as Bonaparte had been.

This chapter explores how the Ottoman Empire came to pretend, in the 1830s, to Whig reforming patronage. Decisive steps were taken in the form of the Balta-Liman trade convention and the Edict of Gulhane. The Syrian rebellion of 1840 against Mehemet Ali, and the echo it found in the British media, helped broaden the appeal of the Ottoman cause. Official belief in Turkey’s improvement programme was moreover reflected in British policy in Syria after the invasion, in 1841. Long before, nevertheless, Britain’s espousal of Ottoman reconstruction, through a programme of free trade, laissez-faire, and security of person and property, made its alignment in the Eastern Question all but predestined.