The activity of the foreign Powers in Persia during the early twentieth century has begun to receive historians’ attention; the British role in the Persian struggle against Kajar despotism, however, has not been made clear. The British have been pictured as indecisive and as not significantly supporting the Persian revolution. Or, where they have been described as aiding rebellion, only vague implications exist as to their purpose: hints that before the Anglo-Russian Convention the British encouraged the revolutionaries in order to extend British influence, presumably at Russian expense, and that after the Convention the British tried to make the shah honour his promises to the constitutionalists to obtain political stability and a secure environment for British trade. At least partly correct, if limited in scope and inexplicit about details, these ideas do not allow a full understanding of British policy during the tumultuous Persian struggle for a constitution. A thorough examination of the exact impact of the Anglo-Russian Convention on Russians and revolutionaries in Persia is required for comprehension of British attitudes and policies.

There are grounds for arguing that the dynamic thrust of English Liberalism in the early twentieth century was in the direction of social democracy; and that this was a necessary condition of the survival of the Liberal party as a party of government. By 1910, according to this view, the party represented workingclass interests rather than those of any other class. But what about business Liberalism? We are likely to discover an upper limit of its strength among businessmen involved in the cotton trade (cotton bosses). As the party of Free Trade, the Liberals were well placed here. There was no sectional reason why the Conservative programme of Tariff Reform should attract these industrialists. Having no need of protection in home or Empire markets, the cotton industry had almost nothing to gain from an artificial restriction of competition, whereas it had much to lose if a system of tariffs increased production costs.

Unlike their fellows in a number of other industries, English farm labourers came relatively late to the idea of trade unionism. Admittedly, unsuccessful attempts at combination had been made by some few labourers from the 1830s onwards – and particularly during the later 1860s – but it was not until the years 1871–2 that appreciable numbers of them displayed real interest in the principles of trade unionism

The question of the direction of the speech which Lloyd George made at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 has recently been raised again by Dr Cosgrove. His article, however, is in some respects not entirely satisfactory. Most of the material that he uses to revive the traditional version of the Mansion House speech – namely that it was directed against the Germans – is derived from letters which deal with reactions to it, most of them Foreign Office reactions, and some of them at a considerable remove from the event itself. Admittedly one can build a prima facie case on ‘the entirely different impressions’ which the speech was observed to produce in Paris and in Berlin. There was the placing of it by Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London, at the end of a line of mounting irritation in England against the attitude of Germany, as the sort of thing the Spectator might have quoted in support of its thesis of the necessity of the union ‘intime évidente, affirmée’ of England and France; and his suggestion that French papers be encouraged ‘à publier quelques appréciations flatteuses de ce discours et de son auteur’.

The dominant role of the secretary of the British Labour party, Arthur Henderson, in the reconstruction of the party in 1917–18 has never been disputed. It is surprising, therefore, that little attention has been paid in recent historical literature to the development of Henderson's political ideas during the First World War and, more particularly, to the impact of the Russian Revolution on his attitude towards the conduct of international affairs and domestic politics. The neglect of this aspect of an important chapter of labour history has obscured the fact that Henderson came to advocate the reconstruction of the Labour party only after and partly as a result of his visit to Russia in mid-1917

Critical research into the motivation and content of Liberal social policies before 1914 has qualified much of the credit the party's accomplishments originally received. Yet such qualifications may go too far and in the struggle to do justice to all the facts, historical accuracy may suffer both from tendencies to look for dominant motifs or patterns, and from the temptation to emphasize the ‘real’ empirical nature of politics, so losing sight of all purposes and patterns – especially value-patterns. For example, the emphasis upon nineteenth century administrative development may certainly correct the previously overdrawn distinction between, firstly, individualism and the negative state, and secondly, collectivism and the positive state, but if such emphasis is carried too far it may appear that the social reforms passed after 1906 were no more than the logical continuation of a legislative trend already well-established. It may appear through the simple cataloguing of administrative growth, in conjunction with the attention focused on the rise of the Labour movement and the ensuing attempt to place both in a long-term historical perspective, that the Liberal party was largely the passive instrument of movements and ideas which passed around and about the party, rather than through and within it; and, this being so, that interpretations such as those of Laski, dating the emergence of ‘fundamental’ party divisions from post-1914, may be too easily accepted.

The National Democratic Party (NDP) provides the most spectacular example of a ‘ mushroom ’ party in twentieth century British politics. It first fielded candidates in the 1918 general election, and ten of them were returned to parliament. Those of its M.P.s who defended their seats in 1922 all stood under different auspices; they were all defeated, and none of them was ever again elected. Yet in its short career the NDP and its predecessors underwent some very considerable changes in structure and purpose. Their origin must be sought in the widely different, and often confused, attitudes to the First World War which existed in the Labour party and the various Socialist groups.

Lord Hardinge, returning to the Foreign Office as Permanent Undersecretary in June 1916, after an interval of six years spent as Viceroy of India, remarked that he could scarcely recognize the pre-war Foreign Office in the structure with which he was confronted. Hardinge was thinking of the more obvious changes wrought by the war on the Foreign Office, where the work had increased dramatically since August, 1914 – indeed, by 1918, it was estimated that it had ‘more than quintupled since the outbreak of hostilities’ – and the resulting increase in staff had produced almost insurmountable practical difficulties. Yet there were other, more subtle ways in which the Foreign Office of 1916 differed from that over which Hardinge had presided from 1906 to 1910. Lord Bertie, British Ambassador in Paris, hinted at what was perhaps the most fundamental change when, writing to congratulate Hardinge on his appointment, he commented: ‘I think you will find that the Foreign Office is in great part a “pass-on” department viz. it issues instructions at the instance of other offices often without considering whether such instructions are advisable or feasible…’ Bertie's comment was to prove as relevant to the second as to the first half of the war. Indeed, there were occasions during the 1916–18 period when the Foreign Office might more properly have been described as a ‘passed-over’ department with little influence on the policy-making process.

The Treaty of Sèvres was stillborn. It was signed on 10 August 1920, as a treaty of peace between the principal Allied Powers and Turkey, but was never ratified. During the succeeding two years, the triumphs of Mustapha Kemal were to render the projected peace terms obsolete and to necessitate the negotiation of an entirely new treaty. But the failure of the Treaty of Sevres cannot be attributed to Kemal alone. The seeds of disaster lay in the conflicting interests of the Allies themselves.