Examining British policy during the Ruhr occupation crisis of 1922-24, this work highlights the difficulties Britain faced when dealing with her European neighbours and provides insight into the complexity of British foreign policy at this time.

The treaty of Rapallo, concluded in 1922 between Germany and the Soviet Union, the two vanquished powers of the Great War, ranks high among the diplomatic coups de surprise of the twentieth century. Its real importance, however, lies in the repercussions of the alliance on the subsequent policies of the two victorious powers, Britain and France. This study examines the impact of Rapallo on British foreign policy between 1922 and 1934, when the German-Soviet relationship had virtually ended. The "ghost of Rapallo" is the central theme of this story, as ever since the treaty's conclusion Rapallo has been a byword for Soviet-German secret and potentially dangerous collaboration. This book describes how the British viewed the Rapallo co-operation, how they dealt with this special relationship, and how the lingering memory of Rapallo affected British policy for decades to come. While examining a particular aspect of international relations it throws additional light on broader topics of European relations in the 1920s and early 1930s. Dr STEPHANIE SALZMANN completed her PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

In January 1923 French and Belgian forces occupied Germany's Ruhr District and seized its prime industrial assets in lieu of unpaid reparations. This unilateral attempt to enforce the crumbling Versailles settlement precipitated a wider struggle for long-term control of Western Germany andultimately for the very survival of the Weimar Republic. The Ruhr Crisis is the first comprehensive account of a definitive and mutually self-defeating confrontation, which marked one of the great untold tragedies of European history yet, paradoxically, sowed the seeds of Franco-Germanreconciliation after 1949. It demonstrates how and why the people of the Ruhr waged a grass-roots mass campaign of passive resistance against the invaders, and evaluates the human and political price of their ultimate failure. To this end, the author exploits a broad range of local and regionalsources, many for the first time, to bring together the high politics of the crisis and intimate, often disturbing, accounts of the daily struggle in the mines, towns, and villages of the Ruhr. It is a ground-breaking contribution to the history of inter-war Germany.

The British in Interwar Germany analyses the British presence in Germany from the armistice until the end of the Rhineland occupation in 1930. It looks at British involvement in the Rhineland, Danzig, Upper Silesia, Schleswig and East Prussia and on the inter-Allied Control Commissions (IAMCC), which were supervising German disarmament. Drawing widely on a range of primary sources, David Williamson explores the problems facing British military and civil officials, their attitudes towards the Germans and their relations with their allies - particularly the French. The book also examines the everyday lives of the British soldiers and administrators in Germany and their interaction with the Germans, with particular attention being paid to the city of Cologne and the British colony that developed there. This new edition brings David Williamson's study fully up-to-date and now contains a greater coverage of the relevant social history, as well as maps, illustrations and a useful glossary. The British in Interwar Germany will be of great interest to students and scholars of Weimar Germany and Britain and Europe during the interwar years.

John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world.

Gustav Stresemann was the exceptional political figure of his time. His early death in 1929 has long been viewed as the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic and the opening through which Hitler was able to come to power. His career was marked by many contradictions but also a pervading loyalty to the values of liberalism and nationalism. This enabled him in time both to adjust to defeat and revolution and to recognize in the Republic the only basis on which Germans could unite, and in European cooperation the only way to avoid a new war. His attempt to build a stable Germany as an equal power in a stable Europe throws an important light on German history in a critical time. Hitler was the beneficiary of his failure but, so long as he was alive, Stresemann offered Germans a clear alternative to the Nazis. Jonathan Wright's fascinating new study is the first modern biography of Stresemann to appear in English or German.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, students of history will revisit the causes, conduct and aftermath of the war. In each of these, Sir Eyre Crowe played a very significant role. Yet, outside academic and diplomatic circles, his name is little known. An “outsider” in the Foreign Office, he neither attended an English public school nor university. He was born and educated in Germany. Yet he rose because of his unique expertise to be the Permanent Under-Secretary from 1920 until his death in 1925, during which time he worked, not always amicably, with prime ministers and foreign secretaries such as Lloyd George, Curzon, Ramsay Macdonald and Austen Chamberlain. On his death, Stanley Baldwin called him “our ablest public servant.” Eyre Crowe was a participant in events that led to the 1914–1918 war, was one of the main organisers of the blockade of Germany, helped to end the Ruhr crisis of 1923–24, and played a major role in the acceptance of the Dawes Plan at the 1924 London Conference. Shortly before he died, he persuaded a sceptical Cabinet to accept a policy that culminated in the Locarno Pact. Yet, Crowe played a strange role at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Britain’s most knowledgeable expert on Germany, he was marginalised by Lloyd George prior to the signing of the Versailles Treaty, but then played a leading part as Ambassador Plenipotentiary. Crowe’s Memorandum of 1907 had a profound influence upon Foreign Office perceptions of Germany for more than forty years. The “Crowe line” on Germany was opposed by Neville Chamberlain and the British Ambassador in Berlin, Neville Henderson, prior to the Second World War. Crowe had believed that Germany was a great nation, but that Britain had made too many concessions to its government when it needed to stand firm. Foreign Office diplomats were even seen waving copies of the memorandum (by then a published document) in the faces of journalists from the pro-appeasement Times newspaper. This book focuses mainly on the 1907 Memorandum and Crowe’s career after the war, but it provides many insights into the characters, talents and failings of a number of players in this extraordinary period of history.

A major re-interpretation of international relations in the period from 1919 to 1939. Avoiding such simplistic explanations as appeasement and British decline, Keith Neilson demonstrates that the underlying cause of the Second World War was the intellectual failure to find an effective means of maintaining the new world order created in 1919. With secret diplomacy, alliances and the balance of power seen as having caused the First World War, the makers of British policy after 1919 were forced to rely on such instruments of liberal internationalism as arms control, the League of Nations and global public opinion to preserve peace. Using Britain's relations with Soviet Russia as a focus for a re-examination of Britain's dealings with Germany and Japan, this book shows that these tools were inadequate to deal with the physical and ideological threats posed by Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Argues that rising powers challenge international order when their status ambitions seem to be unjustly and permanently blocked.