T. G. Otte follows in big footsteps. There is a huge pile of literature on British foreign relations during the pivotal decades of peace that preceded the First World War, a body of work to which Otte himself has contributed much over the past few years. And his book is also not by any means the first attempt to define the mentalité of official London during that era. Most obviously, Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny’s Africa and the Victorians (1961) brought to the fore a half century ago the idea of the late Victorian British elite as guided by an “official mind” focused on preserving British national interests on a global scale. In The Foreign Office Mind, Otte uncovers the corporate ethos of a particular slice of that elite, the clerks, diplomats, and undersecretaries of the British Foreign Office.

The bulk of The Foreign Office Mind is a dense description of how the Foreign Office and its diplomats perceived and interacted with the other European great powers—France, Germany, Austria, and Russia. Otte displays astonishing command of the voluminous correspondence between British diplomats in Europe and their masters in Whitehall, using it to flesh out plausible descriptions of the individual thought processes of a huge number of prominent Foreign Office personnel. Otte describes in detail (although not as clearly as Zara Steiner) the constant wrangling for plum positions and the efforts of rising leaders to secure promotions for their followers. By delving into the interaction of policy debates and office politics, this book provides an often fascinating institutional history of the Foreign Office and is a treasure trove of biographical information on many of the ministry’s key personnel during this period.

Otte perceives the roots of the “Foreign Office mind” in its members’ common landed social class and public school educations, with the resulting codes of conduct and honor marking everyone who entered the foreign service. This elite only grudgingly accepted the expansion of suffrage and mass politics both in Britain and abroad, worrying about how democratic urges might impede the ability of diplomats to shape and maintain the European balance of power. Throughout this period, the Foreign Office mind remained ever focused on maintaining the European balance of power, while always shy to enter into entangling commitments in Europe, perpetually wary of Russia, and increasingly concerned with the rise of Germany. More than most other historians, Otte stresses the thinness of Britain’s commitments to France in the years immediately before the outbreak of the war.

Otte takes pains throughout the book to support his own complex periodization of the shifts in the mentality of the British Foreign Office. He poses in his introduction a division of its personnel into three generational cohorts (Palmerstonian, high Victorian, and Edwardian) with distinctly different “formative political experiences” (407) and loyalties. However, the lines between the three generations are a bit fuzzier in the rest of the book, as each appears beset by similarly “precarious positions” abroad and is forced to react to changing circumstances, rather than lead (most notably, Foreign Office personnel were uniformly in awe of Bismarck’s ability to continually spin Europe in his favor). How could they have been expected to do more if “avoiding entangling commitments … was their watchword” (398), a mentality necessitating reaction to the many other powers quite willing to tangle themselves in commitments? In the end, despite repeatedly pressing his case for their uniqueness, Otte acknowledges that differences between generations were mere “nuances within a broader stream of continuity” (407) in the Foreign Office mind.

This is not a book for readers unaware of the larger scope of European international relations during this period. Certain events that Otte claims pivotally shaped each Foreign Office generation should have been more thoroughly explained, such as the Bulgarian Massacres of 1876 or the Berlin Conference of 1878. We get the reactions of the Foreign Office, without completely understanding what they reacted to. Prior knowledge is also assumed about the structure of the Foreign Office. Otte never explains, for example, exactly where the permanent undersecretary ranked compared to the minister and the assistant undersecretary or the fact that ministry staff were divided between departments delineated by a wide variety of duties. Ambitious clerks undoubtedly wanted a posting to certain departments more than others. Such information would enhance Otte’s explanations of why personnel jostled for certain posts more than others.

Otte proves that the members of the Foreign Office felt certain they were always acting in the best interests of the nation, but he shows perhaps too much sympathy for their efforts. I wished for more analysis of what the official mind was not. What were the holes in its reasoning? What issues passed beyond the view of Foreign Office personnel blinkered by their common social and educational backgrounds? One wonders how their efforts stacked up against the foreign services of the other great powers. Certainly if one takes Otte’s book as representing the true proportion of effort that the Foreign Office put into each facet of British foreign policy, the overwhelming lack of interest in the United States is shocking and suggests a real failure of British diplomats to foresee the change in progress away from a mere European to a more global balance of power. Similarly, Otte mentions but does not prove that the “national efficiency” movement in Britain influenced the Foreign Office mind. There is nothing, for instance, about the related possibility put forward by some contemporary critics that British diplomats should work to promote the foreign trade efforts of their nation’s businessmen. Although Otte does not acknowledge any of D. C. M. Platt’s work on the structures and attitudes of the Foreign Office, his book fully supports, if inadvertently, Platt’s judgment that the Foreign Office cared not at all for issues of trade or finance.