The Origins of British-American Cooperation in Foreign Affairs 1897-1920

Abstract

Cooperation in foreign affairs between Great Britain and the United States has often been portrayed in the scholarship as natural — on racial, cultural, or other grounds — and an exception to the ‘Thucydides trap’, which predicts conflict between a waning hegemon and a rising one. The argument here, by contrast, is that U.S. cooperation with Britain and its empire in foreign affairs, after the U.S. entered World War One in April 1917, was constructed with great effort and uneven success. This dissertation tracks and analyses that effort by looking closely at the emergence and methods of two overlapping ‘policy communities’ that shaped this phase of the Anglo-American relationship, and at the nascent trans-Atlantic intelligence networks that helped tie them together. Their efforts decisively influenced how American internationalism and British imperialism were synthesized during the Paris Peace Conference and the formation of the League of Nations. The first group was founded by Alfred, Lord Milner, during his tenure (1897-1905) as British pro-consul in South Africa and is known as the Kindergarten/Round Table. The second group, the Inquiry, was established in 1917 by Woodrow Wilson and his chief advisor, Colonel Edward House, to develop policies as the U.S. adjusted to great-power status. The key actor in the intelligence networks was Sir William Wiseman, an agent for Mansfield Cumming at Britain’s MI1c, the predecessor to MI6, and a close collaborator with House and Wilson from early in 1917. The wartime policy networks established by House and Milner came to work together in establishing common policies on the central and difficult challenge of reconciling American internationalism and British imperialism. This dissertation fills lacunae in the current scholarship on the role of policy communities in shaping state policy; the roots of internationalism in South African unification; the growth of Indian nationalism within the framework of imperial reformism; the construction of Wilsonian foreign policy; the role of propaganda in British-U.S. relations; the beginnings of U.S.-British intelligence collaboration; the role of race in imperial and internationalist economic development; strategic effects of the colour bar; the nature of the relationship among India, the U.S., and the British Commonwealth; and the productive but fraught relationship between self-determination and internationalism.