Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-1926 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

This is the first book to analyze systematically the relationship between British foreign, military, and financial policies during the 1920s. John Robert Ferris traces the development of British strategic policy over an extensive and relatively peaceful period of long-term military planning and seeks to define the internal political dynamics that shaped that planning. His book is based on a detailed study of the records of three service departments, the Cabinet, the Foreign Office, and the Treasury, as well as the private papers of leading politicians, servicemen, civil servants, and diplomats.

Britain's strategic position at the outset of World War II is customarily depicted as having arisen from the muddle of the country's internal politic, Ferris and rivalries among the fighting services during the 1920s. Challenging this idea, Ferris argues that there was a dialectical relationship between British diplomacy and its financial and military policies, for example, between Britain's attitudes regarding France and the expansion programs of the Royal Air Force between 1921 and 1925. He demonstrates that the "ten-year rule" and Treasury control over service policies did not begin to affect strategic policy significantly until 1925, and that between 1919 and 1925 Britain followed many strategic policies rather than a single strategic one. He claims that the government actively sought to balance the aims of its various military constituencies with the goals of its economic planners, and he considers whether different decisions that might have strengthened Britain's position in the 1930s were practicable in the 1920s.

Calling for a radical reassessment of a critical period in Britain's past, this book should find appreciative readers among political scientists and historians, especially scholars of military and diplomatic history and specialists in the interwar period.