type of structural decisions invisibly shaping the discipline, which reflected but also perpetuated value judgements regarding the significance of various societies.Given too that the title of Marchand's book (rather excitingly) implies that early German Oriental scholarship was part of an 'age of empire', it was disappointing to read her assertion that 'before the 1880s the Reich did not have a ''culture of empire''' (337), despite recent scholarship complicating this view. Even when Germany did establish a state-run colonial empire, she argues, scholars did little to facilitate the work of empire, apart from isolated figures such as Martin Hartmann and Carl Becker. This is in line with her portrait of the intrinsically otherworldliness of Orientalists, whom she presents as largely untouched by political and commercial debates. Reading her work contrapuntally, however, it is evident that Marchand too sees these scholars as 'liberals', 'post-liberals', and 'conservatives' and that their politics were visible in their scholarship.These modest disagreements do not diminish Marchand's achievement. Nothing is more terrifying to the undergraduate than the nineteenth-century German philologist, whose mastery of obscure dead languages and literary traditions spanning thousands of years contrasts with their own attempts to master a small corner of scholarship in their own language. If Edward Said's Orientalism seemed to offer a short-cut for airily dismissing the staggering erudition of a previous age, Marchand's great contribution is to march the student straight back to these nineteenth-century scholars in order that a more sophisticated sense of German Orientalism might be garnered.
This article uses the Spanish marriages episode of 1846 as a prism through which to examine the relationship between the leading foreign affairs writers for the increasingly powerful Times newspaper and the authors and servants of British diplomacy in the early Victorian period. The focus of this study is Lord William Hervey, the first secretary of the British embassy in Paris, a diplomat who well understood the power of the press over ministers, parliament and the people. Hervey's under‐utilized private papers shed light on the divisions in British political and literary (press) society over the nation's policies towards France and Spain. They also paint a picture of an increasingly isolated foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston, a Whig statesman who failed to carry his policy through the Whig cabinet and who failed to convince the Conservative Times of its supposed merits, despite the support of some overactive members of the British diplomatic community. This is a story of diplomatic failure; a rare study of how not to win friends and influence people.
This article uses Sir Henry Lytton Earle Bulwer's time as British commissioner to investigate the internal condition of the Danubian Principalities between 1856 and 1858 as a prism through which to view Britain's handling of Anglo-French relations and of the 'Eastern Question'. It will explore the assumptions underpinning Whig policy towards France and the Ottoman empire in the immediate post-Crimean period, and examine the balance of power in British decision-making at London and Constantinople. Analysis of Bulwer's role illuminates British policy by placing his mission in a clearer context than has been the case hitherto.
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