Introduction

Abstract

The diplomatic career of William James ‘Jack’ Garnett was relatively unusual in the number of his postings. Besides brief periods spent in the Parliamentary and Contraband Departments of the wartime Foreign Office, between 1902 and 1919, he served successively in Constantinople, Peking, Bucharest, St Petersburg, Tehran, Sofia, Athens, Tangier and Buenos Aires. He thus lived and worked in four of the world’s continents at a time when the tectonics of international affairs shifted significantly. He was at the Foreign Office when the strains of war placed unprecedented demands on it, and his career as a whole spanned a period in which it, as well as the Diplomatic and Consular Services, underwent reform on several occasions. Garnett’s nomination as an unpaid attaché in the Diplomatic Service was confirmed just as Britain signed an alliance with Japan, thus ending decades of relative diplomatic isolation. The period of his diplomatic career was one in which German military and naval power increased substantively and its ambitions erupted in August 1914. It was a period in which the old empires of Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, with its expansive Asiatic dominions, as well as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, dissolved. Then, too, nascent Chinese and Japanese imperialism took shape, and both those powers joined Russia in seeking greater influence in Central and East Asia.KeywordsForeign PolicyBritish CommunityLocal AffairRussian EmpireUnprecedented DemandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.