Officials In London Research Articles

Side-stepping Geneva: Japanese Troops under British Control, 1945–7

The grave political, humanitarian and economic crises facing Britain in Southeast Asia in August 1945 were first reflected in a remarkable ad hoc policy towards surrendered Japanese. To the alarm of civilian officials in London, the Geneva Convention was effectively suspended. Subsequently, the British used Japanese troops against nationalists and detained other Japanese for use as coolies, in clear breach of the Potsdam Declaration. These extreme measures — and frequent pleas for cheap American repatriation shipping — underlined Britain's lack of capability and starkly limited options. Nevertheless, Britain's influential status as victor also allowed it to impose controls unilaterally on prisoners, leaving a legacy that continues to reverberate in contemporary warfare.

Creating Nations, Establishing States: Ethno-Religious Heterogeneity and the British Creation of Iraq in 1919–23

This article explores the creation of modern Iraq in the period between the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, marking the end of the First World War in the Middle East, and the conclusion of a formal peace treaty with Turkey in 1923. It looks at how far the British occupiers considered the ethno-religious character of the population while defining frontiers and political system in the territory, focusing on the three major ethno-religious groups in Iraq: Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. It shows that British policy, influenced by the state of Anglo-Turkish relations, the relationship between officials in London and officials in Baghdad, and British economic necessities and public sentiments towards imperialism, evolved through three main phases: progressively, ethnic and religious factors receded in significance.

The 1967 Riots in Hong Kong: The Diplomatic and Domestic Fronts of the Colonial Governor

AbstractThis article examines the dynamics behind the Hong Kong colonial government's policy during the 1967 riots, a turning point in the colony's development. Starting as an industrial dispute, it soon erupted into a major crisis that prompted the British to consider evacuation from the territory. While the Governor, David Trench, was preoccupied with the colossal task of maintaining order on the domestic front, his success was heavily dependent on his progress on the “diplomatic front.” His perception of British interests did not always resonate with the views of the British diplomats in China. This article argues that the prevalence of Trench's proposed policy of firm suppression of local communists over the accommodating approach, suggested by the British diplomats in Beijing, was a result of his success in persuading the officials in London of the greater utility of his proposal in preserving British interests. The limited options available to Britain and Trench's shrewdness in exploiting the sovereign's uncertainty over the future of China contributed to the Governor's success in swaying the opinions of officials in London.

Empire and Order on the Colonial Frontiers of Georgia and New South Wales

In 1767, settlers on the western frontier of Georgia in North America sent a dire petition to their governor begging for protection. They claimed that local Creek Indians had stolen their horses and planned imminently to destroy their livestock and to kill their families. Before the governor could respond, the settlers crossed the Indian boundary to loot and burn a Creek village. In doing so they galvanized the imperial legal order into action – not against Creek horse thieves but against settler vigilantes on Creek land. At the urging of London officials, the governor of Georgia had the settlers arrested and charged, first with a felony, and when that failed, with ‘abuse and misdemeanour at common law against government’. However, Georgia's jurors refused to hold them accountable on either charge.

British Policy Discussions on the Opium Question in the Federated Shan States, 1937-1948

When Burma was separated from India in 1937, the production and distribution of opium in the trans-Salween area became an important issue for the British since the Government of Burma would be expected to adhere to the various international agreements to control the opium trade. Initiatives by British officials in London to tighten restrictions were necessary since this region produced over and above the licit requirements of opium for the Shan States, but they were never fully implemented owing to resistance from local authorities and traders and the lack of any alternative cash crop to substitute for opium.

Thwarted Victors: Civil and Criminal Prosecution against Parliament's Officials during the English Civil War and Commonwealth

Whereas both Houses of the Parliament of England have been necessitated to undertake a war in their just and lawful defense … all oaths, declarations, and proclamations against both or either of the Houses of Parliament … or their ordinances and proceedings, or any for adhering unto them, or for doing or executing any office, place or charge, by any authority derived from them; and all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders and inquisitions in any the said causes … be declared null, suppressed, and forbidden. (From the first of nineteenNewcastle Propositions, July 1646; expanded from the first of twenty-sevenPropositions of Uxbridge, November 1644; repeated in the second ofThe Four Bills, December 1647)Indemnity Committee cases from the 1647–55 manuscripts indicate a widespread volume of suits pressed against parliament's Civil War and Commonwealth officeholders. Invariably, the officials petitioning the Indemnity Committee were under prosecution. Often they had been fined and even jailed. Also revealed in these papers is a public knowledgeable in the law and ready to wield its power in punishing an array of officials in London and the shires. Four broad conclusions are asserted here. First, the Indemnity Committee records reflect a massive legal assault on state officials from the beginning of the Civil War to the mid-1650s, a factor in the political, administrative, and social history of the period that has heretofore been ignored. Second, suits were lodged mainly as the result of actions stemming from fiscal innovations put into place by a parliament that pushed toward victory and then struggled to pay its war debts.

"A Separate People": Becoming and Being Choctaw and Cherokee

Between 1759 and 1761, Cherokees and colonial South Carolinians were at war with each other. Like many other conflicts in British North America, the three campaigns that together constituted this war left some communities in ashes, a number of participants on each side dead, and little change in the political or geographic status quo. Still, Carolinians could have at least hoped that imperial officials in London would see that the colonists had fought the good fight against a legitimate and threatening enemy. Imagine what those men and women must have thought when they received news that a delegation of three Cherokees had traveled to London in the summer after the war ended to, in the words of Lloyd's London Evening Post, pay their respects to the King of Great Britain, for whom they express the greatest veneration. To make matters worse, that same newspaper later carried reports that perhaps ten thousand Britons went to Vauxhall Garden to see the visitors.' If the Cherokee travelers were greeted as loyal, if alien, members of the empire, what did that mean about the Carolinians who had gone to war against them? Such a question lies at the heart of Tom Hatley's excellent book on eighteenth-century relations between the peoples of territory that had become the southeast of colonial mainland North America. To ask the

Rafael Medoff - Letter to the Editor

To: The Editor: Rafael Medoff The reason there were no proposals to bomb Auschwitz “prior to April or May 1944” is twofold: it was only in May 1944 that the Allies began sustained bombing of Nazi targets in eastern Central Europe and therefore had the capability of striking Auschwitz; and it was only in June 1944 that the full details of Auschwitz reached Jewish leaders in the Free World, in a report by two escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. 1 It is hardly surprising that there were no calls for bombing Auschwitz prior to the period when the West learned what was going on in Auschwitz. The response of the Jewish Agency Executive to the Vrba-Wetzler revelations illustrates the difference in reaction before and after the meaning of Auschwitz was unveiled. At the June 11, 1944 meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem—before Vrba-Wetzler—Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the Agency’s Rescue Committee, proposed that the Agency seek Allied air strikes on Auschwitz. David Ben-Gurion and some other Executive members opposed bombing Auschwitz because they believed that—as they put it—Auschwitz was a “labor camp.” Naturally they saw no reason to risk killing inmates of a labor camp; conditions in labor camps were undoubtedly harsh, but the prisoners did not face immediate death. Two weeks later, the Vrba-Wetzler report reached Jerusalem, revealing the true nature of Auschwitz. As historians Dina Porat and Shabtai Teveth, of Tel Aviv University, have documented, once the Jewish Agency officials knew what Auschwitz was, they ceased their objections to the bombing idea and their London office, headed by Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok, began lobbying vigorously for Allied air attacks on the camp. When the British Foreign Office informed Shertok that the bombing idea would be given serious consideration, Shertok cabled the news to Ben-Gurion. At the next meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion announced the news from Shertok, and cited the recent bombing of Hungarian railway stations (from which Jews were being deported) as evidence supporting speculation that the bombing was the result of the Jewish Agency’s lobbying. None of the Agency leaders objected. During the months to follow, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chair of the Agency’s Rescue Committee, repeatedly recommended the bombing proposal to Allied officials and Jewish leaders abroad; his Jewish Agency colleagues raised no objections to Gruenbaum’s lobbying. 2 [End Page 337] Contrary to Rubinstein’s misleading claim that rescue advocates “were anything but firm or unanimous in their advocacy of ‘bombing Auschwitz,’” the Jewish Agency officials in London were part of a long line of Jewish organizational leaders, journalists, diplomats and government officials who publicly or privately advocated bombing the death camps or the railways leading to them. Between June and October 1944, such bombing proposals were put forth by: the Czech Government in Exile; the Polish Government in Exile; the Slovak Jewish underground; the American Jewish Conference, a coalition of all leading U.S. Jewish organizations; the World Jewish Congress (its New York headquarters, its Geneva representative, Gerhart Riegner, and its representatives in London); the American Orthodox group Agudath Israel; the Labor Zionists of America; Jewish Agency representatives Moshe Krausz, in Budapest, and Richard Lichtheim, in Geneva; the U.S. Orthodox rescue group Vaad Hatzalah (both its New York headquarters and its Geneva representatives Isaac and Recha Sternbuch); War Refugee Board director John Pehle, Board staff member Benjamin Akzin, and the Board’s repre-sentative in England, James Mann; the editors of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Independent Jewish Press Service; and columnists for the New York Yiddish daily Morgen Zhurnal and Opinion, the Jewish monthly edited by American Jewish Congress president Stephen Wise. Rubinstein mentions that, in September 1944, the Bergson Group (the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe) urged the Allies to use poison gas against the Nazis as retaliation for the mass murder of the Jews. Yet Rubinstein neglects to mention that Bergson’s Emergency Committee had also written directly to President Roosevelt, in July 1944, urging: “Railways and bridges leading from Nazi-occupied territory to extermination centers in Poland can be destroyed by bombing” . . . “The extermination camps...

NOMANSLAND: The British Colonial Office and the League of Nations Mandate for German East Africa, 1916–1920

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.

‘I will not Work in such Conditions any more…’

‘When my first production The Fallen and the Living was closed down, some friends of mine arranged a meeting for me with Andropov. He was Secretary to the Central Committee at that time. I had a long conversation with him. He started by saying: “I thank you as a father”. I didn't understand and said, “What for exactly?” He replied: “You didn't accept my children into the theatre”.’ The chief director of the Moscow Taganka Theatre Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov was in London at the end of 1983 and in early 1984. He collected the Evening Standard prize — England's most prestigious theatre award — for his staging of Crime and Punishment based on Dostoevsky's novel. In London, Yuri Lyubimov made a number of statements in which he severely criticised official Soviet cultural policy, in particular with regard to the theatre. These statements caused anger among Soviet embassy officials in London and even provoked threats. On 17 February 1984 Lyubimov granted M. Fillimor, a correspondent of L'Alternative, the interview which we publish below. Yuri Lyubimov asked for the interview to be prefaced with two epigraphs: one from A. Pushkin — the second from F. Shalyapin's book The Mask and the Soul. The quote from Shalyapin comes from the 1932 Paris edition of the work (the corresponding pages are omitted in the Soviet edition). The interview was first published in the magazine L'Alternative, Paris.

Britain and the Armenian question, 1912–1914 a study in realpolitik

The Armenian Question owes its notoriety primarily to the massacres of the indigenous population of the area during the 1890's and the First World War. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is these two pivotal periods of recent Armenian history which have tended to dominate discussion of the topic. One result has been the emergence of a controversial debate over the exact causes and nature of the Armenian question;' another, which is less laudable, has been the comparative neglect of historical interest in-,the issue for the years between the two main bouts of massacres.2 Particularly is this the case with regard to the diplomatic negotiations between the Great Powers on the Armenian Question during the period which preceded the outbreak of war in 1914. Recent surveys of British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey, to take the most notable example, barely allude to the topic.3. Such neglect is unfortunate, principally because it distorts both the continuity and the change in Britain's attitude towards the Armenians before World War I. The British Government was deeply involved in the intricacies of the Armenian Question by the 1890's;4 her interest in the subject did not decline thereafter. Moreover, until 1914 her policy remained remarkably consistent. In principle, Britain was opposed to the annexation of Armenia by Russia, and in favour of Turkish reforms of the province. The formal entente with Russia in 1907, although a dominant influence on the subsequent formulation of British foreign policy in its entirety, did not alter this view. What it did, however, was to make it much more difficult to sustain and, in operative terms, to implement. Increasingly, it became impossible for British policy-makers to treat the Armenian question as an isolated issue. Instead, policy towards Armenia had to be judged and shaped in the light of such wider consideration as the fate, and European alignment, of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, Britain's relations with Germany and Russia, andmore specificallyBritain's efforts to preserve intact her interests in India, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. At this level, the period between 1912 and 1914 would appear to be of particular interest; primarily, this is because it was during those years that three separate, although related, trends can be seen to have come to a head. One was the accelerated rate of Ottoman disintegration. Indeed, Ottoman disasters during the First Balkan War of 1912 raised the question of the fate of the Empire's Asiatic provinces in a particularly acute form and markedly increased the danger of a Great Power clash over their possible distribution. Another influence was the progress betweeen 1912 and 1914 of AngloGerman-Ottoman negotiations concerning respective commercial and strategic interests in the Baghdad Railway, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. A third was the steady-even if reluctant-shift of opinion respecting the Ottoman Empire in the British Foreign Office itself. Although officials in London (but not in the Embassy in Contantinople) continued to support

Direction of policy in Palestine, 1936–45

The years preceding World War Two witnessed significant changes in British policy in Palestine. These changes were at one and the same time the cause and effect of a radical re-adjustment of the British policymaking machine (for want of a better name) responsible for Palestine. Until 1936, Britain had administered the Palestine Mandate in the light of a reasonably objective judgement of the respective rights of Zionists and Arabs. To a considerable degree, policy-making had been delegated by Cabinet and Colonial Secretary to the permanent officials in London and to the men on the spot in Palestine. But the Arab Rebellion which began in April, 1936 and continued intermittently until the eve of war, involved the moral sympathy, political support and even the physical intervention of certain of the Arab States. The increasing involvement of the Arab world in Palestinian affairs of necessity led to an increasing and ultimately dominating interest on the part of the Foreign Office. With the security of the whole Eastern Mediterranean at stake policy in Palestine could no longer be left in the hands of officials, whether in London or Jerusalem. London could no longer afford the luxury of considering the problems of Palestine in isolation from the rest of the Middle East. The re-assumption of ministerial and Cabinet control over policy in Palestine was neither swift nor smooth. Ministers relied heavily on the opinions of their permanent staff, especially when they themselves were new and often ephemeral incumbents. Baldwin's leadership in Cabinet was weak, collective responsibility sadly lacking. Baldwin took little interest in foreign affairs, and believed that Ministers should run their own Departments, with himself on hand to settle disputes or give advice. 1 If during 1935-36 the Cabinet dithered for months over its attitude to Italy, it could not be expected to re-assert swift control over a troubled colony. Government machinery for dealing with Arabian and Middle Eastern problems generally still showed a remarkable lack of unified direction. Apart from the traditional, major, but rather obscure divisions between the responsibilities of on the one hand, the Foreign Office and, on the other, of the India Office and the Government of India in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, policy in Iraq (until its official independence in 1932), Transjordan and Palestine was the responsibility of the Colonial Office.2 Defence policy in the Middle East had been placed in the hands of the Air Ministry during Churchill's tenure at the Colonial Office in 1921, but the despatch of troops in considerable numbers to Palestine in 1936 led to an ad hoc assumption of general command by the G.O.C. of the Army. The Admiralty was concerned for its part with the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf Ports as stop-offs on the Imperial route to India and as terminal ports for oil supplies.

France's New Defense Strategy and the Atlantic Puzzle

What is France's defense posture in the post-de Gaulle era? How will it affect relations with NATO? The author bases much of his analysis on interviews with government officials in London and Paris this past June. Prof. Brenner is with the Department of Government at Cornell University.