Event Details

Professor Gaynor Johnson will discuss her work in progress on 'Writing the history of the Foreign Office'.

Few people would dispute that the British Foreign Office, in all of its historical iterations, is one of the three major offices of state, the others being the Home Office and the Treasury. There has been a separate government department dealing with foreign affairs since 1782 and, as today's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, it continues to play a central part in British political and diplomatic life. Yet, no history of the Foreign Office exists, at least not one that attempts to cover most of its history. My project aims to do something to plug that gap, and my presentation will discuss the pros and cons of such an undertaking, the nature of the sources and approaches it is possible to take. So, if you are interested in modern British political history, diplomatic history, British foreign policy or the history of government, this session is for you.

Gaynor is Professor Emerita of International History at the University of Kent and an Honorary Researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster. Her major publications include The Berlin Embassy of Lord D'Abernon, 1920-1926 (Palgrave, 2002) and Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy 1920-1929 (Routledge, 2004). Her interest in diplomats and British foreign policy led to The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2005) and to Our Man in Berlin: The Diary of Sir Eric Phipps, 1933-1937 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). She has edited a number of books on how states interacted with each other in the years leading to the Second World War. These themes are also explored in her most recent book, Lord Robert Cecil: Politician and Internationalist (Ashgate, 2013). Along with Professor John Keiger, University of Cambridge, she was the holder of a major AHRC grant for Networks and Actors in British and French Foreign Ministry Responses to the Idea of European Integration, 1919-1957. This examines British and French foreign policy from the perspective of civil servants/permanent officials rather than through the political elite. It also analyses the effect of formative influences, such as education, social background etc. on these people’s thinking about foreign policy issues. She is currently completing a book on British ambassadors to Paris in the interwar period as well as a prosopographic study of the role of women in British diplomacy in the twentieth century.