British Diplomacy in Turkey.

AuthorHandley, John M.
PositionBook review

British Diplomacy in Turkey

Review by Dr. John M. Handley

British Diplomacy in Turkey: 1583 to the Present, by G. R. Berridge; Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009, ISBN 978-90-04-17639-3., 336 pages, $ 176.00

Professor G. R. Berridge's publication, British Diplomacy in Turkey, addresses the evolution of the British embassy in Turkey from 1583 through 2008. With only 241 pages of text, plus nine appendices, the author managed to capture the breadth and depth of this evolution through scholarship and no lack of British humor. Each page is heavily footnoted with both source information and, for every historian, wonderful content footnotes full of interesting tidbits and factoids. As indicated in his introduction, since the early twentieth century the resident embassy has been supposed to be living on borrowed time. By means of his exhaustive historical account of the contribution of the British Embassy in Turkey to Britain's diplomatic relationship with that state, this book shows this assumption to be false. Professor Berridge uses a simple but effective formula. He asks a series of questions and then proceeds to answer them. The book is divided into two parts. Part A analyses the evolution of the embassy as a working unit from its founding in 1583 up to the First World War: the buildings, diplomats, dragomans, consular network, and communications. Part B examines how, without any radical changes except in its communications, it successfully met the heavy demands made on it in the following century, for example by playing a key role in a multitude of bilateral negotiations and providing cover to secret agents and drugs liaison officers. This section includes chapters on the embassy during and after World War I and its abundance of military, especially naval, presence; the reluctant more to Ankara, 1924-1938; the embassy during World War II, 1939-1944; business as usual, 1945-1974; and culminates with a chapter on business above all, 1974-2008.

Although there are numerous vignettes throughout this book from the humorous and...

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