In April 1913 Winston Churchill told an audience of Australians and New Zealanders that Europe was ‘where the weather came from’. Churchill employed the metaphor to address the security concerns stemming from the rise of German military power. Britain’s strategic priorities lay firmly within the Continent. Continental affairs, in turn, influenced British domestic politics.  

Drawing on published and unpublished sources, the book sheds light on a sequence of episodes outlining Britain’s involvement with national questions on the multinational empires, and the so-called “successor states” of central and eastern Europe. It surveys the international thought of a loose network of British intellectuals with a keen interest in, European history and politics at a time of nationalist agitation and imperial transformation in Britain and eastern Europe, from 1870 until the 1920s. They mediated between national communities and Britain’s policy-makers and their solutions reflected concerns about national and imperial questions within the British Isles. The excavation of their thought uncovers the politics of regional knowledge and unearths the liberal internationalist dispositions underpinning British attitudes towards southeastern Europe in the age of nationalism and internationalism.

The book is under contract with Manchester University Press in the Studies in Imperialism series