Deceit and Distraction

regarded as the terra incognita of eighteenth-century British foreign policy, the period between the Seven Years War and the end of the war in America has become one of its most heavily trampled fields. M. S. Anderson and Frank Spencer were among the pioneers, at a time when Namierite research on the reign of George III largely ignored foreign policy, but Michael Roberts, who decisively changed the accepted view of the period, inspired a generation of students to explore it.1 Though Hamish Scott has summarized their research,2 and Jeremy Black has explained the broad outlines of British foreign policy in the eighteenth century, as well as many of the details of Britain's diplomacy,3 a number of gaps wait to be filled. We lack biographies of key figures such as the earl of Rochford, Viscount Stormont, and Sir Robert Murray Keith. Scholars have focused on the failures of the 1760s and ignored the 1770s, when Britain's diplomacy was more successful and its foreign policy more coherent. Lastly, as Scott suggests, the importance of Russia may have been exaggerated.4 Scott characterizes the years 1765-8 as ones of decline marked by the failures to secure a Russian alliance and to resolve disputes with the Bourbon powers over Dunkirk and the Manila ransom. The nadir came with the surprise acquisition by France of Corsica in 1768, a brilliant fait accompli by Louis XV's leading minister, the duke de Choiseul, about which the British government (nominally led by the earl of Chatham, but in fact led by the duke of Grafton) did nothing other than make disapproving noises. Many observers attributed the humiliation to divisions within Grafton's cabinet, while other great powers perceived it as evidence that Britain had lost its way and did not know how to exploit the naval superiority and territories it had acquired from the Seven Years War. As Scott points out

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• The Corsican crisis in British politics 1768–1770

  Luke Long•Global Intellectual History•2019

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