The Foreign Office Library copy of this key work on Anglo-Russian diplomacy and the Eastern Question.
David Urquhart (1805-1877), Scottish diplomat and writer, travelled extensively in the Near East and Black Sea environs, and developed an intimate understanding of Turkish culture and affairs. After a period of freelance war correspondence in which he petitioned the British government through the press, he was recruited as an aide to Stratford Canning on a mission to negotiate the Greek frontier with Turkey. In Constantinople in 1832, Urquhart was accused of “going native”, adopting local dress and customs, and moving out of the embassy quarters. He returned to the East in 1834, “embarking upon a yacht tour around the Black Sea, visiting the Circassian tribes who were fighting the Russian attempts to incorporate them within the empire” (ODNB).
In 1834 Urquhart made an attempt, known as the Vixen Affair, to break the Russian trade embargo on the east coast of the Black Sea, and force British involvement. Palmerston accused Urquhart of causing diplomatic embarrassment, and ended his official commission. The present text was first published in England, anonymously, that same year. This fifth edition, which came to press in the following year, includes an extensive 23pp additional introduction entitles “Impossibility of Dislodging Russia from the Dardanelles”, and two further pages of critical commentary which would suggest that the first edition came to press in December of 1834. That it should have reached five editions before the end of the next year is testament to the extent to which Turkish and Russian foreign policy were of chief concern to the British public.
The Foreign Office Library was, until the lease expired in the 1990s, held at Cornwall House in Southwark. The move into smaller accommodation required a sizeable reduction in the collections, and dispersals were conducted both by deposit into other British research libraries like the BL, Cambridge, and the Bodleian, and by sale through the antiquarian book trade.
Maggs issued a catalogue of such books, though the present title did not appear. Quoted in the introduction to Catalogue 1165: “Much the largest collector of information about our foreign countries was the Foreign Office. The British diplomatic service had become one of the best organized and most professional in the world, notwithstanding the fact that until the present century it was staffed mainly by amateurs, intelligent and not so intelligent. The purpose of the service was to be in permanent contact with other countries, partly to deal with them and partly to know about them.” (P. Calvocovesi Top Secret Ultra, 1980 p17).
Urquhart was the quintessential amateur diplomat of the nineteenth century, prolific in his output and at times far from in accordance with Parliament in his intentions. As such, the Foreign Office would have paid close attention to his published works.
