157. Triumph and Decline

Lord Salisbury had decided to serve as his own Foreign Secretary and, indeed, it was events abroad that most marked his third administration.

This episode starts by looking at the great feast of Empire which was Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee of 1897. It was Britain at its peak of might, with the biggest empire the world had ever seen, wealthy, powerful, and with a people broadly united behind the Queen, her Empire and her government.

That last bit was something that men like Salisbury, in the government, made the most of.

But behind the scenes, a rather different picture was beginning to emerge, of a country whose power, while great, was already in decline. This episode looks at three widely different events, out of the many that Salisbury addressed, that suggest this was happening: the Jameson raid in South Africa, the failure to intervene in support of the Armenian Christians against ongoing massacres by their Turkish overlords, and the US support for Venezuela in a border dispute with then-British Guiana.

Illustration: Dr Jameson (fourth from left) and the officers of the Jameson Raid, 1896. National Portrait Gallery P1700(20b)

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.