Documents on British policy overseas
DBPO is the most recent incarnation of a long-running series of republished government documents relating to British foreign policy, first produced in 1926. The aim of the original volumes (Documents on the Origins of War: DOW) was to release significant government documents throwing light on the causes of the First World War into the public domain, many decades before they were due to be formally opened to the public. After the Second World War, a new run of volumes (Documents on British Foreign Policy: DBFP) was commissioned, covering the inter-war period; and in the 1980s, FCO historians began producing a post-war series: Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO).
FCO historians are now concentrating on volumes covering documents from the 1980s that are currently closed to the public, such as those relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Dr Hampshire has been commissioned, as an associate editor, to fill in some of the gaps in coverage in the original 1940s material. Almost all of the relevant documents have an 'open' status at The National Archives, so accessing the records has not been difficult. The scale of the project, however, presents its own unique challenges. Dr Hampshire's first volume covers the period 1940 to 1948, from the earliest suggestions and discussions of a post-war military guarantee system through to the Dunkirk Treaty and the Brussels Pact. The second volume will document the negotiations for the Atlantic Treaty itself.
The work involves reviewing records mainly, but not wholly, from the large Foreign Office Correspondence Series (FO 371), describing their contents and basic details, and identifying which specific documents should be considered for inclusion in the volume. These details are then passed to the FCO historians, who borrow the documents in order to transcribe them, either using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology or manual transcription. Approximately 500 documents will be transcribed, so the selection of documents involves a strict assessment of their value as primary evidence and their potential to illustrate as succinctly as possible particular issues or government decisions. Some longer documents will also be included in the volumes, but these may also be published as edited extracts.
The FCO historians, in partnership with the academic publishers Proquest, are in the process of launching a subscription digitisation of the documents in the DOW, DBFP and DBPO series. It is anticipated that the content of the two volumes Dr Hampshire produces (to be published by 2012) will also be digitally reproduced, alongside some of those documents not included in the print volume.
These publications will continue an FCO tradition of producing scholarly source editions for an academic and general readership that dates back to the 1920s, and to the origins of 20th century British diplomatic history itself.
