Authors

Samuel Foster¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

Nearly seventy-five years after his death, the British historian and political activist R.W. Seton-Watson (1879-1951) remains a divisive figure. Writing under the pseudonym Scotus Viator, from 1906 he established a reputation as Britain’s leading authority on the Habsburg Monarchy in Central and Southeastern European, particularly the Kingdom of Hungary. The First World War saw him channel these energies into anti-Habsburg secessionist causes, specifically the Czechoslovak and Yugoslavian movements. This later stage of his career garnered praise for having brought the plight of Europe’s ‘small nations’ to the attention of the Anglophone world. Critics, meanwhile, have described him as a political ‘dilettante’ and unwitting pawn of local nationalists, or a partisan, non-state actor who leveraged his press and political connections to influence British foreign policy in favour of his preferred national groups and governments. 

This paper looks beyond this reductive binary by reconsidering Seton-Watson as both a conduit for, and early purveyor of, a new hybrid form of historical knowledge prior to 1914. Such an approach did not simply focus on documenting past events, but sought to instrumentalise understanding for the pursuit of public education as much as political activism. Moreover, it also seeks to demonstrate how rather than representing another aspect of 'informal British imperialism', this early stage of R.W.Seton-Watson's career signified a new phase in liberal internationalism, one predicated on the sharing and spread of political ideas within a transnational European context. It was ultimately in late-Habsburg Hungary, with its increasingly authoritarian and exclusivist political system, that Seton-Watson found this ideal's purported antithesis.