The Anglo-American Establishment
Quigley's posthumous 1981 monograph on the Milner Group and the Round Table network
Also known as: Anglo-American Establishment, AAE
The Anglo-American Establishment (written in the 1940s, published posthumously in 1981 by Books in Focus) is Carroll Quigley's dedicated monograph on the The Milner Group — the British network organized by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner that, in Quigley's account, 'has been one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century' (AAE 2). Running through Round Table groups, the The Rhodes Trust, All Souls College, Chatham House, the The Times, and the The Cliveden Set, the Group is treated as a coherent informal society that ran much of British imperial and foreign policy from the 1890s through the 1940s. The most documentary of Quigley's books — dense with names, dates, and personal connections.
Scope
The book covers roughly 1891-1945. It opens with the The Cecil Bloc — the Salisbury-Balfour social-political network into which Cecil Rhodes's secret society was grafted — and traces the Group's evolution through Milner's South African Kindergarten (1897-1910), the Rhodes-Oxford nexus (1901-1925), the capture of The Times, the founding of the Round Table magazine and groups, the First World War and the Versailles peace, the creation of the British Commonwealth as a Group project, the founding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and its American sister the Council on Foreign Relations, the management of Indian policy 1911-1945, British foreign policy 1919-1940 (including appeasement), and the Second World War. An appendix gives a 'tentative roster of the Milner Group' — the membership lists that are the book's most-cited apparatus.
Structure
Thirteen chapters plus an appendix. Chapter 1 is an introduction laying out Quigley's claim that a coherent informal society — the The Milner Group — has shaped British and Commonwealth policy since 1891. Chapter 2 (The Cecil Bloc) maps the Salisbury circle within which Rhodes operated. Chapter 3 (The Secret Society of Cecil Rhodes) gives the textual evidence from Rhodes's wills. Chapter 4 (Milner's Kindergarten, 1897-1910) tracks the South African civil-service group that became the Group's inner core. Chapter 5 (Milner Group, Rhodes, and Oxford, 1901-1925) covers the Group's institutional capture of Oxford colleges and the Rhodes Trust. Chapters 6 and 7 cover The Times and the Round Table groups proper. Chapter 8 covers the First World War and Versailles. Chapter 9 covers the Commonwealth project. Chapter 10 covers the RIIA. Chapter 11 covers India. Chapter 12 covers foreign policy 1919-1940 (the appeasement chapter). Chapter 13 covers the Second World War. The appendix names 'A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group' — the inner core and outer circle as Quigley reconstructs them.
Method — How Quigley Wrote a Book About a Secret Society
Quigley's preface is candid about the methodological problem: 'It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it' (AAE 2). He claims to have received 'a certain amount of assistance of a personal nature from persons close to the Group' but, because he cannot name them, has only cited claims he can corroborate from publicly available documents. His basic technique is prosopographical: he reconstructs the network from biographical, institutional, and publication trails — who served with whom in South Africa, who held which Oxford fellowships, who edited which journals, who wrote which Round Table articles (the magazine was anonymous, but Quigley has identified the authors), who chaired which committees at Chatham House, who married whom. He divides the Group into 'an inner core of intimate associates' and 'an outer circle of a larger number, on whom the inner circle acted by personal persuasion, patronage distribution, and social pressure' (AAE 3). He is explicit that the errors he expects to have made are errors of inner-vs-outer-circle attribution, not errors of membership as such.
Reception and Suppression
The Anglo-American Establishment was written in the 1940s — completed in 1949 — but Quigley could not find a publisher willing to put his name to it during his lifetime. The book finally appeared in 1981, four years after Quigley's death, from a small press (Books in Focus). The mainstream press largely ignored it; the secondary academic literature on the Round Table movement (Lavin, Bosco, May) treats Quigley as a primary source for the membership and meeting record but is often skeptical of his sharper claims about Group coordination. In the conspiracy-oriented literature that took up Tragedy and Hope after None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), The Anglo-American Establishment quickly became the definitive citation. Quigley himself, in life and in posthumous interviews, defended the book's documentary apparatus while objecting to the political uses to which it was being put — see The Professor Who Knew Too Much for his own complaint about being read selectively.
Where to Begin
Unlike Tragedy and Hope, The Anglo-American Establishment is short (285 pages), self-contained, and tightly written. It can be read straight through. For readers short on time: read the Preface (which is unusually candid about Quigley's epistemological situation), Chapter 3 (the textual evidence from Cecil Rhodes's wills), Chapter 7 (the Round Table), Chapter 10 (the founding of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations), Chapter 12 (appeasement as a Group project), and the Appendix (the membership roster). Read alongside Chapter VII of Tragedy and Hope for the financial-side complement. Read alongside The Evolution of Civilizations for the civilizational frame within which the Group is, on Quigley's reading, simultaneously the institutional product of late Western expansion and one of the engines of its passage into the Age of Conflict.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 1 Quigley
The Anglo-American Establishment — By Carroll Quigley — Professor of Foreign Service, Georgetown University — New York: Books in Focus, 1981.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 2 Quigley
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 2 Quigley
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 2 Quigley
It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 3 Quigley
I have tried to solve this difficulty by dividing the Group into two concentric circles: an inner core of intimate associates, who unquestionably knew that they were members of a group devoted to a common purpose; and an outer circle of a larger number, on whom the inner circle acted by personal persuasion, patronage distribution, and social pressure.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 1 Quigley
Table of Contents — Chapter 1 Introduction — Chapter 2 The Cecil Bloc — Chapter 3 The Secret Society of Cecil Rhodes — ... — Chapter 13 The Second World War, 1939-1945 — Appendix: A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group.