ABSTRACT
Given that France and Britain have long been divided by a great deal of common history, it is not surprising that Franco-British relations are as much about the past as about the future. So it was with the Entente Cordiale, signed in the opening years of the twentieth century. That agreement between France and Britain was certainly not an alliance, nor even a treaty, both of which would have been forward-looking. Instead it was a hotch-potch of a convention and two declarations signed in London on 8 April 1904 whereby Britain and France settled a number of outstanding colonial differences over far-flung parts of their respective empires in Newfoundland, West and Central Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Madagascar and the New Hebrides islands. Rather than drawing the two empires together, it physically pushed them apart by establishing respective spheres of influence in Siam and West Africa. The agreements did not even contain a statement of general policy on friendlier relations. Only with hindsight was it clear that this was the starting point of an ever closer union between erstwhile rivals that would lead to alliance at the outbreak of World War I. That remarkable metamorphosis from enmity to amity took place in the space of only 15 years from 1898. During that period France and Britain shifted from being on the brink of war with each other to becoming wartime allies. How did this come about?
