ABSTRACT
It did not take very long for some British policy-makers to mourn the passing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Less than twelve years after the Washington Conference ended and 7 years before Britain would find itself at war with Japan, an element within the government, lead by the Treasury, began to press for a revival of the agreement. The chief exponents of this position were the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Sir Warren Fisher and, more importantly, Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself. By 1934 both had come to believe that in scrapping the Alliance the British Empire had sacrificed the concrete support and protection afforded by the Japanese and instead had thrown in their lot with that most undependable and fickle of powers, the United States of America. One historian, George Peden, has gone so far as to say that the Treasury ‘hankered’ for the return of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.1
