Alliances, Doctrines and Secret Understandings: Great Power Diplomacy from 1794 to 1937

Signed in 1794 between the United States and Great Britain, the Jay Treaty averted a renewed war and opened a decade of peaceful trade. Its ratification angered France and divided American opinion, which fed the rise of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties.

After the War of 1812, Richard Rush and Charles Bagot agreed in 1817 to limit each side to a handful of small armed vessels on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. It became the basis for a demilitarized United States and Canada border and remains technically in force.

In 1819 John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onis ceded Spanish Florida to the United States and fixed a boundary across the continent to the Pacific at the 42nd parallel. Because it defined a line the full width of North America, it is also called the Transcontinental Treaty.

Not a treaty but a statement, made in President Monroe's message to Congress on 2 December 1823, opposing further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The young United States could barely enforce it then, yet later administrations invoked and expanded it.

On 20 May 1882 Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy signed a defensive pact, engineered chiefly by Bismarck to isolate France. Romania adhered secretly in 1883, but Italy negotiated separately with France from 1902 and in 1915 joined the opposing side.

This secret German and Russian agreement of 1887 to 1890 promised benevolent neutrality if either fought a third country, except if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Germany let it lapse after Bismarck's dismissal, and Russia allied with France in 1894.

Signed at Lansdowne House on 30 January 1902, this pact between Britain and Japan was unusual as an agreement on comparatively equal terms between a Western power and a non-Western one. It ended Britain's diplomatic isolation, was renewed in 1905 and 1911, and ended in 1923.

The agreements of 8 April 1904 settled colonial disputes between Britain and France, recognizing Egypt as Britain's sphere and Morocco as France's. It was not a formal military alliance, but it ended long rivalry and laid groundwork for cooperation in the First World War.

Ten letters exchanged between July 1915 and March 1916 in which Britain agreed to recognize Arab independence over a large region, with exclusions, in return for Hussein leading the Arab Revolt. Whether Palestine was included became bitterly disputed once the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour Declaration emerged.

Published by the Daily Mail four days before the British general election of 29 October 1924, this supposed Comintern instruction was a forgery. Its authorship remains disputed, and most historians judge that Labour would likely have lost the election regardless.

Colonel Hossbach wrote this record five days after a meeting in Berlin on 5 November 1937, where Hitler told Germany's military and political leaders that Austria and Czechoslovakia must be seized within five to six years. Historians dispute how firm the plan was, but it is widely read as a turning point.