Editing Diplomatic history (section)

===20th century scholars===
Ranke's understanding of the dominance of foreign policy, and hence an emphasis on diplomatic history, remained the dominant paradigm in historical writing through the first half of the twentieth century.  In the early 20th centuries, work by prominent diplomatic historians such as [[Charles Webster (historian)|Charles Webster]], [[Harold Temperley]], and [[Bernadotte Everly Schmitt]] focused on great European events, especially wars and peace conferences. A notable breakthrough in diplomatic historiography occurred in 1910 when the French government start to publish all of the archives relating to the [[war of 1870]].<ref name="Matusumoto pages 314-316"/>

Ranke's approach, combined with the effects of the [[War Guilt Clause]] in the [[Treaty of Versailles]] (1919) that blamed Germany, stimulated a massive outpouring in many languages on the [[origins of the war of 1914]].<ref>M. H. Cochran, "Historiography and war guilt." ''Political Science Quarterly'' 43.1 (1928): 76-89 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2143067.pdf online]</ref> The Bolsheviks in Russia published key secret papers from the Allies in 1918 and other governments commissioned carefully edited, multivolume collections of key documents in their possession. Numerous historians wrote multi-volume histories of the origins of the war.  In the interwar period, most diplomatic historians tended to blame all of the Great Powers of 1914 for the First World War, arguing that the war was in effect everybody's responsibility. In general, the early works in this vein fit fairly comfortably into Ranke's emphasis on ''Aussenpolitik''.<ref>Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich, eds. ''Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present'' (2021) [https://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/OpenAccess/CornelissenWriting/9781789204698_OA.pdf#page=09 online]</ref>

Historian [[Muriel Chamberlain]] notes that after the First World War:
: diplomatic history replaced constitutional history as the flagship of historical investigation, at once the most important, most exact and most sophisticated of historical studies.<ref>Muriel E Chamberlain, ''Pax Britannica'? British Foreign Policy 1789-1914'' (1988) p 1</ref>
She adds that after 1945, the trend reversed, allowing political, intellectual and social history to displace diplomatic history.

For the first half of the 20th century, most diplomatic history working within the narrow confines of the ''Primat der Aussenpolitik'' approach was very narrowly concerned with foreign-policy making elites with little reference to broader historical forces. The most notable exceptions to this tendency were [[A. J. P. Taylor]] and [[W. N. Medlicott|William Medlicott]] in Britain, [[Pierre Renouvin]] in France, and [[William L. Langer]] in the United States, who examined economic and domestic political forces.<ref name="Matusumoto pages 314-316"/>