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This thesis examines British Foreign Office views of Russia and Anglo-Russian relations prior to the 1907 Anglo-Russian Entente. British diplomatic documents, memoirs, and papers in the Public Record Office reveal diplomatic concern with ending Central Asian tensions. This study examines Anglo-Russian relations from the pre-Lansdowne era, including agreements with Japan (1902) and France (1904), the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, and the shift in Liberal thinking up to the Anglo-Russian Entente. The main reason British diplomats negotiated the Entente was less to end Central Asian friction, this thesis concludes, than the need to check Germany, which some Foreign Office members believed, was bent upon European hegemony.