Peter Brock's 1956 article, published in The English Historical Review, examines one of the most consequential and least-studied chapters in the final phase of Circassian resistance to Russian conquest: the years between 1860 and 1864, when private actors in Britain and the Polish exile community mounted a last-ditch effort to sustain the Circassian struggle after the fall of Shamyl left the northwestern tribes fighting alone.

Brock's central argument is that British involvement in Circassia during this period was not the product of state policy but of what he calls "private diplomacy" — driven above all by David Urquhart, an eccentric but tireless advocate for the Circassian cause, in alliance with the Polish Hotel Lambert network operating out of Constantinople. Together they organized public meetings, lobbied the Foreign Office, and ultimately dispatched an arms-laden vessel, the Chesapeak, to the Circassian coast — an effort undone as much by internal quarrels as by Russian military pressure.

The article is valuable to this collection not only for its detailed reconstruction of these events but for what it reveals about the broader diplomatic abandonment of Circassia: The Circassians were left to face the full weight of the Russian military alone, culminating in the fall of Kbaada on 21 May 1864 and the mass exodus of an estimated 400,000 people to Turkey — the dispossession that defines the Circassian catastrophe.