Qualla: Chatham House

Chatham House: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chatham House, CC BY 2.0. On 20 October 1931, 750 people crowded into the meeting hall at 10 St James's Square to listen to a small man in a white shawl talk about India's future. Mahatma Gandhi had come to London for the Round Table Conference on Indian constitutional reform. His talk at the Royal Institute of International Affairs - already informally known as Chatham House - was the largest meeting the institute had ever held. The space could barely contain the audience. It was the kind of room where things were said that mattered: a Georgian mansion full of senior diplomats, retired ministers, foreign press correspondents, and the quiet machinery of British foreign policy thinking. That a Hindu lawyer who challenged the British Empire could fill it to capacity in 1931 was itself a measure of how much the world had changed since the institute opened its doors a decade earlier.

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Chatham House | CC BY 2.0

Chatham House: The Idea After Paris

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saraseth13, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Royal Institute of International Affairs began in a Paris hotel room on 30 May 1919. American and British delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, exhausted by the negotiations that were producing the Versailles Treaty, met informally to discuss how the work of expert analysi...

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Saraseth13 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chatham House: Three Prime Ministers, One House

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chatham House, CC BY 2.0. The building itself has its own story. Number 10 St James's Square is an 18th-century Grade I listed townhouse designed in part by Henry Flitcroft. Three British prime ministers occupied it at various points - William Pitt the Elder (1st Earl of Chatham), the Earl of Derby, and W...

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Chatham House | CC BY 2.0

Chatham House: Keynes and the Gold Standard

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chatham House, CC BY 2.0. In 1929 the institute set up a special study group on the international gold problem. The group included John Maynard Keynes, then in the early stages of the thinking that would lead to The General Theory in 1936. Over three years the group examined the economic strains the post-...

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Chatham House | CC BY 2.0

Chatham House: The War Years

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foreign and Commonwealth Office, CC BY 2.0. When the Second World War broke out, the staff dispersed for security. Most moved to Balliol College, Oxford, where the institute's Foreign Press and Research Service - directed by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee - worked closely with the Foreign Office. The FPRS provided intelli...

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Foreign and Commonwealth Office | CC BY 2.0

Chatham House: The Chatham House Rule

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chatham House, CC BY 2.0. The institute's most widely known contribution to public life is probably its Rule. First formulated in 1927 and last revised in 2002, the Chatham House Rule reads: "When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the informatio...

Read more: Chatham House on Qualla

Image: Chatham House | CC BY 2.0