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A British subject proficient in local languages who held the rank of secretary or counsellor at British diplomatic and consular missions in the Near East (including Persia) in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. (Oriental counsellors sometimes held the rank of counsellor only locally.) Similar posts, also employed by the US Diplomatic Service at this time, were designated ‘Chinese secretary’ in Peking and ‘Japanese secretary’ in Tokyo. (French diplomacy employed a secrétaire d\'Orient in the Near East and a secrétaire d\'Extrême-Orient in the Far East.) The oriental secretary was one of the products of the strong nineteenth century reaction against the long-standing dependence of British diplomacy on the dragomans of the Ottoman Empire, who had come to be widely distrusted for the most confidential work. Ronald Storrs, who held the post of oriental secretary at the British Agency and Consulate-General in Cairo from 1909 to 1914, said that he was ‘the eyes, ears, interpretation and Intelligence (in the military sense) of his Chief, and might become much more’. Nevertheless, where an oriental secretary was posted at a major embassy, as for example in Istanbul, he was always subordinate to the secretary of embassy. |
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