The Levant Consular Service

One of several specialised sections of the British network of consuls in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Levant Service covered the Ottoman Empire and its fringes, or what today is called the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East. It grew out of the consular posts inherited from the Levant Company in 1825, though it was not formally constituted as a reformed separate service employing natural-born British subjects until 1877. With heavy, and especially judicial, responsibilities under the capitulations and mounting political tasks as Anglo-Russian rivalry increased, the Levant Service was exceptionally large, elaborate and expensive; its consuls also had a higher status than those in the general service and by the First World War had replaced the China Service, the other main specialised service, as the most prestigious element in the whole consular establishment. Because of the ending of the capitulations, among other reasons, the independent Levant Consular Service was amalgamated with the General Consular Service in 1934, and matters have gone downhill ever since.