George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston

George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (11 January 1859 – 20 March 1925), known as Lord Curzon, was a British statesman, Conservative politician, explorer and writer who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 and Foreign Secretary from 1919 to 1924.

Curzon was born in Derbyshire into an aristocratic family and educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, before entering Parliament in 1885. In the following years, he travelled extensively in Russia, Central Asia and the Far East, and published several books on the region in which he detailed his geopolitical outlook and underlined the perceived Russian threat to British control of India. In 1891, Curzon was named Under-Secretary of State for India, and in 1899 he was appointed Viceroy of India. During his tenure, he pursued a number of reforms of the British administration, attempted to address the British maltreatment of Indians, undertook the restoration of the Taj Mahal, and sent a British expedition to Tibet to counter Russian ambitions. In 1905, he presided over the partition of Bengal and came into conflict with Lord Kitchener over issues of military organisation. Unable to secure the backing of the government in London, he resigned later that year and returned to England.

In 1907, Curzon became Chancellor of Oxford University, and the following year he was elected to the House of Lords as an Irish representative peer. During the First World War, he served in H. H. Asquith's coalition cabinet as Lord Privy Seal, and from late 1916 he was Leader of the House of Lords and served in the war cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Policy Committee. He was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in October 1919 and lent his name to Britain's proposed Soviet-Polish boundary, the Curzon Line. He also oversaw the division of the British Mandate of Palestine and the creation of the Emirate of Transjordan, and was the chief Allied negotiator of the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne which defined the borders of modern Turkey. In 1921, he was created a marquess. On Bonar Law's retirement as prime minister in 1923, Curzon was a contender for the office but was passed over in favour of Stanley Baldwin. He remained as foreign secretary until 1924 when the Baldwin government fell, and died a year later at the age of 66.