This is not a complete list, but it provides a starting point for those with an interest in the British consular service.
D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London: Longman, 1971).
P. D. Coates, The China Consuls: British Consular Officers, 1843-1943 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Lucia Patrizio Gunning, The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Rudolf Agstner, an Austrian foreign service officer, wrote dozens of books and articles about aspects of the Habsburg consular service in various parts of the world. His work is a good source of specific details about the location of posts and who occupied them.
A few of his publications:
Rudolf Agstner, Austria (-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America since 1820: “Our Nationals Settling Here Count by the Millions Now’’ (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012).
Rudolf Agstner, “From Apalachicola to Wilkes-Barre: Austria(-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America, 1820-1917,” Austrian History Yearbook 37 (2006): 163–80.
Rudolf Agstner, From Halifax to Vancouver: Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consular and Diplomatic Presence in Canada, 1855-2005 (Vienna: Institut für Strategie und Sicherheitspolitik, 2005).
Rudolf Agstner, “Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consulates South of the Rio Grande (1828-1918): A Survey,” in Transatlantic Relations: Austria and Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Klaus Eisterer and Günter Bischof, Transatlantica 1 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2006), 85–120.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of my 2013 Cambridge University Press book, U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed deal with US consuls in the Habsburg Empire and Habsburg consuls in the United States, particularly as they attempted to deal with the effects of migration between the two countries in a period when passports were not required; questions about citizenship were rife.
Chapter 3 offers a broad history of the US Consular Service, stressing the expansion of its mandate from facilitating trade to promoting trade and then protecting citizens abroad. As I have done more research on consular services, I do think that trajectory holds for the US presence in the Habsburg Empire, but consuls in other parts of the world performed the full range of functions from the beginning of the service’s existence. Each individual post had its own unique profile of activities.
Ferry de Goey’s 2014 book, Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism, 1783-1914, was published in the Perspectives in Economic and Social History series from the London-based Pickering & Chatto. It offers a comparison of the British, German, US, and Dutch consular services in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Brief case studies of particular consuls make up most of the chapters, and there is considerable emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century.
De Goey points out that consuls as a whole have an ambiguous record when it comes to generating international trade, but they did facilitate the growth of capitalism by concentrating a wide variety of state functions in one flexible and inexpensive office.
Bernadette Whelan’s 2010 book from Manchester University Press, American Government in Ireland, 1790-1913: A History of the US Consular Service, provides a detailed, analytical account of the consuls who represented the United States in Ireland in the long nineteenth century. The consuls’ roles in the US Civil War, immigration and naturalization, and Irish nationalism feature prominently.
Jörg Ulbert and Lukian Prijac, eds., Consuls et Services Consulaires Au XIXe Siecle = Die Welt Der Konsulate Im 19. Jahrhundert = Consulship in the 19th Century (Hamburg: DOBU, Dokumentation & Buch, 2010).
The volume contains an overview of the US Consular Service that emphasizes reform and professionalization: Christoph Strupp, “Das US-amerikanische Konsularwesen im 19. Jarhundert” (218-33).
The thirty-four other essays in the volume include overviews of several services, as well as more focused studies. A few of the essays are in English; most are in French or German.
Thomas G. Paterson’s 1966 article “American Businessmen and Consular Service Reform, 1890’s-1906” appeared in the January 1966 issue of Business History Review (vol. 40, no. 1, pages 77-97).
Reform-minded officials at the State Department in Washington generally welcomed the assistance of American businessmen in lobbying Congress for consular service reform. The 1906 reform introduced an inspection system and provided salaries for consuls and consuls general. Consular agents continued to work for fees, but after the reform, agents began to be phased out.
Ruth Kark’s 1994 book from Magnes Press of Hebrew University and Wayne State University Press, American Consuls in the Holy Land is one of the few book-length treatments of US consuls in a particular part of the world. In the Ottoman Empire, the capitulation system operated, giving consuls extraterritoriality, which meant that, in addition to regular consular duties, they also operated courts and jails for US citizens. Similar systems operated in China and Japan as well.
In 1986, US Foreign Service Office Walter Burges Smith created a database of US diplomats and consuls who served between 1776 and 1865 and wrote a book interpreting the results and commenting on the source base.
Here’s the full citation:
Walter Burges Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776-1865: A Geographic and Biographic Directory of the Foreign Service from the Declaration of Independence to the End of the Civil War (Arlington VA: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986).
The book is available as a free PDF via the Hathi Trust.
Scholarship directly focused on the US Consular Service is in short supply. The main book is Charles Stuart Kennedy’s The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776-1914, originally published in 1990 by Greenwood Press. It is now out in a revised second edition that takes the story to 1924; that version was published in 2015 by New Academia Publishing.
Kennedy, a former US Foreign Service officer, provides an account of the institution’s divided temporally and geographically. It focuses on the issue of professionalization and provides many vignettes featuring some of the most famous — or, indeed, infamous — US consuls, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper.
