This dissertation appraises the ways intelligence collection granted political power to British state actors between 1873 and 1904 by analyzing the British Intelligence Branch’s institutional development within the context of heightened European interstate competition and British imperial expansion. Building upon prior historiography, this dissertation highlights the many channels through which policymakers received actionable information, as well as the increased intervention of British intelligence organizations into diverse information ecosystems across the Empire and Europe. In this way, the work weaves between the British metropole and imperial periphery in order to assess the role of information and intelligence flows in driving British policy across Egypt, South Africa, and Europe. This dissertation further argues for a shift whereby the state began to both intercede with greater force into commercial information channels during the period, while simultaneously increasing sanctions concerning the distribution of confidential information in ways that limited public oversight and debate around foreign policy in response to increasing domestic enfranchisement. As a result, this work argues that the permanent institutionalization of intelligence collection shifted relations between the state and its domestic population in novel ways, and that this institutionalization both spurred and benefited from novel juridical shifts that permanently designated certain information pathways exclusively accessible to the state. In this way, my research investigates the history of an institution that attempted to cordon off areas of policy deliberation from the British public, while shaping policymakers’ conceptions of geopolitical competition during the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most broadly, it explores the role that centralizing European states in the nineteenth century played in building institutions designed to entrench their own public decision-making authority, alongside the ways commercial actors contributed to this endeavor while simultaneously competing with state-based institutions to drive policy in preferred directions.