The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660-2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain

External challenges, strategic threats, and war -- in short the primacy of foreign policy -- have shaped the course of modern British history. This volume examines how Britain mobilized to meet these challenges and how developments in the constitution, the state, the public sphere, and the economy were a response to foreign policy issues from the Restoration to the rise of New Labour in the late twentieth century. The modern British state has its origins in the wars of the late seventeenth century. Since then the long struggle with France, which ended with victory over Napoleon in 1815, the rise of Germany in the late nineteenth century, the two world wars, the Cold War, and European integration have been amongst the most significant preoccupations in British politics and have been integral to the history of modern Britain.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; B.Simms& W.Mulligan Conflicting Visions: Foreign Affairs in Domestic Debates, 1660-1690; G.Glickmann Primacy Contested: Foreign and Domestic Policy in the Reign of William III; D.Onnekink Anglo-Scottish Union and the War of Scottish Succession; A.I.Macinnes The Development of the Executive and Foreign Policy, 1714-1760; A.Thompson European Great Power Politics in British Public Discourse, 1714-1763; B.Simms& D.Ahn Waging War: The Irish Military Establishment and the British Empire, 1688-1763; C.I.Mcgrath Europe, the American Crisis, and Scottish Evangelism: The Primacy of Foreign Policy in the Kirk?; G.Mailer Debating the Union in Foreign Fields: Ulster Unionism and the Importance of Britain's Place in the World, 1830-1870; J.Bew The Enduring Importance of Foreign Policy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century; A.Brettle Radicalism, Free Trade, and Foreign Policy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain; A.Howe Gladstone and the Primacy of Foreign Policy; W.Mulligan Imagined Spaces: Nation, State and Territory in the British Colonial Empire, 1860-1914; D.Bell British Liberal Historians and the Primacy of Internationalism; C.Sylvest 'Chief of all offices': High Politics, Finance, and Foreign Policy, 1865-1914; T.Otte The 1910 Elections and the Primacy of Foreign Policy; P.P.O'Brien Patriotism and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1870-1914; P.Readman The Historiography of Inter-War Politics: Competing Conservative World Views in High Politics, 1924-1929; R.S.Grayson The Primacy of Foreign Policy? Britain in the Second World War; D.Edgerton Britain in Europe? Conservative and Labour Attitudes to European Integration since World War II; N.Crowson& J.Mckay Foreign Policy in the Labour Party Manifestos, 1945-1997: What Primacy?; A.Capet Conclusion; B.Simms& W.Mulligan Notes Index

About the Author :
WILLIAM MULLIGAN is Lecturer in Modern History at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of The Making of the Modern German Army: General Walther Reinhardt and the Weimar Republic (2005) and The Origins of the First World War (2010). BRENDAN SIMMS is Professor of the History of European International Relations, University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of several works on geopolitics such as The Impact of Napoleon (1997), The Struggle for Mastery in Germany (1998), Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001) and Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire (2007)