The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660-2000

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.