This review article has a conventional purpose, namely, to assess the contributions made by thirteen recent books, most by British historians, to the history of British foreign policy and the European states system during the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and post-Napoleonic eras. There is, however, a problem. None of the books is conventional diplomatic history. Almost half relate only indirectly to foreign policy, while for the remainder foreign policy constitutes only part of their subject matter. The review therefore consciously runs two risks: that of judging the books by inappropriate standards and that of drawing conclusions about current historiography in this field and period from an inappropriate sample. The reader will have to judge whether the results justify the procedure.

Geoffrey Best's War and Society in Revolutionary Europe illustrates the problem. Best clearly succeeds in his goal of going beyond the study of military organizations to the study of war itself as a “unique human interest and activity.” The book is far-ranging, delightfully written, based on wide reading, and packed with insights. It also contributes substantially to the history of international politics, mainly by demonstrating how powerful an impact armies and combat had. Yet from the political historian's standpoint there is ground for some frustration as well as for pleasure. Best's descriptions of how armies developed from the Old Regime into the nineteenth century and his analyses of the impact of war in 1792–1815 are excellent for France and Britain and adequate for Prussia and Spain.

Eighteenth-century British foreign policy has been a marginal subject for several decades. During that period much good work has been produced, particularly on the diplomacy of the first four decades of the century, but this work has not been integrated into the general scholarship of the period. The textbooks for the century, commonly written by experts in high politics, generally offer a hurried account of foreign policy, that is, a jumble of names and dates that are not related to the problems discussed in the rest of the work. Foreign policy is rarely perceived as a crucial problem of political management or debate. Eighteenth-century scholars complain often, particularly in conversation, about what they regard as the excessively detailed nature of foreign policy studies and their supposed failure to address themselves to problems of general relevance.

The strong diplomatic bias of eighteenth-century foreign policy studies has certainly led to the production of many works that have few points of access for the general scholar. The domestic context of foreign policy and, in particular, the extent to which policy was debated are subjects that have received relatively little attention. Partly this is a result of the development of the subject. The great age of foreign policy studies was the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, an age in which history existed to study the growth and exalt the triumphs of the nation-state.

Labour took office in 1945 amid high hopes that its socialist message could be applied abroad as well as at home. Although Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour leaders had had almost as much responsibility as their Conservative counterparts for Britain's wartime foreign policy, it was widely believed that once on its own Labour would play a different role in world affairs. Let Us Face the Future, the party's election manifesto, pledged to “apply [a] Socialist analysis to the world situation.” Bevin's famous “Left understands Left” remark was widely taken to mean that Labour would be more sympathetic to revolutionary developments throughout the world but above all to the Soviet Union. For many in the Labour movement, a socialist foreign policy and sympathy for the Soviet Union also implied distrust of the United States and its attempt to create what the New Statesman called a capitalist “economic empire.” For the Labour movement as a whole, the story of these years can be summarized simply: the reluctant abandonment of hopes of Anglo-Soviet friendship and the grudging acceptance of an Anglo-American alliance.

Labour leaders, of course, did not fully share the assumptions of their more enthusiastic followers, and they made clear from the start that they intended no radical break with the foreign policy of the wartime coalition that they had helped to shape. Ernest Bevin told the Commons in his first major speech as foreign secretary that he accepted the foreign policy of his predecessor, Anthony Eden. But a commitment to continuity in foreign policy did not immediately entail complete hostility to the Soviet Union or a special relationship with the United States.