‘Introduction: British World Policy and the White Queen’s Memory’

Scholars of Britain’s external relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries readily acknowledge the global nature of their subject. Yet in practice, they tend to dissect it along bilateral lines or with an exclusive focus on the imperial periphery. The tension between Britain’s global strategic interests and its ability to safeguard them has likewise long been the subject of scholarly debates, invariably accompanied by more or less explicit assumptions about the nation’s decline in the twentieth century. Already Arnold J. Toynbee, in reflecting on the origins of the Second World War, contrasted Britain’s assumed position as ‘the arbiter of Europe’ from around the time of the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century until the final years of peace before 1914 with the country’s reduced circumstances in the interwar period