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Provides the historical setting for the relationship between the US and Western Europe before 1945. The account starts with the British–American war of 1812, and goes on to America's military–political isolation up to its 1917 declaration of war on Germany. It then looks at the inter‐war years, when American isolationism hardened, and continues until the entry of the US into the Second World War after Pearl Harbour and Hitler's ensuing declaration of war on America. Both American isolationism and the cultural Americanization of Europe are discussed in some detail.

During the Thirty Years War, continental European armies recruited extensively in the British Isles, with religious allegiance often determining which army a recruit served in. Impressment was employed as a means of removing demobilized soldiers, vagrants, paupers, and other undesirable persons from the realm. But in Scotland and Ireland, lairds and clan chieftains could compel clansmen, kinsmen, and tenants to volunteer. The Scots comprised one-sixth of the Swedish army in the time of Gustavus Adolphus, while the Catholic Irish were encouraged by their priests and the English government in Ireland to serve in the Spanish and, after 1635, the French armies. Between 55,000 and 80,000 soldiers were recruited in the British Isles for service in the Thirty Years War. Service in particular foreign armies helped determine the allegiance of those who returned after 1638 to fight in the British and Irish civil wars, but the experience of English and Scots serving together in various mainland armies ultimately helped to forge a British identity.

This chapter investigates examples of insubordination, ranging from the unruly behavior of the city's laboring class in the streets, marketplaces, dock areas, and taverns to the remarkable bids for freedom on the part of runaway servants and slaves. It points out that the largely unregulated population flows moving in and out of the port of New York compounded the problem of policing the city's servile population. It notes that the British war policy marked the abandonment of the long-standing disciplinary mechanism of governing the rulers and the majority settler population by cultivating a shaded interest between the rulers and the ruled in subjugation of the black population.

The American historian John Lewis Gaddis has suggested that during the Cold War the USSR practised what he called ‘Potemkinism’, a strategy he defined as ‘building just enough of a capability to create the illusion that much more lay behind it.’ This book argues that, given its limited combat capability, the same notion could be applied to the post‐war British army.

This chapter deals primarily with British war aims towards the country with which it went to war in 1939 – Germany. It discusses British and American aims towards France, and of the war aims of France itself in the various forms that that country took between 1939 and 1945 (independent state, Vichy regime, and Free French movement). The chapter also considers British aims in relation to the Soviet Union. While Germans could not be killed in cold blood, as the Nazis were doing to others on a vast scale, it was deemed desirable that German war casualties should be very high, thus reducing the country’s military manpower capacity. Although there were serious tensions before the military catastrophe of the spring of 1940 in British relations with France, there was also a sense of a community of interests between two great powers, in the sense that they wished only to retain what they already had.

Senator Gerald P. Nye's radio address on August 1, 1941 served as an opening salvo in a counterattack against what an isolationist called “Pro-British-American War Preachers”. Nye argued that films were no longer instruments of entertainment and instead had become engines of propaganda “to rouse war fever in America”. This chapter focuses on how films became instrumental in causing the shift from isolationism toward internationalism. It explains how policymakers and filmmakers combined forces in a transnational publicity campaign to educate Americans about the world situation. Their goal was to replace isolationism and Anglophobia with an internationalist, pro-British ethic that supported American involvement in World War II.

This chapter discusses the events which led to the confrontation between English and the French and the Cherokee combined. It also takes into account the outcome of the realization of the Creeks of the need to find a way to unite so they could speak with one voice and act accordingly. Two main events shaped the course of the colonies and the Franco-British war for the control of North America. Firstly, the English blundered into a costly war with the Cherokees in late 1759 and secondly the secret agreement between the Bourbon kings of France and Spain brought Spain into the North American war in early 1762 which led the course of the imperial triumph.

The Six-Day War cannot be seen as a shining example of British military genius. In fact, it was a “text-book case of how not to conduct a campaign”. The problems of poor military intelligence are covered. It also describes the logistical failures in supplies and transport. It then evaluates the problems of command and the inadequate reports. Capt. E.L.C. Berger's actions in the Six-Day War show his understanding of what a standard British colonial war should consist of: it was, in every respect, a copy-book example of a small-scale British military operation. At the same time, Military Headquarters in Hong Kong do not seem to have taken any of these late nineteenth century writers' advice to heart at all. Every error that could be committed was committed: all of Reginald Clare Hart's and Charles Callwell's maxims failed to be observed. It must be a matter of conjecture as to what Lord Roberts would have done with William Gascoigne if this campaign had come under his command, and if the facts of how it was managed had been drawn to his attention.

This chapter surveys the inauguration and early development of Dearden and Relph's partnership at Ealing and examines their first five films together; from The Bells Go Down (1943) to The Captive Heart (1946). It emphasises that they rapidly embraced and cemented their partnership within the Ealing wartime ethos of ‘quiet heroism’ and team work under Michael Balcon's studio management and direction. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that they made their distinctive mark in Ealing's projection of Britain during this time of national, wartime crisis and proved themselves considerable, but understated talents at the studio in the period.

One of the key and consistent themes in the post-war films of Dearden and Relph concerned men forced to confront new circumstances and changed expectations. This chapter surveys eleven of their films (1948 – 1970) that work in a diversity of genres settings and scenarios but that are distinguished by tragic, male narratives. These films result either in the death of the male protagonist or in his otherwise seriously compromised ending. These are not ‘social problem’ films as such, but they do address from multiple viewpoints, the contradictions and anxieties of men, dealing with and trying to face up to, the forces of personal, social and historical change.

By comparison with those films based around the tragic male melodrama, this chapter investigates a small number of films that Dearden and Relph made in the 1950s which examined men's adjustment to the loss of (war-time) action. These films seek to recreate aspects of male solidarity, purpose and experience, but within changed, peace-time circumstances. Crime and criminality is often the result, but it is ultimately shown not to pay.

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Following detailed sections on Biography and Career Notes, this introduction provides an overview of the conventional critical assessment of the work of Dearden and Relph. It argues that until recently, they have often been perceived as exemplars of a rather staid, unimaginative and self-consciously British mix of cinematic entertainment and liberal social comment, and that their reputation has tended to be evaluated solely in the context of their few ‘social problem’ films, to the exclusion of their wider oeuvre. The introduction challenges these views and then outlines the rationale for the organisation of the chapters which follow.

This chapter is an exploration of the intelligence collaboration between Britain and the Jewish Agency during the Second World War. It argues that intelligence liaison and collaboration at an operational level was more nuanced and less conditioned by adherence to stated British government policy. The clandestine relationship with key British intelligence officials allowed the Jewish Agency to develop and strengthen its transnational links, magnify the importance of their contribution to the Allied war effort at both a practical and symbolic level beyond the actual numbers of people involved, while developing a reservoir of expertise and experience that was to prove invaluable in the struggle for statehood. Despite the integration of the productive capacity of the Yishuv in support of the British war effort, the attitude of the Mandate authorities towards the leadership of the Jewish Agency remained decidedly cool.

This chapter evaluates the influence of the British Cold War culture on Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963). British cinema was far slower than Hollywood to address the nuclear threat in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was a reflection of the government's own reticence on the matter. The Edgehill Establishment, Bernard's secret facility, would have been a familiar sight to most people in Great Britain by the early 1960s. Such 'secret establishments' became a regular feature of science fiction from the late 1950s onwards, embodying the growing public distrust in the government's defence programme and anxieties about safety. Ultimately, The Damned inhabits a historical moment between the wane of public deference towards the government concerning nuclear weapons and the more full-throated protests and bolder visualisations of nuclear war that appeared mid-decade.

This chapter elaborates the various aspects of the British wars during 1649 to 1652. Oliver Cromwell returned to England in mid-October 1648, and spent the next six weeks supervising the sieges of Pontefract and Scarborough, the last garrisons holding out in the north for the king. This distanced him from the early stages of the second army coup, first the demand from the army that King Charles should be brought to trial to answer for the crimes he had committed against the people of England, and then the forcible expulsion by the army of about one hundred members of the House of Commons to ensure that it prevailed. The expeditionary force, some 12,000 strong, duly landed at the port of Dublin in three waves between 15 and 25 August, only for Cromwell to discover that the army he was expecting to face had fallen apart.