In 1945, as the storm finally lifted in Europe and Asia, the new Attlee government in Britain was faced with a vast array of international and colonial issues that required urgent attention, as well as the task of mapping out a foreign policy for the new world that was coming into existence. This was, of course, not a unique historical phenomenon. Only a quarter of a century earlier, the Lloyd George administration had been faced with a similar rupture in international politics. The circumstances, though, were different. In 1945 the relative transfer of power between Britain and the United States that had taken place during the war was far greater than had existed in 1919, and central and eastern Europe was now under the avaricious dominion of the Soviet Union rather than the chaos that had prevailed at the end of the First World War. To make this comparison might seem obvious, but it is worth making because writings on post-1945 history sometimes treat the period as if it were sui generis. This is one of the reasons (and, of course, there are many others) why we should appreciate the work of historians such as Professor Michael Dockrill, to whose memory this volume is dedicated, because he was a scholar whose original work had dealt with the early twentieth century and thus brought to his studies of postwar Britain a grounded understanding of British power and interests.