This book is based on the Wiles lectures for 1981 delivered at the
Queen's University of Belfast in October 1981. It is not a history of
Anglo-American relations in the century; its theme deals with how the
United States of America came to replace Britain as the primary world
and oceanic power confronting a grouping of land-based continental
powers, the position Britain occupied throughout the nineteenth century.
This theme is examined in the light of how the process of replacement
was conceived and perceived by those groups which had the primary
responsibility for the formulation and conduct of foreign relations in
each of the two powers, Britain and America. The author, whose earlier
study of 1965 of the British foreign-policy-making elites pioneered this
approach in Britain, argues the existence and continuity over much of
this century of similar groups in the United States.