To complement current work on the British domestic economy in the post-war period it is necessary to examine external economic policy. Whilst considerable work has been done on Britain's relations with Europe and with America, the complexities of the sterling area have remained obscure. This volume makes a significant contribution to unravelling the strands of British external economic policy in the post-war period.

The demise of sterling as an international currency was widely predicted after 1945, but the process took thirty years to complete. Why was this demise so prolonged? Traditional explanations emphasize British efforts to prolong sterling's role because it increased the capacity to borrow, enhanced prestige, or supported London as a centre for international finance. This book challenges this view by arguing that sterling's international role was prolonged by the weakness of the international monetary system and by collective global interest in its continuation. Using the archives of Britain's partners in Europe, the USA and the Commonwealth, Catherine Schenk shows how the UK was able to convince other governments that sterling's international role was critical for the stability of the international economy and thereby attract considerable support to manage its retreat. This revised view has important implications for current debates over the future of the US dollar as an international currency.

Banking on Sterling: Britain's Independence from the Euro Zone, by Ophelia Eglene, provides an in-depth analysis of the British policy on the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) over the past twenty years. Eglene demonstrates how the Conservative government of John Major and the Labour government of Tony Blair implemented policies that had the same overriding goals. The first of their shared goals was to continue being involved in decisions on the remaining details of the EMU and to avoid discrimination in the European Union by appearing as a member state willing to embrace the full European project at an indeterminate point. The second goal was to address the conflicting preferences of domestic economic actors with an ambiguous policy aimed at buying time. Pressure on the British government came from both the business and financial sectors on the question of EMU membership. While the business community was divided on the euro, there was one sector, export-oriented producers, strongly in favor. The financial sector, for its part, needed more time to clearly assess where its interests lay, and it insisted that the government not rush a decision one way or the other. Banking on Sterling demonstrates that the government--no matter which party was in power--always had in mind the welfare of the financial sector. When the conclusion was reached in London that its financial sector would benefit more from an offshore position than as a member of the EMU, the British government provided both direct and indirect compensation to the export-oriented business sector that had definitely lost the battle for the euro. Ophelia Eglene's Banking on Sterling: Britain's Independence from the Euro Zone effectively shows the unequal influence of business and finance on the British economy.

NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.