Churchill, Roosevelt, and India

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Steven Hugh Lee

"Following World War II the United States, determined to prevent the extension of Soviet and Communist Chinese influence, took the lead in organizing the defence of Western interests in Asia. In Outposts of Empire Steven Lee explores the foreign policy objectives of the United States, as well as those of Great Britain and Canada, and examines the role that economic and military aid played in their attempts to establish pro-Western, anti-Communist governments on the periphery of Communist East Asia.". "Drawing on a wide range of recently declassified documents, Lee outlines the regional and international context of American diplomatic relations with Korea and Vietnam and analyses the relationship between containment, the bipolar international system, and American and European concepts of empire at the beginning of the era of decolonization. He argues that although policy makers in the United Kingdom and Canada adopted a more defensive containment policy toward Communist China than the United States did, they generally supported American attempts to promote pro-Western elites in Korea and Vietnam."--BOOK JACKET.

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William Stueck

This first truly international history of the Korean War argues that its timing, its course, and its outcome made it in effect a substitute for World War III. Stueck draws on recently available materials from seven countries, plus the archives of the United Nations, presenting a detailed narrative of the diplomacy of the conflict and a broad assessment of its critical role in the Cold War. In Stueck's view, contributors to the UN cause in Korea provided support not out of any abstract commitment to a universal system of collective security but because they saw an opportunity to influence U.S. policy. At the moment of Chinese intervention in Korea in the fall of 1950, as in other instances prior to the armistice in July 1953, NATO allies and Third World neutrals succeeded in curbing American adventurism and so in blocking the spread of hostilities to other parts of the world. While conceding the tragic and brutal nature of the war, Stueck suggests that it helped to prevent the occurrence of an even more destructive conflict in Europe.

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John Ramsden

In this book, Dr. Ramsden recounts the Conservatives' eclipse during the latter part of the Second World War, and explains the Party's crushing defeat in the postwar election of 1945. He reassesses the Tory recovery under the guidance of R. A. Butler and Lord Woolton in the later 1940s, and throws new light on how that recovery was achieved. He discusses the Party's stormy relationship with Churchill, and the efforts of other Conservatives to make him retire. He evaluates the career of Sir Anthony Eden, and the Suez crisis which ended it; and he charts the rise to the premiership of Harold Macmillan. The Age of Churchill and Eden has been written with full access to the Conservative Party's archives, both nationally (including Conservative Central Office, the Party Whips and the Research Department) and locally (the minute books of area and constituency parties).

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Jean Lacouture

The second volume of Jean Lacouture’s acclaimed biography of Charles de Gaulle opens with the creation of the Fourth Republic in the aftermath of World War II and with the election of de Gaulle―the voice of Free France, the savior of the nation in war―as president of France. But the internal contradictions of the new constitution soon forced de Gaulle to resign, leaving France to a succession of short-lived and generally ineffective coalition governments. In 1958, with the outbreak of the bitter colonial war in Algeria, destiny beckoned again. De Gaulle offered himself as a mediator and in short order became president of the Council of Ministers, then president of the Firth Republic.