LAUSR

the 1970s with the contemporaneous uncertainties confronting Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The collapse of the British world, and the inability of the United Kingdom to compete successfully in world markets, meant the United Kingdom appears to have had no option but to accede to the European Economic Community. Conversely, the same trends required the former Dominions to jettison, finally and irrevocably, any belief that economic salvation was to be found by focusing on the UKmarket. For this reviewer, and presumably for Thackeray, it is ironic—and possibly very mischievous—to suggest that the brouhaha surrounding Brexit was preceded 70–80 years ago, when the Dominions, which had become newly independent, began to chart their own economic fortunes. Thackeray sought to explore how successive and varied attempts to promote a British world converged, and then conflicted, with alternative forms of trade collaboration. He has succeeded admirably. Forging a British World of Trade provides a definitive discussion of the complex interplay between a diverse range of cultural, economic, political, and social factors that explain the evolution of the British world between the late nineteenth century and the 1970s. Thackeray is to be congratulated. Many historians, whatever their hue, will be in his debt.