Jeremy Black is a prolific historian. His rate of productivity, furthermore, is increasing. At one stage, not so long ago, he had published as many books as there were years in his life; now he has nearly doubled that tally. The brief biographical sketch of the author that appears on the inside cover of the dustjacket announces that he has written more than 100. His publications have covered a wide expanse of ground, from the Grand Tour to warfare, but most have been focused on the eighteenth century and many have dealt with different aspects of foreign policy, the subject of his first works and apparently his abiding love. More specifically, British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727–1744 is intended as a successor volume to his earlier studies of Debating Foreign Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2011) and Politics and Foreign Policy in the Reign of George I, 1714–1727 (2014). It could as easily be seen as a companion to many other studies by Black, including British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole (1985), Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (2004), Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover, and Interventionism, 1714–1793 (2005), and Trade, Empire, and Foreign Policy, 1689–1815 (2007).

Black's latest foray into eighteenth-century British foreign policy has all the hallmarks of his earlier publications on the subject. His footnotes and bibliography establish his credentials as an expert in the field. He writes with the authority that comes from having examined vast quantities of diplomatic correspondence, not just the letters and dispatches generated by British ministers and their overseas representatives but also the reports of the ambassadors of foreign states in London, who, as he points out, often picked up important ideas about British policy that we cannot find in the official British record. Black's enviable linguistic skills—along with the holdings from private collections in the United Kingdom and the state papers in the National Archives, he is able to deploy material from French, Italian, and German archival sources—means that no one is likely to be able to present a richer or more nuanced picture of British foreign policy between the accession of George II and the outbreak of formal war between Britain and France in 1744 than does Black. In the process of researching archival sources on international relations for more than thirty years, he has inevitably accumulated an enormous amount of information and understanding about policies, processes, and personalities.

His work is often characterized by a mass of detail, derived from his close reading of the archival sources. Some might find the result, with its twists and turns, a little bewildering, or even overwhelming. But for Black the detailed picture is imperative. He distrusts, or rather believes inadequate, interpretations of international politics based on “systems.” His approach, which brings into view the range of possibilities open to the participants at any given moment, enables him to invoke the importance of recognizing the role of contingency and uncertainty. Systems, in Black's view, take one only so far as an explanation for foreign policy decisions; he offers a more personal picture in which chance and circumstance play a big part. In this particular volume, however, he goes beyond a detailed reconstruction of the diplomacy and foreign policy debates of the period. He attempts to link foreign and domestic policy and to place the foreign policy of the 1730s and early 1740s in the context of Britain's rise to world-power status later in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The first objective is surely unproblematic. Black's observations that both “Aussen” and “innen” politics influenced foreign policy (xiv), and that the two “were more than related; they were interdependent” (262) are unlikely to cause widespread dissent. Indeed, he has established the connection in his earlier work. His suggestion that there were connections between the foreign policy of the period 1727 to 1744 and later developments in British history will probably be more controversial. It would be easy to dismiss his arguments on this subject, which appear mainly in the preface and the conclusion, as attempts to make relevant to a general readership the detailed analytical narrative that forms the meat of the book. But we should take them seriously. He makes important points, which come across with some force despite their being presented with an appropriate tone of caution. Foreign policy was one of the main areas of disagreement in domestic politics in the age of Walpole, yet its conceptualization of “national interests” helped to promote a stronger sense of the nation in British minds. Whether a sense of the nation and specifically British interests necessarily helped to promote British power and prosperity is questionable—one might argue that the strength of the British economy in the later eighteenth century owed less to broad conceptions of national interests than to the decisions of a myriad of individuals with their own profit in mind. But Black is surely on to something when he stresses that the focus of much of British foreign policy was on the importance of commerce. Policy makers may not have been responsible for the wealth generated by overseas trade, but their decisions—both in peace and war—helped to create conditions conducive to commercial growth, which few would doubt was the engine of national power. As Black concludes, “It would be foolish to see foreign policy as the key element in Britain's rise to greatness and global prominence, but it would equally be mistaken to detach foreign policy from the story or to treat it as a minor element” (279).