Academic works on the history and politics of the Falkland Islands are comparatively few. Where they do exist, they almost exclusively take as their subject the brief but vicious Falklands War of 1982, when Britain wrestled back the islands from Argentine occupation. The war and its aftermath proved to have significance that outweighed the brevity of the conflict. The retaking of the islands, courtesy of a remarkable military campaign at a distance of nearly 7,000 nautical miles from the United Kingdom, showcased the formidable expeditionary proficiency of Britain's armed forces at a time when few believed Britain had any real need other than to counter the Soviet threat in Western Europe (and foreshadowed the type of warfare the U.K. military has become focused on since the Cold War). This action became a fundamental catalyst for other kinds of reappraisals. In many ways the events of April to June 1982 mark a watershed in Britain's post-1945 history. The war and its victory have come to define the Thatcher premiership courtesy of the subsequent electoral landslide, just a year later, when the country went to the polls with the events in the South Atlantic still fresh in mind. A hesitant nation, reluctantly but stoically resigned to “decline,” was seemingly transformed overnight, in the popular mind, to a more confident one with renewed vigor that translated more broadly. The legacy of empire had proven to be the vehicle by which that past was laid to rest, in one sense, and yet ushered in a new, more confident, less diffident Britain.

This perception and focus on the war and its aftermath have dominated studies of the Falkland Islands, appropriately so in many regards. There is, however, much more to the history of these territories and to the 1982 conflict. As the author of this new study, Aaron Donaghy, notes, “‘The Official History of the Falklands campaign Volume I; re origins of the Falkland's war’ is dwarfed by the larger second volume, which examines the military campaign.” Donaghy's work attempts to redress that balance not only by his focus on the origins of the conflict but also in the (comparatively) much earlier time frame that he examines, 1974 to 1979. This period, a time of Labor administrations and two prime ministers, Harold Wilson and Jim Callahan, is only occasionally referenced in any studies and none to the extent of Donaghy's. Donaghy, as he explains in the introduction, makes good use of recently declassified material to paint a much more comprehensive picture of the origins of the Falklands War, to describe the challenges and responses faced by the participants themselves, and also to look earlier than the immediate causes of the 1982 conflict and instead examine those years when tensions rose, most notably in the autumn of 1977. Donaghy also paints a fuller picture of Labor's efforts to ward off a direct Argentine effort to assert its sovereignty claims and shows how diplomacy and the preparation for military action worked hand in hand to avoid the actual need for force. As such, the book illustrates more fully what has hitherto surfaced only on occasion and usually via the words, in print or otherwise, of the participants themselves. Of particular note and interest, to this reviewer at least, was the detail and narration of the strong islander lobby and their agency in impact decisions and policy in London.

As one who has examined the Falkland Islands conflict in terms of the military dimension, to read and gauge the scale of the diplomatic effort and endeavor through the 1970s was certainly sobering and enlightening. As the events narrated and discussed are the obvious prelude to the conflict of 1982, this work offers a valuable insight into how conflicts and crises can be diffused before they occur and exactly what is needed to ensure that happens. Donaghy's book also ties in nicely with an earlier volume in this series examining the various negotiations between the United Kingdom and Argentina in an earlier decade: Martin Abel Gonzalez and Nigel Ashton's The Genesis of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands Conflict: Argentina, Britain and the Failed Negotiations of the 1960s (2013).

Donaghy's is a refreshing and useful study and also a timely one. At the time of writing, the Falkland Islands and their sovereignty have been in the news once again with renewed saber rattling on the part of the Argentine government and especially its combative president, Cristina Kirchner. Kirchner's media antics at the Group of Twenty summit in the summer of 2012, with U.K. prime minister David Cameron serving as foil, thrust the topic of the islands once again to the forefront of the media cycle. The referendum on the political status of the islands and their approximately 2000 residents, in March 2013, which returned a convincing “yes” (of 99.8 percent) to the question of whether the Falkland Islanders themselves supported the continuation of their status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom, served to bring the ever-present question, and fact, of the Falkland Islands to a far wider audience than usual. Additionally, various military analysts debated and concluded that the Falkland Islands were in a far more parlous state of defense than ever they were before 1982, or that the comparative sophistication and quality, if not quantity, of Her Majesty's armed forces in the second decade if the twenty-first century were more than sufficient to head off any ill-advised Argentine gambles.

All told, Donaghy's scholarly work rescues a vital and woefully underexplored segment of the history of U.K.-Argentine relations with regard to the Falkland Islands. In doing so, it sheds valuable light on the subsequent conflict of 1982 as well as the wider pressures on the United Kingdom and the workings of the various Labor administrations, so long associated and overshadowed by discussions of domestic rather than foreign policy.