From Colony to Superpower - U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, George Herring, Oxford University Press, 2011, 1030 pp., ISBN 9780199765539, £14.99

An excellent study of a work that first appeared in hardback in 2008, this is the sole topical volume in the Oxford history of the United States. It effectively offers the case for foreign policy, both in its own right and as a key way to understand the development of a state. Herring's study is therefore of great significance not only for specialists, but also for other scholars. Far from the USA being separate from the world of the Great Powers and from ancien régime diplomacy, it emerges, from the outset, as greatly affected by the power politics of this wider world. Moreover, Herring ably charts the consequences of American expansionism. A first-rate work.