Dr Boyce claims (pp. ix–x) that academic writing on the inter-war period has been so specialised and fragmented as to preclude ‘a persuasive synthesis’, leaving us no plausible explanation as to why ‘a second world war [so soon] followed the first’. Nor, despite considerable work on the origins (and some of the components) of the Slump, has much been done ‘to explain why this depression became the … most … catastrophic the world has ever witnessed’. So he has sought ‘to integrate political, diplomatic, … monetary and commercial history, as well as the influence of political ideas …, the history of peace-making and … of European reconstruction and integration’ to produce ‘a new history of interwar Britain, the United States and France, the international relations of the 1914–39 period, the world economic depression and the place of globalization in the twentieth century’. This history is governed by the perception that, though often treated separately, international security and finance/economics were intimately linked: the ‘key to understanding the slump is to recognize … that the causal connection between economic and political factors [always] ran in both directions’ (p. 426). Lastly, Boyce is led to challenge the prevailing periodisation of the twentieth century: ‘the First World War constituted only a hiatus in the great era of globalization that began in 1815 and continued until 1927’; the ‘dual politico-economic crisis that began in 1927 and culminated in 1933–4’ represented the failure of the previously dominant ideology, liberalism, to the benefit of either ‘socialism or radical-nationalist movements’, and ushered in a ‘general crisis comprising imperialism, autarky, industrialized warfare and genocide’. Recovery only really began in 1947, when the incipient Cold War induced the United States to address (western) Europe's economic and security problems, thus enabling ‘a new era of (partial) globalization [to] get properly under way’ (pp. 428, 439). Boyce's book is essentially an examination, within this framework, of the 1919–27 and 1927–34 sub-periods, though there follow a few pages on the later 1930s and a slightly longer comparison of the ‘2007–9’ economic depression with the great Slump.