the broad thrust of British foreign policy throughout the inter-war years—an attempt to adjust the balance between the victorious and vanquished powers of the peace settlement of 1919 by concessions based on the widely held feeling that the terms of that peace had been unacceptably harsh. More broadly, the term has also been put forward as an accurate representation of the usual course of British foreign policy since the middle of the nineteenth century: the instinctive preference of a country that had achieved most of its ambitions in the world arena, whose dependence on uninterrupted trade provided a trenchant argument against recourse to disruptive war and whose growing democracy increasingly clamoured for policies which preserved peace, stability, and social progress.