For the historian, two features stand out over the course of the years 1950–1951, as the Colombo Plan took shape. The first is a sense of overloaded expectations by the British not being met, especially after the Americans declined to tie their own policy to British plans for sterling debt reduction. Logically, those seeking a British-shaped or US-determined narrative dependent on the conjoining of finance, foreign policy and defence strategy in plans for South and Southeast Asia need to look elsewhere, not at the Colombo Plan. The second is the emergence of a broader range of diplomats, politicians and planners whose work appears marginally in British and US archival records, but from 1950–51 increasingly in the archives of other Colombo Plan members such as Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand. This bigger cast of diplomatic players decouples the Colombo Plan from its British anchoring and enables the agency of others to emerge more fully.