Having now worked on this period for close to a quarter-century, there is a sense of coming back to old friends when writing on this subject. Yet, at the same time, in providing both a narrative and thematic account of British foreign policy in the eighteenth century, focusing on the role of Parliament in the making of that policy, I am trying to tackle at book-length a subject that has not hitherto received adequate attention. There are first-rate articles on various aspects of the relationship between Parliament and foreign policy, especially those of Graham Gibbs, but no comprehensive treatment, and none that takes my theme and follows it through the century. This reflects the difficulty of the task and the extent to which the subject matter demands the expertise of both the diplomatic historian and the domestic political historian. In this book, I consider the role of Parliament in the conduct of foreign policy, the impact of this policy on parliamentary politics, and the quality of parliamentary debates. These are important questions for our understanding of eighteenth-century Britain: our contemporary fashion for social and cultural topics does not obviate the centrality of Parliament, foreign policy and war in the politics of the period. The issues I discuss are also relevant today, not least because they relate to the important question of the effectiveness of democratic states when confronting authoritarian rivals.