“Bill Apter’s book synthesises historical scholarship on Australia’s relationship with Australia and the United States and draws on extensive analysis of primary research in Australia, Britain, and the United States to offer a consistent interpretation of the period from 1941 to the late 1950s. It makes a sustained argument about the primacy of economic considerations in Anglo-Australian relations and the decision to remain with or move away from the British Commonwealth, from before the Second World War to the late 1950s. There is a striking parallel to be drawn between the analysis of Australia’s relations with a rising United States and declining Britain in the 1940s and 1950s and Australia’s current dilemma in choosing between a rising China and declining United States.”—Associate Professor David Lee, University of New South Wales