Military historians tend to pay much more attention to the triumphs and conquests that make empires than the management of their decline. The British Empire is no exception. Few have tried to provide a big-picture treatment of how Britain transitioned from military superpower in 1945 to the country it became a generation later. The pieces gathered together in THE LONG DRAWDOWN together endeavor to provide exactly that, filling in a crucial but too often overlooked portion of the modern history of Britain-and the world.