‘History is too important to be left to the historians”.

The relationship between history, international history and international relations has never been an easy or a particularly amicable one. To talk of a cold war may be something of an exaggeration, but it does capture something about the way in which the various subjects tended to regard the other for the greater part of the post-war period. Thus practising historians and international historians appeared to have little time for each other, and together had even less for those seeking to establish the new discipline of International Relations.