The British Labour party has been the focus of considerable attention from historians and political scientists, but until recently little of that attention has been directed towards the party's approach to foreign affairs. This is particularly true with respect to the early decades of the twentieth century. Scholars of this period of Labour's history have focused on providing explanations for the emergence and nature of the Labour party, and its replacing the Liberal party on the left of British politics. Labour's approach to foreign affairs has not generally been regarded as particularly important in explaining these developments and, mainly for this reason, the subject has been neglected.

This reflects a more general neglect of ideological and policy developments in the early Labour party, particularly by labour and social historians. The adoption of a socially deterministic approach to explain the party's electoral rise is one reason for this. It has encouraged the view that Labour only needed to establish itself organisationally to benefit from the economic and social changes that occurred in Britain in the later part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Policy development played little part in this process. Labour's policy merely reflected the fact that the party was the beneficiary, and product, of the creation of an industrial working class, as a side-effect of modernisation. Labour remained, up to 1931 at least, little more than a pressure group for organised labour, with no coherent set of policies or firm set of principles. If the party was ideological at all, its ideology was ‘labourism’