The thirst for encyclopaedic knowledge has quite a pedigree. By the 17th century, the University of Edinburgh had a course in world history. In 1768, Edinburgh scholars produced the first edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. After another century, the taste for universal learning caught on in the United States. The Britannica moved to Chicago, and courses on world history sprang up on American campuses. British academics now began to make snobbish remarks about lesser sequels to "vintage editions" of the Britannica, and to ask how a country as isolationist as the United States could possibly pretend to global knowledge.

The Encyclopaedia of US Foreign Relations (EUSFR), by definition, is not isolationist. It is about the foreign policy of a nation that started life as a colony of one global power, and then attained the status of a global power in its own right. It reflects an American desire to know about the rest of the world that gives the lie to the notion that the US has ever been truly provincial. More than this, the editors declare their adherence to a significant element in the "political correctness" of the American historical profession, proclaiming that the EUSFR contains "articles by both American and foreign scholars".

Here, the encomia must temporarily end. All six of the advisory editors, as well as the two senior editors, are attached to American institutions. Of the 373 authors who have contributed to the EUSFR, only 13 work in institutions outside the United States. Nine of these are in Canada, some of them of US origin. This leaves one in Belarus, one in Santo Domingo and two in the United Kingdom. So, one might argue that the PC claim by the editors is merely a gesture.

But does the American bias in author selection make a difference? The articles in the EUSFR focus on the US, yet that is only proper - after all, the work is about American foreign policy, not international relations. Beyond that, can one detect any evidence of interpretive bias? In some ways, the answer is a resounding affirmative. One of the earliest entries is on the CIA official James Jesus Angleton, by James D. Calder of the University of Texas. It is simply disappointing that Calder thinks MI6 is a counterintelligence organisation, but almost sinister that he omits to mention Angleton's long association with the Italian right and his opposition to the CIA's "opening to the left" strategy in its postwar French and Italian covert operations.

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No more than 50 pages later, there is an unfortunate entry on Clement Attlee by Robert M. Hathaway, a researcher with the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He remarks with no further explanation that the British electorate's rejection of Churchill in 1945 was "inexplicable" to Americans. He further observes that Attlee oversaw the dismantling of "the old British empire," a debacle more usually attributed to the ministers of George III.

Staying with the first letter of the alphabet, mention must be made of the entry on Australia by Robert G. Sutter of the US Congressional Research Service. Sutter acknowledges the tensions between Australia and the US in the early 1980s, but fails to mention in this connection the undemocratic removal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a coup widely attributed to American dirty tricks, and a watershed in Australian politics and foreign relations.

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The EUSFR is undoubtedly strong in many areas. The article on the Monroe Doctrine by Gaddis Smith (Yale University) is sensitive to Latin American opinion and, as exemplified by references to the doctrine's "liturgical power" and secretary of state Frank Kellogg's attempt to "detoxify" its effects, sparkles with literary brilliance. The high quality of the majority of the contributions and the orderly presentation of data in the four volumes makes the EUSFR a useful and sometimes inspiring source of information on US and world history.

The editors have also shown some sound judgement in playing the notoriously subjective who's in and who's out game. Ernest Bevin, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl are in, Harold Wilson, John Major and Douglas Hurd are out. So be it.

Yet, within one category of entry, a certain over-Americanisation of subject matter creeps in. Jean Bethke Elshtein supplies a sane contribution on "Women, war, peace, and foreign relations", but the editors show a lack of cosmopolitan awareness in their decisions on which women to exclude. It is right and proper that Jean Kirkpatrick and Madelaine Albright are in, but why is there no room for the world's first democratically elected female leader, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, or for Gro Harlem Bruntland, one of the leading international figures of recent years? It seems odd that Golda Meir is not even mentioned in the index.

On the evidence of the EUSFR itself, it could be argued that more extensive use of foreign expertise would have resulted in a better product. Both the British-based contributors offer essays that focus on America's role without being myopic: Anatol Lieven of The Times notes American support for Estonian independence but adds that the Royal Navy played a "key role" in securing it in 1919; Alan P. Dobson of the University of Wales, Swansea gives an even-handed account of Anglo-American negotiations on civil aviation.

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In some entries, the adverse consequences of not consulting overseas scholars are plain. The essay on Nato is by Joseph Lepgold of Georgetown University. More important than Lepgold's mistaken impression of the dates of Arthur Vandenberg's tenure as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is his omission of any discussion of the view that European and especially British diplomacy sucked or suckered the Americans into full Nato participation. It seems a pity that on this point and others the editors did not draw on the scholarship of non-US historians of the distinction of Geir Lundestad. But here it is apt to change the object of censure. The truth is that there are not enough Lundestads about. A distressing conformity afflicts European Americanists, brought about by a combination of cold war loyalties, European McCarthyism, the insinuations of American culture, poor indigenous research funding and American largesse.

In Britain, the problem is compounded by the fact that we remember how we invented America. Our conceit is that they are like us, so there is no point in trying to think differently from them. It is now fashionable for British Americanists to say that we should be part of the US Americanist community. The editors of EUSFR did not hire us because they did not notice us, and that may be because we have nothing different to say.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is reader in history, University of Edinburgh.