Author Description

'We are a very rich and a very vulnerable Empire, and there are plenty of poor adventurers not very far away who look upon us with hungry eyes.' This is how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain underlined England's acute imperial predicament in 1938 when he was about to launch his policy of European appeasement. What was the relationship between Empire and appeasement in British foreign policy in the last years of the inter-war peace? How did Britain's exposed overseas interests in the Far East, in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean influence diplomatic policies taken in London at the time of the Rhineland occupation, the Anschluss, the Munich crisis, the Prague coup of March 1939, or the invasion of Poland six months later? How closely was the policy of appeasement tied to the burden of global military weakness, and what was the impact of strategic advice on Cabinet decision-making in the Chamberlain era?