BRITISH POLICY TOWARDS EUROPE, 1919–1939 Neville Chamberlain and appeasement. By R. Caputi. London: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. Pp. 271. ISBN 1-57591-027-6. £35.00. The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: peace without victory? Edited by M. Dockrill and J. Fisher. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xvi+97. ISBN 0-333-77630-5. £40.00. British foreign policy, 1919–1939. By P. W. Doerr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Pp. xi+291.

Abstract

In the last eighty years, an enormous amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to explaining why Europe was at the centre of two cataclysmic conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century. The books considered here represent part of a resurgence of interest in British foreign policy in the interwar period and are primarily concerned with the policy of reconciliation towards the former Central Powers after the First World War, especially the appeasement of Germany. They offer a further opportunity to challenge the still-held misapprehension that appeasement was a strand of British policy that only appeared after Hitler's rise to power. They also offer a means of examining British foreign policy through sources inside and outside the government. Gordon Martel's volume illustrates the amount of journalistic pressure that was put on the British government to recognize and act on the likely threats to international peace. Austen and Neville Chamberlain, the sons of the great nineteenth-century Conservative politician, Joseph Chamberlain, were at the centre of the British foreign policy making process during the interwar period. Indeed, Robert Self's two volumes of letters written by Neville Chamberlain to his sisters illustrate how steeped in foreign and domestic politics the whole Chamberlain family was. Richard Grayson sees a long, unbroken attempt to accommodate Germany diplomatically starting with Austen Chamberlain and the treaty of Locarno. The importance of Neville Chamberlain's contribution to the history of British foreign policy is offered further recognition through surveys of the historiography of his premiership by David Dutton and Robert Caputi.