Appeasing Hitler comes garlanded with tributes from almost a dozen distinguished historians and writers. It is, the publisher tells us, “the first major narrative account of appeasement”. I spent a pointless quarter of an hour trying to come up with a construction that would render this claim true. Is it that the groaning shelves of books on appeasement in our libraries and bookshops are, because they make some analytical points, not “narrative”? Or is it that AJP Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, David Reynolds, Richard Overy, RAC Parker, Martin Gilbert and all the other historians who have tilled this furrow (all cited by Tim Bouverie), not to mention Winston Churchill himself, are somehow not “major”?
The more sensible question is: as this is an anything- but-untold story, does Bouverie retell it in an interesting, readable way? The answer is yes. This is a good example of political history of a particularly British kind: pacy, personality-driven, self-consciously writerly and ever so slightly moralistic. There are limits to this sort of history, about which I'll say more, but it certainly has its pleasures. It is a genre that takes for granted that the course of the British ship of state is charted by ministers responsible to parliament. One can see why this genre might be attractive at this moment.
Appeasement can be told as a story about how the western allies sought to respond through concession to a series of territorial claims and grabs (Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia) by the so-called revisionist powers (Japan, Italy, Germany). But it is more commonly told, especially in Britain, as the narrower story of how and why the ostensibly “national” but largely Conservative government, led by Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain from 1935, essentially did Hitler's work for him, declining to respond to early provocations and then working out the 1938 agreements over Czechoslovakia that handed over the richest portion of that sole remaining east European democracy. Bouverie tells that latter story, providing some crucial context about the 1919 Versailles settlement and the reasons so many British statesmen felt guilty about their part in making it, but essentially beginning with Hitler's rise to power. He takes us expeditiously through the 1935 Abyssinian and 1936 Rhineland crises, agreeing with scholars who have seen the latter as the last moment when Britain and France together could have easily curtailed Hitler's aggression, but out of an excess of caution and some mutual mistrust declined to do so. But the bulk of the book treats the period of Chamberlain's premiership, when appeasement became, as Bouverie aptly puts it, not a “reactive and desultory policy, tempered by scepticism”, but rather an “active, positive policy, which would carry all before it”.
