Arnold J. Toynbee, the Colonial Question, and ‘Peaceful Change’

Abstract

While most scholarship on appeasement focuses on its later stages in Europe – culminating in the Munich Agreement – policymakers and public intellectuals throughout the early and mid-1930s were exercised by appeasement in a different context. These prominent Britons, concerned by increasing international tensions and conscious of the resentments engendered by having a globe-spanning empire, sought to contrive some way to appease the revisionist powers without betraying their liberal internationalist principles or harming British national interests. At the center of these debates was Arnold J. Toynbee, director of studies at Chatham House. A devoted liberal internationalist, Toynbee was convinced that a durable peace could be built on appeasement in the context of ‘the colonial question’. This version of appeasement claimed that German interests and honour could be satisfied by finding some way to return Germany to Africa as an imperial power. But the debates over ‘the colonial question’ revealed the extent to which British and German conceptions of the issue diverged. They also demonstrated the inability of liberal internationalists to reconcile their commitment to changing an unsatisfactory status quo with their commitment to preventing the forceful revision of that same status quo; ‘peaceful change’ was therefore elusive.