East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain's Mediterranean Crisis, 1936-1939

'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 Ea...