The Romance of Decline: The Historiography of Appeasement and British National Identity by Patrick Finney | Institute of Histor

1. Ever since the 1930s, in the context of Great Britain's secular decline from world power status, the historiography of appeasement has been inextricably intertwined with shifting understandings of British national identity. Baldly stated, the assertion is probably unexceptionable: most historians would agree that historical inquiry is a social process, and within this body of work the significance of decline as a factor influencing interpretation has long been acknowledged. (1) But for most international historians, the role of such cultural factors remains marginal and certainly does not impinge upon the ultimate sovereignty of primary archival sources in determining interpretation. In the discipline at large, these traditional empiricist assumptions are now under sustained challenge from textualist and relativist critiques, problematising the claims of traditional historical methodology to offer access to objective truths, not least through analysis of the ideological tensions at play in particular bodies of historiography and of the political projects and socio-cultural identities which they have served to ground. In this last respect, moreover, there are many fruitful points of interaction with broader inter-disciplinary work on the 'imagining' of national identity through textual representation, in which the scripting of national historical narratives bulks large.