How have historians disagreed about appeasement as the basis of British foreign policy from 1937 to 1939?

Appeasement has spawned a wide debate among historians over time. The differing views of historians and their scholarship over a period of time is called historiography. Firstly, thinkers such as Cato and Churchill chastised Chamberlain’s appeasement as naïve. They explained that appeasement simply allowed Nazi Germany to grow more powerful unchallenged, and that it did not have a sustainable result. This has been titled the orthodox school of thought.Subsequent ‘revisionists’ such as A.J.P. Taylor redefined appeasement as an active rather than a passive policy. The revisionist school of thought was significantly aided by by the 1967 Public Records Act, which precipitated wide access to the thinking of late 1930s policy-makers. Revisionist historians such as John Charmley strongly advocated the success of appeasement, and notes that the only flaw was abandoning the policy. He argues that Britain was faced with obligations towards its Empire which it already struggled to fulfil, and therefore appeasement “offered the only way of preserving what was left of British power”. Equally, Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy examined appeasement as a means of buying time for British rearmament.Finally, ‘counter-revisionists’ display degrees of sympathy with appeasement and they are personal in analysis of Chamberlain, yet they maintain that it was ultimately mistaken. For example, Niall Ferguson charges appeasement with failing to acknowledge the possibility for the alternative of preemptive action either through diplomatic or armed intervention. It is therefore clear that historians have widely disagreed about the policy appeasement, comprising a broad historiography.