The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

by Susan Pedersen

Overview

Winner of the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize At the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference saw a battle over the future of empire. The victorious allied powers wanted to annex the Ottoman territories and German colonies they had occupied; Woodrow Wilson and a groundswell of anti-imperialist activism stood in their way. France, Belgium, Japan and the British dominions reluctantly agreed to an Anglo-American proposal to hold and administer those allied conquests under "mandate" from the new League of Nations. In the end, fourteen mandated territories were set up across the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Against all odds, these disparate and far-flung territories became the site and the vehicle of global transformation. In this masterful history of the mandates system, Susan Pedersen illuminates the role the League of Nations played in creating the modern world. Tracing the system from its creation in 1920 until its demise in 1939, Pedersen examines its workings from the realm of international diplomacy; the viewpoints of the League's experts and officials; and the arena of local struggles within the territories themselves. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life figures, including Lord Lugard, King Faisal, Chaim Weizmann and Ralph Bunche, the narrative sweeps across the globe-from windswept scrublands along the Orange River to famine-blighted hilltops in Rwanda to Damascus under French bombardment-but always returns to Switzerland and the sometimes vicious battles over ideas of civilization, independence, economic relations, and sovereignty in the Geneva headquarters. As Pedersen shows, although the architects and officials of the mandates system always sought to uphold imperial authority, colonial nationalists, German revisionists, African-American intellectuals and others were able to use the platform Geneva offered to challenge their claims. Amid this cacophony, imperial statesmen began exploring new means - client states, economic concessions - of securing Western hegemony. In the end, the mandate system helped to create the world in which we now live. A riveting work of global history, The Guardians enables us to look back at the League with new eyes, and in doing so, appreciate how complex, multivalent, and consequential this first great experiment in internationalism really was.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190226404
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/29/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Susan Pedersen is Professor and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. She specializes in British history, the British Empire, comparative European history, and international history. She is the author of several books, including Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience.

Table of Contents

Illustrations List of Tables and Maps Principal Players Introduction: Guardians Assemble Part I. Making the Mandates System 1. Of Covenants and Carve-ups 2. Rules of the Game 3. A Whole World Talking Part II. Retreat from Self-Determination, 1923-1930 Preface: Allies and Rivals 4. News from the Orange River 5. Bombing Damascus 6. A Pacific People Says No Part III. New Times, New Norms, 1927-1933 Preface: Enter the Germans 7. The struggle over sovereignty 8. Market economies or command economies? 9. An independence safe for empire Part IV. Between Empire and Internationalism, 1933-39 Preface: Multiple exits 10. Legitimation Crisis 11. When empire stopped working 12. When internationalism stopped working Conclusion. Mandatory Statehood in the Making Appendix I: Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations Appendix II: Principal administrators of mandated territories Acknowledgements Photo credits A Note on Sources Notes Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

04/13/2015
Columbia University historian Pedersen (Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience) confirms her position as a leading scholar of 20th-century diplomacy in this exhaustively researched, clearly written analysis of a defining event of the 20th century. The mandate system established for the Middle East after WWI was “quixotic,” an “effort to subject imperial rule to international control.” Its “profound effects,” Pedersen argues, “were not quite those that its architects and advocates expected.” She shows how the League developed into a major instrument of geopolitical change, a “‘global’ structure for mobilization, protest, and claim-making.” South African settler colonialism in Namibia, French terror bombing of Damascus, and Samoan protest of New Zealand governance all contributed to increase pressure on the mandatory powers to “make international control real.” However, between 1927 and 1933 an increasingly bitter struggle arose between the League’s Mandates Commission and the mandating states over major issues such as control of harbors and railroads and the choice between market and command economies. A new definition of independence was emerging: one providing for self-determination but “safe for empire.” Pedersen demonstrates how on the eve of another world war “imperial imperatives, and not League doctrine,” drove state policies, yet despite this, “the League helped make the end of empire imaginable.” Illus. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Susan Pedersen's account of the PMC is replete with fascinating personalities as well as the turbulence of the interwar years....This book forms part of an important new wave of assessment of the League of Nations, based on exacting scholarship rather than post-Second World War disillusionment. The failings and inadequacies of the PMC are amply documented, but so too are the evolution of thinking on issues of global governance...Elegantly written, highly accessible, meticulously researched, this is a model of historical scholarship."—Journal of Modern History

"The first indispensable book written on a critical subject in 50 years! 'The Guardians' is a magnificent book. Telling a complex yet compelling story, it deserves to be read by anyone interested in the European overseas empires during a crucial epoch of world history."—Wall Street Journal

"A richly detailed study...[H]er book shows that the conventional wisdom about the League will not do."—Financial Times

"Impressive...Joining a global scope to deep archival research, Susan Pedersen reveals the process by which a group of supposedly apolitical technocrats at the League helped to create a new kind of international politics and to destroy the imperial order they had set out to protect."—Dissent

From the Publisher