The Guardians

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Susan Pedersen

Winner of the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature
The first comprehensive study for more than fifty years of the role played by the League of Nations in imperial politics and the end of empire
Shows how imperial issues were central to the 'European crisis' of the 1930s and how these rivalries contributed to undermining empire
Describes the shaping of the modern Middle East - Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine - by international and imperial interests
Based on original and innovative research across four continents

The Guardians

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Susan Pedersen

Description

The First World War threw the imperial order into crisis. New states emerged from the great European land empires, while Germany's African and Pacific colonies, and the Ottoman provinces in the Middle East fell into allied hands. Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, and the British dominions wanted to keep the new states, but Woodrow Wilson and the millions converted to the ideal of self-determination thought otherwise. At the Paris Peace conference of 1919, the allies agreed reluctantly to govern their new conquests according to international and humanitarian norms and under 'mandate' from the League of Nations.

As The Guardians shows, this decision had enormous consequences. The allies sought to use the League to safeguard imperial authority, but that authority was undermined by the mechanisms for international oversight they had themselves created. Colonial nationalists and humanitarians exploited new rights of petition or opportunities for publicity to expose abuses or scandals; Germans resentful of the loss of their colonies and Italians eager to found a new empire arrived in Geneva to demand a repartition of the spoils. As imperial politicians wearied of continual scandals and crises - revolts in South West Africa, Syria, Samoa, and Palestine; famine in Rwanda; labour abuses in New Guinea; extortionate oil contracts in Iraq - they began to question whether independent states might be easier to deal with than territories subject to international scrutiny.

Drawing on research in four continents and dozens of archives, and bringing to life a global network of nationalists, humanitarians, international bureaucrats, and imperial statesmen, The Guardians offers an entirely new interpretation of the importance of international organizations in the emergence of the modern world order.

The Guardians

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Susan Pedersen

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, 1933-1939
Preface: Multiple exits
10:Legitimation Crisis
11:When empire stopped working
12:When internationalism stopped working
Conclusion: Mandatory Statehood in the Making

The Guardians

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Susan Pedersen

Author Information

Susan Pedersen, Professor and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum, Columbia University

Susan Pedersen was born to Canadian missionary parents and spent her childhood in Japan and Minnesota. Rescued by Harvard at the age of 18, she spent the next 26 years there as a student, faculty member, and sometime Dean for Undergraduate Education. A historian of Britain and Europe with wide interests and an a penchant for far-flung research, she has written on subjects ranging from the history of women's movements, to the origins of welfare states, to British rule in Kenya, Hong Kong, and Palestine. Since 2003, she has been on the faculty at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on British and international history, and on 'great books' from Plato to Nietzsche. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

The Guardians

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

Susan Pedersen

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature

"[An] original, stimulating and thoroughly researched examination of how the new League managed to sustain a façade of trusteeship in a world of selfish imperial interests... This is a fascinating examination of empire in its final death throes." - Literary Review, Richard Overy

"A richly detailed study of the League's Permanent Mandates Commission... Pedersen's book is genuinely revelatory a long disquisition on the politics of unintended consequences, as a bureaucratic system designed to uphold and legitimise imperial reconstruction provided the tools for its undoing." - Financial Times, Duncan Kelly

"The first indispensable book written on a critical subject in 50 years... fair-minded, hard-hitting and readable... The Guardians is a magnificent book." - Wall Street Journal (Europe), WM. Roger Louis

"A strikingly original book." - Mark Mazower, The Guardian

"The Guardians offers many important insights, not least in demonstrating how internationalism deepened when Germany became a commission member and how the UK's governance of Iraq inspired today's system of economic imperialism. The book's primary revelation, however, relates to what the league did not do. Pedersen argues that self-determination, the concept that supposedly underpinned its creation, "was not what the Commission would serve". Its failure to take seriously the demands of its mandated populations initiated a set of forces that would help to forge our unequal world of today. Pedersen's study is nothing less than a groundbreaking account of how one organisation shaped the 20th century." - Times Higher Education, Niamh Gallagher

"A magnificent study." - Ferdinand Mount, London Review of Books

"provides an enlightening, insightful, richly textured exposé of the Mandates Commission from birth to transformation under the United Nations. Her multi-archival, international, superbly footnoted, and, at its core, personality driven narrative brings alive an institution ... the author's highly engaging narrative style makes the book fly by as if it were a summer beach read. Extremely readable, richly informative, and boldly argued." - G. Donato, CHOICE