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

Pedersen, Professor Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199730032 ISBN 13: 9780199730032

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"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

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0199730032
• ISBN 13: 9780199730032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592