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.
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