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Reviews of the cloth edition: A fascinating study of the advent of
the League of Nations mandate system in Africa. ~ Choice ----
Provides us with the best account we are likely to get of the
French and British 'official mind' about mandates. ~ Susan
Pedersen, Professor of History, Columbia U., in a review essay in
American Historical Review (October 2007) ---- In this definitive
book the meticulous research and critical analysis of Michael
Callahan has brought clarity in the evolution of these murky
mandates from the old imperial order to the acceptance of
neo-imperial trusteeship at the beginning of the new. His
scholarship will be rewarded as the source for students, their
teachers, and those scholars of every nationality who seek to
understand Africa in the lost but formative years between the two
great wars of the twentieth century. ~ Robert O. Collins, Professor
of History Emeritus, U. of California Santa Barbara ---- The best
study of the colonial mandates in Africa and raises im
This book completes a two-volume history of the impact of the
mandates system on Anglo-French colonialism in Africa from 1914 to
1946. This second volume explains how the League of Nations
mandates system fused two of the predominant and compelling global
forces of the twentieth century: imperialism and Wilsonian
internationalism. After the First World War, Britain and France
administered most of Germany's former tropical African colonies as
'mandates' under the supervision of the League as 'a sacred trust
of civilisation. This system of international trusteeship changed
British and French rule in Africa. In short, 'mandates' were not
'colonies'. Mandates meant less militarism, more commercial
equality, a greater emphasis on the interests of Africans, and an
end to the extension of European national sovereignty over
colonized peoples. Accountability to the League also required the
British and French to reconsider traditional economic, strategic,
and ideological assumptions about their empires. In the process,
the sacred trust sowed the seeds of self-doubt about the very
purpose and future of European imperialism.The mandates system
continued to represent a genuine internationalisation and
reformation of colonialism and had long-term economic, political,
and cultural consequences for Africans and Europeans within the
mandated territories. Despite the Depression, repeated Anglo-French
foreign policy failures, growing humiliations for Geneva, and war
in Africa and Europe, the principles and practices of international
trusteeship proved persistent. Mandates demonstrated the relevance
of international law, the importance of the League of Nations, and
the impact of Wilsonian principles on international relations and
European imperialism.
This book examines the League of Nations, state-supported
terrorism, and British foreign policy after the rise of Hitler in
the 1930s. It argues that with strong leadership from Britain and
France, the League made it possible for states to preserve the
peace of Europe after terrorists aided by Italy and Hungary killed
the King of Yugoslavia in 1934. This achievement represents the
League at its most effective and demonstrates that the organization
could carry out its peacekeeping functions. The League also made it
possible to draft two international conventions to suppress and
punish acts of terrorism. While both conventions were examples of
productive collaboration, in the end, few governments supported the
League's anti-terrorism project in itself. Still, for Britain,
Geneva served the cause of peace by helping states to settle their
differences by mediation and concession while promoting
international cooperation, a central conviction of British
"appeasement" policy in the 1930s.
The creation of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission
(PMC) at the close of the First World War, and its successor, the
United Nations Trusteeship Council (TC), following the Second, were
watersheds in the history of modern imperialism. For the first
time, the international community had asserted that the well-being
of colonial peoples was not merely the private concern of
metropolitan states, but a shared responsibility of humankind that
transcended national boundaries. Editors R.M. Douglas, Michael D.
Callahan, and Elizabeth Bishop have assembled a wide array of
scholars to assess the relative weight to be placed on
international influence in the process of decolonization.
Imperialism on Trial reveals, across a broad cross-section of
geographical and political settings, the operation of the
complicated and often conflicted dynamic between the national and
international dimensions of colonialism in its final and most
historically consequential phase.
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