The Guardians

Abstract

Abstract The First World War threw the imperial order into crisis. The land empires fragmented, while Germany's colonies and the Ottoman Empire's Middle East provinces fell into allied hands. All Allied powers wanted to keep those conquests, but Woodrow Wilson and millions around the globe afire for self-determination thought otherwise. At the Paris Peace conference it was agreed that the new conquests would be governed under ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations as a ‘sacred trust of civilization’. That decision had enormous consequences. The mandates system mattered not because it altered governance, but because it placed imperial rule under intense public scrutiny. Humanitarians arrived in Geneva to expose abuses; colonial nationalists exploited new rights of petition to make claims for independence; Germans resentful of the loss of their colonies demanded a repartition of the spoils. Charged to investigate everything from risings in Samoa, South West Africa, Syria, and Palestine to famines in Rwanda and oil contracts in Iraq, a Permanent Mandates Commission sought to limit the imperial powers' claims to sovereignty while safeguarding their economic rights. Chafing under international oversight, imperial statesmen crafted new ways to secure their interests. The mandates system brought normative statehood nearer but changed its nature. Drawing on research in four continents and dozens of archives, and bringing to light a host of larger-than-life personalities from Lord Lugard to Ralph Bunche to Faysal of Iraq, this book shows how international organizations shaped the modern world order.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Oxford University Press eBooks, 2015 · DOI ↗