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

Columbia University historian Pedersen (Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience) confirms her position as a leading scholar of 20th-century diplomacy in this exhaustively researched, clearly written analysis of a defining event of the 20th century. The mandate system established for the Middle East after WWI was “quixotic,” an “effort to subject imperial rule to international control.” Its “profound effects,” Pedersen argues, “were not quite those that its architects and advocates expected.” She shows how the League developed into a major instrument of geopolitical change, a “ ‘global’ structure for mobilization, protest, and claim-making.” South African settler colonialism in Namibia, French terror bombing of Damascus, and Samoan protest of New Zealand governance all contributed to increase pressure on the mandatory powers to “make international control real.” However, between 1927 and 1933 an increasingly bitter struggle arose between the League’s Mandates Commission and the mandating states over major issues such as control of harbors and railroads and the choice between market and command economies. A new definition of independence was emerging: one providing for self-determination but “safe for empire.” Pedersen demonstrates how on the eve of another world war “imperial imperatives, and not League doctrine,” drove state policies, yet despite this, “the League helped make the end of empire imaginable.” Illus. [em](June) [/em]