TY - JOUR
AU - Wempe, Sean, Andrew
AB - Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that simultaneously promised and denied them the possibility of self-determination? From Palestine, to Namibia, to Kurdistan, and beyond, the legacies of the mandatory moment remain pressing questions today. League of Nations, imperialism, internationalism, Weimar Germany, decolonization When asked to sum up the League of Nations’ mandates system in a single sentence, I always borrow the same quote from H. G. Wells that I used as the epigraph for my book on Germany’s contributions to and participation in the system: “It was a League not to end sovereignties, but preserve them.”1 This simple statement, found in Wells’s 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, encapsulates the League’s foundational stance on empires. The League, which grew out of the First World War, has often been portrayed as a destroyer of empires that was a failed attempt to usher in global peace, or as an ineffective precursor to the United Nations that was merely a toy of British foreign policy. Both views are incomplete and, frankly, wrong. The League truly was a structure intended for global governance, and we as historians should not doubt those aims because of its perceived failure to prevent the Second World War. The League’s founders, however, used imperialism and the European “civilizing mission” as its source code, with a goal not to end empire but to reform and preserve it within a culturally developmentalist project combined with a global structure of economic exploitation. This project was not exclusively a British endeavor, but rather a shared venture of multiple European powers—including the supposedly ostracized Germans. The mandates system is where the League’s imperial origins floated closest to the surface, and it survived, largely unchanged, in the United Nations as the trustee system, which persisted until 1994. Research to this point has mostly focused on the mandatory powers—those countries that administered the mandates on the League’s behalf—as well as the question of sovereignty in the mandates and the functioning of the system itself. Building on this important foundation and my own contributions, I would like to see more work on how states and individuals outside of the mandatory powers, and especially colonized subjects and non-Europeans, understood the mandates system. Of key importance is ongoing work on whether and how these groups adapted to, subverted, and made use of the system’s structure. How was this complex international imperialism created? The answer, as is well known, lies in the Treaty of Versailles and debates over colonial holdings as part of the peace. Before 1919, Germany controlled the third-largest colonial empire in the world.2 Article 119 of the treaty forced Germany to forfeit all its colonies on the grounds of its militarism and what the Allies deemed its “exceptional cruelty.” Drafters of the treaty heavily debated what to do about the German colonies. Eventually a compromise emerged, put forward by General Jan Smuts of South Africa. Smuts and others suggested that the German colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, along with the territories that had once been held by the Ottoman Empire in Southwest Asia, should be transferred to the authority of the League of Nations. The treaty’s authors outlined a system whereby these mandates would be directly managed by individual mandatory powers—Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, and the British dominions of South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia—which in turn would be overseen by an international Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations.3 The drafters of the League charter conceived the mandates system as a safer means of preserving liberal empire by preventing the unrestricted land grabs and imperial competition that had contributed to the eruption of the First World War.4 They hoped that a new joint imperial project would foster reformed empires that would “facilitate in every way the development of knowledge and character among the people, so that they may eventually be capable of conducting a civilised government for themselves [and] ensure that the rest of the world has equal opportunities with themselves to profit from trade and intercourse with their dependencies. So . . . empire will lead neither to revolution nor international war.”5 Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant organized the mandates system by dividing the territories parceled out among the mandatory powers between 1919 and 1921 into three classes: “A” mandates, “B” mandates, and “C” mandates. Class A mandates included territories “liberated” from the Ottoman Empire in the Near East, such as Iraq and Syria. The Europeans in charge of the labels considered the mandates in this class to be “civilizationally advanced enough as to reasonably pursue the construction of independent, hopefully democratic, states in the near future.”6 The mandates in class B consisted of the German colonies of East Africa, Cameroon, and Togo. The drafters stereotyped these territories, with their large African populations, as insufficiently developed to hope for immediate autonomous government, and thus as needing to be placed under European “guidance” for the foreseeable future. Class B mandates were also expected to maintain an open door policy on trade for all future League member states. The remaining German colonies in the Pacific and Southwest Africa fell into class C. Held by the British dominions and Japan, these territories were considered by their mandatories to be spoils of war, effectively constituting annexation in all but name.7 The First World War marked an adaptation to, not a break with, the West’s enunciation of liberal imperialist principles. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism, as well as individual nationalist movements in various colonies, challenged the rhetoric of the European stadial theory of development with an adopted and modified Wilsonian political language of liberty and self-determination for all.8 In response, the “League of Imperialists” retooled the mission of conquering and civilizing the world, not as a project of individual European nations, but instead as an international program of tutelage toward the eventual—though never scheduled, promised, or guaranteed—transformation of colonies into modern, independent nation-states.9 Internationalism was not intended to destroy empires, but rather to serve as a life preserver for the imperial civilizing mission.10 As Erez Manela has argued, the new international governmental structures created opportunities for representation, petition, and redress for minority and subaltern groups wishing to challenge the status quo.11 The Allies’ use of “colonial guilt” as grounds for the seizure of Germany’s colonies and the establishment of the League’s mandates system initiated a discussion of what constituted “humane imperialism” and “good colonial governance”—the new hallmarks of the “civilized nation” engaged in the work of empire—that would bring the hypocrisies of liberal imperialism to the forefront of the international public sphere.12 That said, it was a far more effective tool for erstwhile and wishful imperialists, as citizens of states without colonial empires—like the Colonial Germans I examine—helped modify the mandates system and used it to achieve the same economic goals of labor, resources, and markets that colonial holdings promised. Supposedly minor states and ordinary citizens, not just great men, took advantage of “influence politics.”13 They inserted themselves into League discussions through their very public and frequently translated books and magazines, through international press coverage and editorials, through their social and professional networks, and through their cultural and political activities at home and abroad. Until the 1990s, most of the scholarship on the League of Nations reflected the influence of the hindsight fallacy and was preoccupied with the League’s failure to maintain general peace and to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. This changed with the fall of the Soviet Union. New questions emerged about how international governing bodies like the United Nations could operate in a global political environment with a single superpower, and how best to handle minorities within the former Soviet republics. In this context, historians shifted their focus away from the League’s teleological trajectory to 1939, and began interrogating its intended roles, structures, and functionality.14 The Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) is an important focus in the scholarship on the mandates system. Some of the most recent works on the PMC differ on both its effectiveness and its means of and motives for maintaining, restraining, and reforming imperialism within the framework of interwar internationalism.15 These scholars, however, share a common interest in analyzing the inner workings of the League of Nations to show us how the bureaucracy functioned. In the broader literature on the League beyond just the PMC, the more positive assessments highlight the encouragement that European minority communities—in newly self-determined European states and some mandates—and colonized subjects in mandates and denizens of some British dominions may have received in the period by analyzing the partially effective supervisory commissions.16 Often, however, the scholarship still neglects aspects of the story that could only be told from the perspective of so-called lesser powers or even the colonized subjects themselves as these governments and groups navigated the complexities of the League’s bureaucracy.17 The narrative remains centered on the dominant states in European politics and the largest mandate-holding powers: Britain and France. My own work tries to push beyond the standard focus on Britain and France. I cover how at least one group ostracized from the League system during its early years—Colonial Germans—nevertheless took part in it. German settlers, former colonial officials, and especially German colonial interest groups attempted to sway public opinion in their favor by using the political language of the time to reinsert themselves into the European “civilizing mission” in dialogue and, in some cases, in praxis. Though they did not always achieve exactly what they wanted, when German colonial lobbies used the media and political and social networks to secure colonial restitution, statesmen, diplomats, and governments were forced to respond to and mollify their constituents in response to manipulations of domestic and international public opinion concerning German colonialism and colonial restitution. Colonial Germans pursued this international set of strategies throughout the interwar period and beyond. Attempts by German colonial lobbies to influence the PMC between 1922 and 1933, as well as the 1925 Locarno Conference, the 1926 admission of Germany to the League of Nations, the appointment of two of Germany’s former colonial officials to the Permanent Mandates Commission between 1927 and 1933, and the selection of Heinrich Schnee, Germany’s most vocal colonial irredentist, to be a member of the League’s Manchurian Commission, exemplify the ways in which Colonial Germans participated in the League’s imperial internationalism.18 Even this, however, is just a small contribution to what remains to be done in our work on the mandates. Open in new tabDownload slide Figure 1: “What would be left of the Entente if they were serious about their own people’s ‘right of self-determination’ and let go of the reins!” German propaganda poster by F. Kliemsch, ca. 1919, Berlin. Public domain. Used courtesy of the British Library, © British Library Board, Maps CC.5.b.29. Open in new tabDownload slide Figure 1: “What would be left of the Entente if they were serious about their own people’s ‘right of self-determination’ and let go of the reins!” German propaganda poster by F. Kliemsch, ca. 1919, Berlin. Public domain. Used courtesy of the British Library, © British Library Board, Maps CC.5.b.29. The adaptive international imperialism created by the League of Nations persisted long after the League’s own demise. After the Second World War, Western thinkers and statesmen were still loath to let go of their colonies. They justified the continued control and/or informal dominance of these territories through the same racist argument: that colonized subjects were not yet ready for self-governance. Rather than being disbanded when the League of Nations was dismantled, the mandates system was given new life under the League’s successor, the United Nations. In 1945, chapters XII and XIII of the United Nations Charter placed the former mandates and several European colonies under the UN Trusteeship Council so that their “tutelage” toward democracy could continue under European and now American administration.19 The council’s ideological foundations in liberal imperialism and imperial internationalism also meant that it facilitated the preservation of the imperial world order well into the final years of the twentieth century. The UN did not release its last trust territory, Palau, until 1994.20 Even with the end of the Trusteeship Council, imperial internationalism persisted in other ways. The “civilizing mission” was rebranded as the “modernizing mission,” aimed at culturally, technologically, and financially binding the former colonies to the global community as defined by the West through assimilation via humanitarian aid and financial regulation. This language was intended by those who participated in its creation to be used in discussing and finding solutions for global societal and economic issues in both former or declining imperial metropoles and their one-time colonies. Yet this phrasing intentionally obscured the fact that the problems faced by the colonial world were a direct result of empire: arbitrary border designations, policies, and societal hierarchies founded on racist pseudoscience, genocide, and war. The solutions proposed by non-governmental organizations, Western governments, pundits, and in some cases even academics have been nearly identical to the solutions that were advocated by imperial thinkers and reformers, including the importance of uplifting these societies by supplying them with Western technology, Western education, and Western government, favoring nation-statism and integration into a capitalist global economy as the normative trajectory.21 The tone struck is frequently a racist one that infantilizes non-Europeans, portraying them as children in need of further guidance or assistance. In the case of African societies, such infantilization often occurs in Western critiques of how states like Tanzania, Uganda, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo manage everything from elections and finances to infrastructure, education, and medical care, leading to an authoritarian desire by Western financial bodies, governments, and NGOs to regulate the economies of these states and even the interpersonal relationships of individuals in these societies. The intent is to create an ideologically justified system of dependency. This can be clearly seen in Western-influenced AIDS relief.22 The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank exemplify this kind of undue influence and economic management on the part of international bodies. These post–Second World War international finance agencies often review “whether there is sufficient absorptive capacity in the economy” of the recipient state: how a country’s government makes use of and handles influxes of money.23 If too much money flows in too quickly from donors, the World Bank initiates an “audit” to assess how the government is managing funds. If a country does not meet certain benchmarks for expenditure or overspends in some sectors, the two organizations may freeze that country’s budget. This was the case with Uganda in 2002/2003, when the World Bank deemed that it had received “too much” external aid for HIV/AIDS. Uganda was instructed to “turn down funding from overseas donors that [did] not fall within the government’s priorities” as defined by the World Bank or risk losing funding from the IMF and the World Bank.24 Scenarios like this put low-income countries in a bind, forcing them to decline aid for one problem in order to receive aid for another.25 The management structures of the IMF and World Bank have the goal of homogenizing economic structures—forcing societies to conform to Western practices even if it is to those societies’ detriment. These dependency networks put pressure on countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, and Zambia to accept external interference in their cultures and day-to-day governance in exchange for the funds needed to encourage their competitive economic status in a world economy dominated by European and American concepts and structures, or to combat a global health crisis. Such patterns in international governance are a continuation of the imperialism that evolved from the League mandates system’s adaptations in trying to transform competitive colonialism between empires into an internationalized structure for imperial management. The chief goal moving forward, I contend, is to widen our scope when we look at which governments and lobbying actors are involved in or engaged with the mandates system and the League in general. Britain and France were certainly the most powerful players in League politics and controlled the largest number of mandates. That said, the mandates system is nothing if not an internationalization of imperialism. Colonial German participation in the League and its Mandates Commission suggests that scholars should stop thinking about imperial histories and continuities in terms of a single metropole or national actor and instead consider how those case studies relate to the larger-scale history of European imperialism as a transnational whole. To more fully “denationalize” imperial studies related to this international system, we need to pursue two strategies. First, we need more scholarship on experiences with and understandings of the League of Nations mandates system from the perspective of colonized subjects. Work on this subject, while not complete, has been exceptionally thorough in the case of the class A mandates of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan.26 The deeper history of scholarship on these mandates, I would argue, has largely been the result of ongoing American, Russian, British, and French influence and the creation of conflict in Southwest Asia. The field is also expanding, though this is a much more recent development, in coverage of indigenous Africans’ and Pacific Islanders’ perspectives.27 This approach is represented by the efforts of many scholars, some of whom have also contributed to this group of reflections. A perfect example is Meredith Terretta and Ben Lawrance’s work on rights claimants in Togo and Cameroon during the mandate period. By centering their scholarship on the experience of figures like Gold Coast barrister and activist J. E. Casely Hayford, they show us how colonized subjects experienced and perceived the League’s adaptive imperialism. More research on figures like Casely Hayford will also give us insight into how colonized peoples made use of the League of Nations system—which was clearly designed to reinforce and support empire in a new form—to exploit weaknesses and contradictions in that same system that they could then use to push back against the League’s infantilizing narratives and racist hierarchies and begin the process of decolonization even earlier than the standard narrative. Such exploration will reveal the unique ways in which non-Europeans in these occupied states perceived or used the institution of the League’s PMC and its governing statutes to foster resistance within this now collaboratively developmentalist system of economic and cultural domination. Such works will also do more to show us in what, if any, ways the mandates system diverged from earlier forms of colonial rule in terms of the lived experience of those oppressed by it. The second avenue to pursue is more akin to my work on Germany’s place in our understanding of the mandates system. We need studies that explore how powers like Spain, Poland, Norway, and even the United States directly or indirectly benefited from the quasi-open-door style of colonialism that the system created. Otherwise we fall into the trap of thinking that this system was nothing more than an extension of the British and French empires instead of what it actually was: a form of imperialist internationalism that provided the means by which the so-called “developed world” has been collectively able to maintain an imperial economic and cultural system of exploitation of much of the planet long after the period of decolonization. The same is most certainly true of several of the League’s members, like Ireland, even if they themselves never formally had a colonial empire.28 Scholars could also begin examining how, with the exception of Japan (the sole non-European-governed mandatory power), non-European powers both within and outside the League engaged with the PMC.29 How, for instance, did the peoples, governments, and delegates of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Brazil, all League members, perceive, challenge, or participate in the economic and governance aspects of the mandates system? In the mandates system, we see a form of international imperialism that was tied, through various agreements, to a complex economic web that stretches around the globe. In many ways this system was the bridge between the long nineteenth century’s variant of imperialism as civilizing mission and the new developmentalist aid networks, the new spheres of influence, and the ongoing exploitation of the Global South by the Global North without formal colonization that arose after the Second World War and decolonization. It is an important link in the evolution of our current international dynamics and merits further exploration. To paraphrase Wells’s title, I look forward to the shape of research to come as we start tugging on the threads of connection beyond the mandatory powers and the principal European players and see where they lead our scholarship on empire next. Sean Andrew Wempe is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University, Bakersfield. His first book, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019, and his second book, A Global History of Inequality in Public Health, is pre-contracted with the same press. Notes 1 " H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London, 2005); Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford, 2019). 2 " Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, “German Imperialism in Africa: The Distorted Images of Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, and Togo,” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 2 (1992): 235–246, here 235, 238. 3 " Michael D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914–1931 (Brighton, 1998), 28–42; Gail-Maryse Cockram, South West African Mandate (Cape Town, 1976), 39–43; Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, 2012), 37–38; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007), 25, 31; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J., 2009), 45–65; Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York, 2012), 165–173; Zara S. Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005), 43–44. 4 " Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 34–38, 40–47. 5 " Mazower, Governing the World, 166–167; quote from “The Harvest of the War,” Round Table 6 (September 1915): 1–32, here 12–14, quote from 14. 6 " Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire, 35. 7 " Cockram, South West African Mandate, 43; Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (2006): 560–582; “The South-West Mandate. Future of the German Population. Position Outlined by General Smuts,” Cape Times (Capetown), September 18, 1920; Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (London, 2001), chap, 8. 8 " Mazower, Governing the World, 165–166; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 3–18, 25, 31. 9 " Mazower, Governing the World, 166–167. 10 " Ibid., 167. 11 " Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. 12 " Veronique Dimier, “On Good Colonial Government: Lessons from the League of Nations,” Global Society 18, no. 3 (2004): 279–299. 13 " Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 7–8. 14 " Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1091–1117. 15 " Callahan, Mandates and Empire; Michael D. Callahan, A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929–1946 (Brighton, 2004); Callahan, “‘Mandated Territories Are Not Colonies’: Britain, France, and Africa in the 1930s,” in R. M. Douglas, Michael D. Callahan, and Elizabeth Bishop, eds., Imperialism on Trial: International Oversight of Colonial Rule in Historical Perspective (London, 2006), 1–20; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004); Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System”; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015), Introduction and pts. I and II. 16 " For one example of how this played out in the British dominions, see Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s. 17 " Martin Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren (Marburg, 2000); Callahan, Mandates and Empire; Callahan, A Sacred Trust; Michael D. Callahan, “The Failure of ‘Closer Union’ in British East Africa, 1929–31,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 2 (1997): 267–293; Callahan, “‘Mandated Territories Are Not Colonies’”; Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System.” 18 " Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire; Sean Andrew Wempe, “Peripheral Players? German Colonial Interests, the Press, and the Spirit of Locarno,” International History Review 40, no. 1 (2018): 177–205; Wempe, “From Unfit Imperialists to Fellow Civilizers: German Colonial Officials as Imperial Experts in the League of Nations, 1919–1933,” German History 34, no. 1 (2016): 21–48. 19 " Gordon W. Morrell, “A Higher Stage of Imperialism? The Big Three, the UN Trusteeship Council, and the Early Cold War,” in Douglas, Callahan, and Bishop, Imperialism on Trial, 111–137. 20 " Ibid., 130–131; Mazower, Governing the World, 252–254. 21 " Criticism of these imperial roots of humanitarianism, modernity, and developmental schemes can be found in postcolonial and subaltern scholarship, such as Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Calif., 2001); James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J., 1993). For specific criticisms of NGOs, see Terje Tvedt, Angels of Mercy or Development Diplomats? NGOs and Foreign Aid (Oxford, 1998); Steven Robins, “Talking in Tongues: Consultants, Anthropologists, and Indigenous People,” in Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin, eds., Expert Knowledge: First World Peoples, Consultancy and Anthropology (New York, 2004), 89–101; Lamia Karim, “Democratizing Bangladesh: State, NGOs, and Militant Islam,” Cultural Dynamics 16, no. 2–3 (2004): 291–318; Karim, “Demystifying Micro-Credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh,” Cultural Dynamics 20, no. 1 (2008): 5–29; Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (Minneapolis, 2011), chaps. 1 and 5; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York, 2006), 70–79, 154, 184; Hans Holmén, Snakes in Paradise: NGOs and the Aid Industry in Africa (Sterling, Va., 2010). 22 " Jon O’Brien, “Can Faith and Freedom Co-Exist? When Faith-Based Health Providers and Women’s Needs Clash,” Gender and Development 25, no. 1 (2017): 37–51; Chris Simms, “Donor, Lender and Research Agencies’ Response to the HIV Crisis,” in Eduard J. Beck, Nicholas Mays, Alan W. Whiteside, and José M. Zuniga, eds., The HIV Pandemic: Local and Global Implications (Oxford, 2006), 607–624. 23 " Maureen Lewis and Susan Stout, “Financing HIV: The Roles of International Financial Institutions,” in Beck, Mays, Whiteside, and Zuniga, The HIV Pandemic, 625–641, here 635, quoting International Monetary Fund, Aligning the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) Approach: Issues and Options, IMF Policy Paper, April 25, 2003, http://www.imf.org/external/np/prsp/2003/eng/042503.pdf, 10. 24 " Lewis and Stout, “Financing HIV,” 637, quoting Charles Wendo, “Uganda Stands Firm on Health Spending Freeze,” Lancet 360, no. 9348 (2002) :1847. 25 " Lewis and Stout, “Financing HIV,” 630–638. 26 " For some of the most interesting recent work, see Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Palo Alto, Calif., 2019); Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, Calif., 2017); Susan Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq—in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood,” American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (October 2010): 975–1000; Sami Zubaida, “Contested Nations: Iraq and the Assyrians,” Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 3 (2000): 363–382. 27 " Molly McCullers, “‘The Time of the United Nations in South West Africa Is Near’: Local Drama and Global Politics in Apartheid-Era Hereroland,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 371–389; several entries in Douglas, Callahan, and Bishop, Imperialism on Trial; and many more than can be listed here due to space restrictions for this piece. 28 " For Ireland in particular, which has waded in that murky middle ground between colony and European state for much of its history, we should certainly be building off of works like Michael Kennedy, “The Irish Free State and the League of Nations, 1922–32: The Wider Implications,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 3, no. 4 (1992): 9–23. 29 " Works in English that explore Japanese involvement in the League and the mandates system are Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu, 2008); Haruo Tohmatsu, “Japan’s Retention of the South Seas Mandate, 1922–1947,” in Douglas, Callahan, and Bishop, Imperialism on Trial, 61–84; Ian Nish, “Germany, Japan and the Manchurian Crisis: Dr. Heinrich Schnee and the Lytton Commission,” in Josef Kreiner and Regina Mathias, eds., Deutschland-Japan in Der Zwischenkriegszeit (Bonn, 1990), 91–104; Nish, Japan’s Struggle with Internationalism: Japan, China and the League of Nations, 1931–1933 (London, 1993). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A League to Preserve Empires: Understanding the Mandates System and Avenues for Further Scholarly Inquiry
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz1027
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-league-to-preserve-empires-understanding-the-mandates-system-and-rSt20dyVu6
SP - 1723
VL - 124
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -