Introduction: Guardians Assemble
PART I: Making the Mandates System
1: Of Covenants and Carve-ups
2: Rules of the Game
3: A Whole World Talking
PART II: Retreat from Self-Determination, 1923-1930
Preface: Allies and Rivals
4: News from the Orange River
5: Bombing Damascus
6: A Pacific People Says No
PART III: New Times, New Norms, 1927-1933
Preface: Enter the Germans
7: The struggle over sovereignty
8: Market economies or command economies?
9: An independence safe for empire
PART IV: Between Empire and Internationalism, 1933-1939
Preface: Multiple exits
10: Legitimation Crisis
11: When empire stopped working
12: When internationalism stopped working
Conclusion: Mandatory Statehood in the Making
Susan Pedersen was born to Canadian missionary parents and spent
her childhood in Japan and Minnesota. Rescued by Harvard at the age
of 18, she spent the next 26 years there as a student, faculty
member, and sometime Dean for Undergraduate Education. A historian
of Britain and Europe with wide interests and an a penchant for
far-flung research, she has written on subjects ranging from the
history of women's movements, to the origins of welfare states, to
British
rule in Kenya, Hong Kong, and Palestine. Since 2003, she has been
on the faculty at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on
British and international history, and on 'great books' from Plato
to
Nietzsche. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two
children.
`[An] original, stimulating and thoroughly researched examination
of how the new League managed to sustain a façade of trusteeship in
a world of selfish imperial interests... This is a fascinating
examination of empire in its final death throes.'
Literary Review, Richard Overy
`A richly detailed study of the League's Permanent Mandates
Commission... Pedersen's book is genuinely revelatory a long
disquisition on the politics of unintended consequences, as a
bureaucratic system designed to uphold and legitimise imperial
reconstruction provided the tools for its undoing.'
Financial Times, Duncan Kelly
`The first indispensable book written on a critical subject in 50
years... fair-minded, hard-hitting and readable... The Guardians is
a magnificent book.'
Wall Street Journal (Europe), WM. Roger Louis
`A strikingly original book.'
Mark Mazower, The Guardian
`The Guardians offers many important insights, not least in
demonstrating how internationalism deepened when Germany became a
commission member and how the UK's governance of Iraq inspired
today's system of economic imperialism. The book's primary
revelation, however, relates to what the league did not do.
Pedersen argues that self-determination, the concept that
supposedly underpinned its creation, "was not what the Commission
would serve". Its failure
to take seriously the demands of its mandated populations initiated
a set of forces that would help to forge our unequal world of
today. Pedersen's study is nothing less than a groundbreaking
account of how
one organisation shaped the 20th century.'
Times Higher Education, Niamh Gallagher
`A magnificent study.'
Ferdinand Mount, London Review of Books
`provides an enlightening, insightful, richly textured exposé of
the Mandates Commission from birth to transformation under the
United Nations. Her multi-archival, international, superbly
footnoted, and, at its core, personality driven narrative brings
alive an institution ... the author's highly engaging narrative
style makes the book fly by as if it were a summer beach read.
Extremely readable, richly informative, and boldly argued.'
G. Donato, CHOICE
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