Having secured a seat at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, British and Dominion officials pushed for the accession of British colonies to the new League of Nations. Chapter Two probes the legal bases, as well as the political arguments employed to convince United States’ President Woodrow Wilson, why the Dominions and India should be separate member states from Britain at the League. As Britain and the Dominions pushed Wilson for colonial accession to the League, this chapter also examines political pressures, both within the United States, as well as from anti-colonial nationalists from within British colonies, who wanted their own membership of the League, separate from the one proposed by Britain. In doing so, this chapter answers whether colonial membership came about through British imperial design, or through anti-colonial pressures of the ‘Wilsonian Moment’.

This chapter examines different styles and contents of attempts to revise the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. It contrasts the devastating critique of the Economic Consequences, with specific proposals with which Keynes was involved that began in November 1919 with meetings in Amsterdam hosted by the Dutch banker Gerard Vissering, and involving a wide range of international bankers, including some influential Americans. The Amsterdam meeting suggested a plan for leveraging private U.S. finance for the sustainable reconstruction of Europe that anticipated some aspects of the 1924 Dawes Plan. Keynes found his role in the Amsterdam plan undermined by the notoriety of the Economic Consequences and the disapprobrium it attracted. How could he hope to persuade the U.S. government after the attack on Woodrow Wilson mounted in the Economic Consequences? There is a sharp contrast – even contradiction – between the Cambridge world of sharp analysis and polemic and the Amsterdam approach, where market-oriented people tried to devise a solution using financial products/financial engineering. And each of these approaches was also quite different from the diplomatic logic that had produced the Versailles Treaty.

The chapter describe the pivotal role of central banks in stabilizing the international system after 1918. It explains how central bankers were drawn into peace-making efforts, although they had no formal role either in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, or in the League of Nations, the world’s first multipurpose international organization that was set up in the wake of the war. In the 1920s, central banks would play a pivotal role in global governance, aided by the League’s Economic and Financial Organization (EFO), a forerunner of the institutions created at Bretton Woods after the Second World War. The EFO was instrumental in stabilization of central and eastern Europe, helping also to establish new central banks in the region. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of central bankers’ breach with the EFO after 1928, the creation of the Bank of International Settlements, and the legacy of these developments for global order in the second half of the 20th century.

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

The sudden end of the war in 1918 gave rise to high expectations of the forthcoming peace congress. Yet neither the gathering at Paris nor the settlement to which it gave its name marked a new beginning in international politics. ‘New Diplomacy’ proved to be a short-lived blossoming. Old diplomacy, with its focus on the management of relations between states, persisted, though bearing outwardly the stamp of Geneva. Openness and democratic ideals did not lend themselves to peacemaking but rather complicated international relations. Not only was the Paris settlement not ‘a building finished and complete in all respects’, it also did not rest on stable foundations. In erecting it, the peacemakers had undermined the primacy of order; and into the cracks in the new building seeped malign ideas and narrowly defined interests which, ultimately, brought it down.

The Great Conversation was a broad-based discussion on international issues and world peace that took place beyond the traditional circles of power and of the intellectual elite at the end of the Great War. In a time of global destabilisation and political innovations, it gave ordinary men and women, mainly in Western countries, the opportunity, the desire and the legitimacy to take a stand on international issues by virtue of a new interpretation of their political rights and their own agency. It was an unprecedented, unorganised, yet transnational movement of thought, which questioned the meaning of citizenship in a context of democratisation of political life.

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

This chapter traces Japan’s status concerns from the late 19th century leading up to the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. It examines Japan’s approach to naval power after the First World War and derives expectations for how Japan would react to an international agreement such as the Washington Naval Treaty from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of Japan’s approach to the Washington Conference of 1921–1922. It finds that although Japan faced a growing threat from the United States in the Western Pacific, Japan accepted greater restraints on warship construction in order to maintain its access to the great power club, alongside Britain and the United States, as part of the ‘Big Three’ at the conference. Subsequently, the US Immigration Act of 1924, which unprecedentedly banned Japanese immigration to America, served as a major betrayal of Japan’s sacrifices for the sake of the international order, thus altering Japanese perceptions of the openness and fairness of the Washington system. It convinced many moderates that the West would never consider Japan its equal, and it empowered anti-treaty factions begin the costly process of abrogating Japan’s commitment to the Washington system.

This chapter traces the origins of International Relations (IR) scholarship from the outbreak of the First World War to the making of the peace. It follows a set of pioneering thinkers and pressure groups across Europe and the United States to demonstrate both the intellectual roots and the practical infrastructure of the emerging discipline. The chapter begins by reviewing the state of international affairs on the eve of the war which inspired a set of writings on economic interdependence and world order. The second section shows how the conflict itself prompted authors to reflect on the causes of war and the conditions for peace. The third section examines the intellectual preparation of the post-war order within an emerging community of IR experts. The final section reveals how the founders of IR contributed as government advisors to the Paris Peace Conference and, simultaneously, laid the institutional foundations of the discipline. As a result, this chapter concludes, the origins of IR were deeply intertwined with wartime events and inspired by the making, not just interpreting, of international politics.

This chapter examimes the acute crisis of the world war and its role in destabilizing the political balance in both cities and in the overthrow of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the German Empire (as well as its constituent state, the Bavarian Monarchy). It compares the revolutions and counterrevolutions and the violence that accompanied the political struggles in both cities.

After the armistice on the Western Front in 1918, the United States provided major food aid programs across Central and Eastern Europe. The American Relief Administration and the American Red Cross rushed into these fragile new nation-states where violence was ongoing with programs aimed largely at children. The JDC jumped aboard other American emergency relief efforts, which helped it reach Poland and later Russia, where Jews were in greatest need. Deployed around Europe, American Jews distributed emergency food relief, medicines, sanitary supplies, and clothing during harsh winters. Much like American postwar diplomacy carried out by the ARA and through private loans with tacit and direct support from the US government, Jewish “diplomacy” was carried out by the JDC, a private humanitarian association. American Jews led the way for American humanitarians of all kinds: as food remitters and as the first American organization in Soviet Russia. American Jewish relief paradoxically appeared as a peripheral humanitarian undertaking and as a central partner in the main humanitarian projects of the day.

Chapter 3 traces the accretion of imperial administration in Nauru from 1888 to 1920. The formal status of Nauru shifted twice, from protectorate to colony to British mandate. From 1888, Nauru was administered as part of the German Marshall Islands, and later subsumed under the direct colonial control of German New Guinea in 1906. The Jaluit Gesellschaft sold its phosphate rights to the British-owned Pacific Phosphate Company, which developed a mining operation under German administration. In 1914 Nauru was occupied by Australia on British request. The chapter retraces the advent of the League of Nations mandate system, arguing that C Mandate status marked an uneasy compromise between advocates of internationalised administration of the occupied territories and the annexationist Dominions of Australia and South Africa. As Nauru’s legal status shifted from protectorate to C Mandate, administrative control was assumed by Australia pursuant to an intra-imperial bargain between Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which established a tripartite phosphate monopoly. The chapter concludes that the basic division of public and private authority established in 1888 survived this shift.