Colonies and mandates, along with protectorates, belong to the wider group of ‘dependent’ territories. Colonies were under the total control of a foreign power which decided all aspects of the administrative, executive and legislative organisation. Public international law was mainly relevant for slavery, forced labour and ‘open-door’ policies. The mandates system was certainly inspired by colonialism, especially in the eyes of contemporaries, for whom colonialism was the ‘white man’s burden’ for the benefit of ‘uncivilised peoples’. However, it also had fundamental structural differences: their purpose – the ‘civilising mission’ – and the triangular relationship (League of Nations, territory, mandate), stand in sharp contrast to the colonial institution. In addition, the mandatory power was not the holder of sovereignty over the mandated territory. The triangular relationship refers particularly to the control that is supposed to embody it. The control exercised by the League marks a notable difference from the colonial system, establishing for the first time in the history of international relations a sophisticated form of indirect international administration of territories.

The distinction between international and domestic law plays an essential function in the establishment of international law as an autonomous order. During the lifespan of the League, this distinction was contested by scholars and judges in increasingly sophisticated ways. This process culminated in the debate between monists and dualists. However, the formal conceptual foundations of this debate meant that it failed to take account of the way that bureaucrats, officials and experts at the League adopted equally sophisticated normative strategies as part of the ‘experiment of international administration’. Such strategies, which lay at the heart of attempts to promote the ‘well-being and development’ of peoples subject to mandatory rule and foster co-operation across social and economic fields, creatively transformed conventional understandings of the relationship between international law and domestic law. This chapter juxtaposes these simultaneous, countervailing trends of formalisation and deformalisation in international law and administration to offer fresh insight into the crucial formative period in the history of the distinction between international law and municipal law.

Chapter 6 reveals that the ICI joined forces with the League of Nations‘ Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) in 1919 to shift the debate about decolonization from sovereignty to representivity. That focus on representivity enabled the ICI to claim that no group really represented the allegedly fragmented colonized population. On these grounds, ICI members who had joined the League of Nations also delegitimized the complaints that Africans and Asian had sent to the League’s PMC. The ICI members dismissed those “abusive petitions” to the League as forgeries by a riotous and unrepresentative minority. The PMC and the ICI strategically kept the debate about representation going, and it never ended. In the interwar period, this debate served to dismiss nationalist voices as unrepresentative and to defend forced labor against the ILO’s initiative to ban it from the colonial world in the 1930s. While styling itself as the representative of colonial authenticity, the ICI had to appease the emancipatory movements. To do so, members of the ICI designed representative councils in the colonies, such as the Volksraad in Indonesia and invited some of their protégés to represent their colonies at international organizations. Restricted representation for moderate elites delegitimized allegedly alienated Westernized anti-colonialists.

This chapter analyses the colonial branch of the League of Nations, the Mandate System, and its pivotal role in the transmission and reconfiguration of ‘civilisation’ between the two world wars. Focusing on the workings of the Permanent Mandates Commission, it documents how ‘civilisation’ developed a rich institutional life and became an important argumentative tool for those both supporting and opposing the emancipation of Iraq from the British Mandate. Emphasising both transformation and continuity, this chapter examines the administrative and bureaucratic turn of the ‘standard of civilisation’ and the ways it became entangled with practices of counting, reporting and standard-setting. Furthermore, the rise of a basic level of welfarism as a marker of the ‘civilised state’ indicates that the ‘logic of improvement’ is not static, but it evolves in response to the changing imperatives and ideals of the capitalist state. The case of Iraq shows that even though international law does not determine imperial interests or major political evolutions, it does nonetheless provide a vocabulary to articulate and contest them.