The Paris Conference assigned the League of Nations the task of continuing to construct the new international order. This in turn would restructure the international system. Through administering institutions and adjudicating issues, the League sought to reconcile the liberalism of Wilsonianism with the realities of geopolitics. Mandates, never colonies in a legal sense, posited an alternative to colonialism, however much the mandatory powers wanted to administer them as imperial domains. Minority protection sought to re-engineer citizenship itself, so that minorities could preserve the attributes that made them minorities while enabling them to become full members of the national communities of the successor states to the multinational empires. The record of the League proved the most troubled in international security, its broadest but most ill-defined area of responsibility. In Manchuria and Ethiopia, the League proved unable to prevent determined imperial expansion on the part of Japan and Italy, two founding members. The work of the League is best assessed not in categories of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but in the new ways it posited creating a global legal order.

The League of Nations was the first permanent international organisation with a general mandate. Its establishment is widely regarded as having had a significant, if elusive, impact upon international law, which became centred on international institutions. These three aspects of the League – its permanence, the generality of its mandate, and the ’institutional turn’ it brought to international law – lie at the heart of the assumed significance of the League for contemporary international lawyers. They are regarded as the League’s principal innovations and central components of its legacy, often without much interrogation and rarely subject to sustained analysis. This chapter offers analysis and interrogation to nuance claims about the League’s innovations. It presents the League as an institution whose grand designs often failed, but which innovated quietly and gradually. Above all, it shifts the focus away from the perceived ’breakthrough’ of 1919, and highlights the evolutionary nature of the League, which adapted throughout its life.

The Intergovernmental Conference on Rural Hygiene held in Bandung, Dutch East Indies, in August 1937 is often discussed as a precursor to the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care. In this chapter, we investigate the Bandung Conference’s antecedents rather than its legacy. We view “Bandung” as a synthetic formulation of various Southeast Asian initiatives, experiments, and experiences in rural hygiene and social medicine, most of which were designed and developed in areas under colonial rule. Primarily focusing on French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, we explore the meanings of social medicine and rural hygiene in Southeast Asian contexts, where health measures were tied to (colonial) economic objectives, health budgets were limited, and populations mostly rural. However, the delegates at the Bandung Conference proposed highly idealistic programs that could not possibly be realized. Consequently, all lofty plans turned into a mirage that symbolically absolved colonial administrations from their responsibility to safeguard their subject’s health. Social medicine at Bandung was a tool for colonial governmentality at a time when colonial empires were contested and weakened.

International Law, we are often told, ‘moved to Institutions’ in the early twentieth century. While recent literature has (masterfully, to be sure) explored the intellectual trajectories of some of the leading lawyer-diplomats or legal doctrines entangled in these international organisations, most accounts divorce their analysis from the seemingly banal histories of the ‘buildings, staffs, and letterheads’. This is particularly true for the history of the interim headquarters of international institutions. For the towering edifices specially erected to host these organisations, just like Rome, were not built in one day. For this reason, the early years of these institutions were shaped by the spatial constraints that their improvised and temporal dwellings imposed on them. For that reason, in this piece I shed light on the interim function of the Hotel National (1920–1937) and the Lake Success complex (1947–1952), as, respectively, placeholders for the League of Nations and the United Nations. By situating the everyday geographies of international law-making in these two precarious and unstable venues, I explore the tensions and hierarchies embedded within parochial modes of organisation that claimed the mantle of the international.

By focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, chief among them – in this chapter I explore the problem of the ‘global colour line’ in relation to international institutions. In particular, I trace the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the United Nations (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge a racialised and hierarchical global order. The result is neither a blind celebration of the United Nations’ anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage. Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other. For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the United Nations and its family of international organisations will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient.

The accession of six British Empire member states to the League of Nations questioned the Empire’s constitutional structure, and whether it was one entity or many. The resulting debate would form the doctrine of ‘inter se’ that attempted to rationalise the Empire’s new situation. Chapter Three delves into the frictions caused by separating the Empire’s international personality, as imperial federalists attempted to control and harmonise the foreign relations of the Empire, whilst Dominion leaders sought to use their newfound seat in Geneva to pursue their distinct foreign policies. As the Dominions began to gain full statehood, the chapter examines how the gulf between their membership at the League and that of India’s began to widen.

‘An anomaly among anomalies!’ exclaimed David Hunter Miller, the United States’ legal representative at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. For Miller, in the decision to admit the British Empire’s ‘self-governing’ colonies, such as Canada, to the idealistic new organisation to secure world peace, the League of Nations had stretched international norms. What aggravated this already-peculiar situation for Miller was the admission of India, a British colony with few self-governing and representative institutions, no independent foreign policy, and no discernible international personality.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of great powers’ efforts to manage their relations, foster international orders, and promote processes of peaceful change in international relations through the use of international organizations since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The focus is on the mechanisms and dynamics of balances of power, concert, and collective security, as reflected in the practices of IOs, including diplomatic congresses and conferences of the nineteenth century, the League of Nations, and the United Nations since 1945. The main research question remains: Under which conditions do great powers use international organizations to promote processes of peaceful change in international relations? The relevant conditions include: a stable and agreed systemic distribution of power among the great powers; a certain degree of normative consensus among them; and a minimal agreement upon the “rules of the game” in the management of international relations. Among the findings drawn from the historical record, we can conclude that great powers tend to be status quo-oriented, and that IOs might thrive, prosper, and affect the behavior of great powers when the three basic conditions are in place.

Chapter 1 introduces the figure of the foreign fighter in the interwar period by focusing on the Spanish Civil War. It shows how the image of the nineteenth-century adventurer haunts the imaginary of the actors preoccupied with finding a legal status for the volunteers in Spain. This image is nonetheless constantly split in two: idealists and freebooters; heroes and opportunists; barbaric troops and brave highlanders. The chapter moves from the League to the Anglo-American doctrine, to domestic discussions and ends at The Hague in 1907. It is there that rules on foreign volunteers are codified in an international convention for the first time. The chapter further links the Brussels Conference of 1874 to those of Geneva in 1949 and offers a lens through which to understand how the shifting image of the adventurer reaches the decolonization period.

Until about twenty-five years ago, economic historians (both those in economics departments and in history departments) had little to say about international law. There possible causes of this (beyond the possible insignificance of international law to the project of economic history) are likely the similar intellectual bases for economics and international law prior to the twentieth century, the lack of an accessible archival and intellectual base upon which to conduct the research, and the professional bias of academic historians against writing about events to close to the present. But as time as marched onward, the development of international economic law in the twentieth century has become of increasing interest to historians broadly interested in the history of international institutions and capitalism.

This chapter offers an historical grounding in interwar international relations. It tracks and analyses the progress of international relations in the period between World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), both of which are rightly seen as two major and formative conflicts in international history and indeed for the study of International Relations. It is sometimes assumed that the two World Wars were primarily European affairs, at least in their origins, and reflected the persistence of European predominance in a fast-changing world. Yet these were truly global and globalising wars, as reflected in their causes, courses and consequences, the technologies they employed and the ideas they helped generate. The period in between the wars was a turbulent and unstable one. It foreshadowed European decline and witnessed the rise of the United States, the challenge of the Soviet Union and the Far East and, more gradually, of peoples around the world subject to imperial rule – in short, the interwar period provided the foundations for the international system that developed over the following decades. Many of its contours are still visible today.

This chapter examines the origin of the customary prohibition of the use of force between States and its relationship to article 2(4) of the UN Charter, focusing on the pre-UN Charter era. In doing so, it critically analyses two possibilities for the norm to have emerged prior to 1945: that it developed prior to the UN Charter and article 2(4) was declaratory of that pre-existing custom, or that article 2(4) crystallised a customary rule that was already in the process of formation. It rejects these two possibilities, arguing that article 2(4) was a significant legal development which went beyond the existing laws of the time in order to found a new international legal order in the aftermath of World War II. Any pre-existing customary limitations on the use of force were significantly broadened by article 2(4), and the drafting process was not accompanied by meaningful State practice developing in parallel with this radical change in the law. Therefore, the customary rule prohibiting recourse to force between States must have arisen after the Charter entered into force. The emergence and development of the customary rule from 1945 onwards are examined in the next chapter.

This second historical chapter provides some important episodes in ICRC history between about 1910 (the death of both Dunant and Moynier) and the end of the Cold War (which is when the rest of the book takes off). Thus the chapter introduces the ICRC through a selected review of its history, emphasizing: the development of international humanitarian law and the global Red Cross network, helping to apply that law and Red Cross Fundamental Principles through assistance and protection in the field, and related activities such as protection of political prisoners. All of this sets the stage for a close analysis of the ICRC since the end of the Cold War and particularly since about 2012. If one wants to know if the ICRC is now in demise, one needs a picture of what it was and did in the past.

This chapter discusses Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace as a matrix for understanding the changing institutional landscape of international trade. In 1919, Keynes highlighted the perils of German participation and US non-participation in international politics, twin problems that continued to frame trade debates in the League of Nations for the remainder of the 1920s. Generally, German leaders supported the construction of an open and regulated world economy. Many internationalists were eager to lock Germany into a system of multilateral norms but also feared that integrating Germany into global markets would reinforce its dominance in key strategic sectors. In contrast, the United States remained aloof from League trade negotiations in the 1920s. Europeans were divided over whether to respond with universal trade rules that the United States might eventually be persuaded to follow or with a regionalist approach that would enable Europeans to negotiate directly with their Atlantic neighbour on a more equal footing. As Keynes saw clearly, both sets of concerns were exacerbated by the financial imbalances stemming from war debts and reparations.

I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.