The Guardians

Abstract The First World War threw the imperial order into crisis. The land empires fragmented, while Germany's colonies and the Ottoman Empire's Middle East provinces fell into allied hands. All Allied powers wanted to keep those conquests, but Woodrow Wilson and millions around the globe afire for self-determination thought otherwise. At the Paris Peace conference it was agreed that the new conquests would be governed under ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations as a ‘sacred trust of civilization’. That decision had enormous consequences. The mandates system mattered not because it altered governance, but because it placed imperial rule under intense public scrutiny. Humanitarians arrived in Geneva to expose…