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Meet The Cundill Prize Finalists! Susan Pedersen

Susan Pedersen is Canadian (born in Japan to Canadian parents) and is a Columbia University Professor in the US. She is nominated for her book: THE GUARDIANS: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press).]

Susan Pedersen is Professor and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. She specializes in British history, the British Empire, comparative European history, and international history.

She has authored five non-fiction titles and has won the:

• Albion Book Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies (for Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience) 
• Allan Sharlin Prize, Social Science History Association (for Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State)

BOOKS THAT SHE HAS AUTHORED:

• The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
• Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies
• Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience
• After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain
• Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945

DESCRIPTION OF NOMINATED BOOK

At the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference saw a battle over the future of empire. The victorious allied powers wanted to annex the Ottoman territories and German colonies they had occupied; Woodrow Wilson and a groundswell of anti-imperialist activism stood in their way. France, Belgium, Japan and the British dominions reluctantly agreed to an Anglo-American proposal to hold and administer those allied conquests under "mandate" from the new League of Nations. In the end, fourteen mandated territories were set up across the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Against all odds, these disparate and far-flung territories became the site and the vehicle of global transformation.

In this masterful history of the mandates system, Susan Pedersen illuminates the role the League of Nations played in creating the modern world. Tracing the system from its creation in 1920 until its demise in 1939, Pedersen examines its workings from the realm of international diplomacy; the viewpoints of the League's experts and officials; and the arena of local struggles within the territories themselves. Featuring a cast of larger-than-life figures, including Lord Lugard, King Faisal, Chaim Weizmann and Ralph Bunche, the narrative sweeps across the globe-from windswept scrublands along the Orange River to famine-blighted hilltops in Rwanda to Damascus under French bombardment-but always returns to Switzerland and the sometimes vicious battles over ideas of civilization, independence, economic relations, and sovereignty in the Geneva headquarters. 

As Pedersen shows, although the architects and officials of the mandates system always sought to uphold imperial authority, colonial nationalists, German revisionists, African-American intellectuals and others were able to use the platform Geneva offered to challenge their claims. Amid this cacophony, imperial statesmen began exploring new means - client states, economic concessions - of securing Western hegemony. In the end, the mandate system helped to create the world in which we now live.A riveting work of global history, The Guardians enables us to look back at the League with new eyes, and in doing so, appreciate how complex, multivalent, and consequential this first great experiment in internationalism really was.