Petitions, protests and the Mandate System 1919-21

It's all too easy, when reading history, to see the world through the eyes of the coloniser rather than the colonised. The mandate system—the League of Nations framework through which Britain and France claimed legitimacy for their post-war territorial grabs—is often presented as a progressive innovation: a move from old-fashioned colonialism to enlightened trusteeship. But what did it look like from the perspective of those who suddenly found themselves under new rulers?

Drawing on Susan Pedersen's extraordinary book *The Guardians*, we explore how the mandate system was intended to serve mult...