Susan Pedersen

When women demanded the vote in the years before the First World War, they promised to use political rights to remake their country and their world. This is the story of the woman who best fulfilled that pledge. Eleanor Rathbone cut her political teeth in the suffrage movement in Liverpool, spent two decades crafting social reforms for poor women and children, and was for seventeen years the most effective woman member of the House of Commons. Remembered today for her long and successful campaign for children's allowances and for her brilliant contributions to feminist and economic thought, she also played a critical role in imperial policymaking and in the opposition to appeasement. The last decade of her life was given to strenuous efforts to rescue Spanish republicans and Jews threatened by Hitler's rise to power. Susan Pedersen's important book restores Eleanor Rathbone to her rightful place as the most sophisticated feminist thinker and most effective British woman politician of the first half of the twentieth century. Pedersen provides a moving account of the intense family dynamics of Rathbone's childhood, and provides a vivid portrait of the worlds of Oxford idealism, Edwardian feminism, and provincial liberalism in which she first moved. Pedersen also uncovers the crucial importance of Rathbone's lifelong partnership with the Scottish social worker Elizabeth Macadam to her emotional life and many achievements. 'This book triumphantly pulls off something that most biographies do not even attempt let alone achieve: it fuses a deeply empathetic and compellingly readable portrait of one exceptional woman with a tough-minded analytical account of some of the knottiest issues in twentieth-century history.' Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History & English Literature, Cambridge University '... this wonderfully written, magnificently researched biography.' Peter Stansky, Stanford University Susan Pedersen taught British history at Harvard University for many years before joining Columbia University as Professor of History. She is an established author.

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience

The development of European welfare states in the first half of this century has often been seen as a response to the rise of class politics. This study of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945 contests this interpretation. It argues, by contrast, that early policymakers and social reformers were responding equally to a perceived crisis of family relations and gender roles. The institutions they developed continue to structure the welfare state as it exists today. This book is innovative in the range and scope of its research, its comparative focus, and its argument, which poses a challenge to older class-based interpretations of the development of the welfare state. It will be of interest to scholars of European history and politics, as well as to those interested in social policy and women's studies.

Britain and France, 1914-1945

Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State

Winner of the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize 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.

The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

The Guardians

Caroline Elkins

Postcolonial states and metropolitan societies still grapple today with the divisive and difficult legacies unleashed by settler colonialism. Whether they were settled for trade or geopolitical reasons, these settler communities had in common their shaping of landholding, laws, and race relations in colonies throughout the world. By looking at the detail of settlements in the twentieth century--from European colonial projects in Africa and expansionist efforts by the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria, to the Germans in Poland and the historical trajectories of Israel/Palestine and South Africa--and analyzing the dynamics set in motion by these settlers, the contributors to this volume establish points of comparison to offer a new framework for understanding the character and fate of twentieth-century empires.

Susan Pedersen

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