Mandates and empire in Africa: Britain, France, and the League of Nations mandates system, 1914-1931

After the end of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference placed the conquered German possessions in Africa under the supervision of the League of Nations and issued as "mandates" to France and Great Britain the territories that are now the independent nations of Cameroon, Togo, and Tanzania. Many scholars have examined the mandates system in terms of its significance for international relations at the highest levels of government in Europe while others have studied the mandates at the lowest levels of local administration within the mandated territories. What the scholarly literature lacks is a comparative study of the impact of the League of Nations mandates system at the point of intersection between the political leaders in the metropoles and the developments in the mandated territories where theories converged with practice.;The current study fills this gap in the scholarship. It is based on diplomatic, colonial, and private records in Great Britain, France, Canada, and the United States. Further, this examination fits within the larger context of the interactive cultural structure of imperialism that linked the actions of political leaders in the metropoles with those of Africans. It considers how the League of Nations mandates system altered the nature of this imperial exchange and recast the culture of colonialism during the postwar period.;Scholars of several historical fields have misunderstood the importance of the mandates system. The present work challenges traditional interpretations and raises new questions concerning international order and the westernization of the modern world. Its conclusion is that the mandates system represented an internationalization and reformation of colonialism that had an impact on both Europeans and Africans. Mandates transformed the ideology of imperialism and had meaning for the economic, political, and cultural lives of Africans within the mandated territories. Britain and France did not always react to the system in the same way or for the same reasons, but they both developed policies for their mandated territories that were more restrained and more internationally-oriented than those in the rest of their empires in tropical Africa. While binding the League to colonial administration in Africa sometimes had contradictory or adverse repercussions, the mandates system attempted to resolve the persistent dilemmas resulting from the importation of European institutions into Africa, the evolving role of Africa within the larger westernizing world, and the perpetual international rivalries over African's peoples and materials.