Developing Civilisation? Imperial Internationalism at the League of Nations (1920s-1930s)

• Autor(a) principal: Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/101484
• topic: League of Nations; Imperialism; Internationalism; Civilization; Colonial Africa; Société des Nations; impérialisme; Internationalisme; Mission civilisatrice; Afrique coloniale

In the aftermath of the World War One, the internationalization of imperial and colonial affairs intensified, entailing the renewal of modalities of imperial political imagination and the tentative transformation of idioms and repertoires of colonial rule. The League of Nations, its specialized agencies and their numerous commissions engaged in the elaboration and institutionalization of new concepts, doctrines, norms and policies of imperial and colonial governance. Renewed standards of imperial civilization were debated and, more de jure than de facto, established. Passionate arguments about the meaning and the obligations of trusteeship and “civilization occurred. “Good [colonial] government” was outlined. The boundaries of the “colour line” were disputed, and tentatively renegotiated. The “conditions analogous to slavery” were identified, questioned, and contested by some. Focusing on modalities of imperial internationalism –the intersection of imperial and internationalist languages and projects, promoted by numerous individuals and institutions, national and transnational–, this article uses the meetings of the Mandates and the Slavery Commissions of the League of Nations and those of the Committee of Experts on Native Labor of the International Labor Organization, in the 1920s and 1930s, as observatories of these dynamics of intervention, especially in Africa.