The League of Nations Mandates System as a Trans-imperial Arena of (Anti-)Colonialism, 1919-1939

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My project elucidates how colonised peoples transformed the global political landscape from within and below, by examining the way that they utilised post-WWI international institutions to resist colonialism and make connections across empires.Interactions between empires have long remained a historiographical blind spot. This theme has only recently come under investigation as a new field of research: trans-imperial history (Hedinger & Heé, 2018; Mizutani, 2019; Sèbe, 2019). However, what is missing from trans-imperial history is the viewpoint and agency of colonised peoples. Of particular interest and significance is the mandates system in the interwar period. It was under this regime that the victorious powers of WWI, including Britain, France and Japan, administered the former German and Ottoman colonies under the League of Nations (LoN) oversight. This trans-imperial nexus, where colonialism and anti-colonialism of different empires intersected, reveals the nature of the late imperial world order and the strategies of its challengers. Internationalising the colonial administration of different empires, the mandates system, most importantly, allowed colonised peoples to protest against colonialism by petitioning the LoN across imperial borders, unlike the nineteenth-century mode of intra-imperial petitioning.Reflecting the recent interest in international institutions and internationalism (Jackson & O'Malley, 2018), historians have argued that the mandates system affected empires and shaped a world order of nation-states (Pedersen, 2015). Whilst some scholars have examined petitions from mandates in the Middle East and Samoa (Jackson, 2013; Pedersen, 2015), anti-colonial petitioning in mandates remains under-studied. Furthermore, little has been written on how anti-colonialists outside mandates engaged with the mandates system, although they also petitioned the LoN regarding colonial issues. Moreover, studies on petitioning in colonial history have limited their scope and analytical framework to a single colony or empire (Huzzey & Miller, 2022). Given that petitioning was a common form of protest, petitioning colonial/imperial authorities and petitioning international institutions should be contrasted to illustrate the interwar dynamics of anti-colonial demands.My research explores the following questions:(1) How did colonised peoples employ petitioning as a means of resistance to colonialism in and across empires?(2) How did colonised peoples inside and outside mandates perceive the mandates system and petition the LoN?(3) What commonalities and differences existed amongst colonised peoples' petitions and strategies at colonial, imperial and international levels?(4) What learning, networks, and solidarity did colonised peoples gain within and across colonial/imperial boundaries through anti-colonial petitioning movements?My project answers these questions through multi-lingual and multi-archival research. I will analyse the under-examined LoN documents as well as British, French and Japanese colonial archives and private papers to explore anti-colonial politics through petitioning and imperial responses thereto.My project is the first systematic historical study of interwar anti-colonial petitioning across imperial boundaries. This research not only demonstrates the entanglement of colonialism and anti-colonialism among empires, criticising contemporary narratives of imperial exceptionalism (Sèbe, 2021). It also reveals that colonialism was consistently challenged and contested by colonised peoples petitioning the international society as well as colonial/imperial authorities, illuminating how their grassroots anticolonial activism reshaped the modern political world.