ABSTRACT
If we wish to understand how international organizations came to perceive, and in time to impinge upon, the powers of states to promote settlement projects and establish settler colonies, we might find some clues among the records and papers left by the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. The Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) has hardly gone down in history as a crucial influence on the character or demise of the twentieth-century empires. 1 It was established by Article 22 of the League Covenant as part of a new mandates system to administer seized Ottoman and German possessions, but even those victorious powers who set it up were far from enthusiastic about its creation. Imperialists in Paris and Tokyo, Cape Town and London, were disgusted that popular enthusiasm for Wilsonian ideas (not to mention Woodrow Wilson's own presence at the Paris Peace Conference) had made outright annexation of ex-enemy territories impossible, and only grudgingly agreed to administer them as “mandates” and under League oversight. They were thus relieved to discover that mandatory administration was indistinguishable from any other type of colonial administration, and that their sole obligation appeared to be to furnish the League with an annual report on their work, to correspond with the mandates commission about petitions from inhabitants in their territory, and to send a representative to Geneva once a year to answer its questions. Small wonder the anti-imperialist George Padmore concluded in 1937 that the mandates system had been a “huge fraud” devised by the great powers to expand their empires while “creating the illusion that they were not really annexing these territories as spoils of war.” 2
