ABSTRACT
This chapter places interwar imperialism within a longer genealogy of liberal ideas of freedom and their complicity in colonialism and empire, while identifying transformations peculiar to the post-World War I moment. Freedom as ideology had a contradictory effect, justifying imperialist domination but also planting the seeds of anti-colonial sentiment. The League of Nations recycled the historicist idea that the realization of self-determination for the colonized would be promised and yet deferred by establishing a mandatory system. This arrangement elicited intellectual and political movements against assumptions about the racial and civilizational inferiority of the non-white world. In the 1930s, the Great Powers increasingly moved toward the formation of autarkic economic and strategic blocs made up of not only formal colonies and protectorates, but also nominally free nation-states. Along with the alternative autarkic form of the Soviet Union, these blocs became the primary agents of yet another war of empires.
