ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the de-centring of the narrative about the economic role of the League by providing a first analysis of the interaction between the League and the Latin American nations, which constituted the bulk of non-European sovereign states in a world still predominantly under the control of European imperial powers. The Persian delegate Hussein Khan Ali stated that the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, traversing the Mesopotamian territories Britain had obtained after 1918, should be considered tributaries of the Shatt-al-Arab, one of the main navigable rivers in Persia and the route through which Persia imported most of the foreign products it needed. Though the Latin Americans stood together effectively against the instrumentalizing of League universalism by British liberal economic imperialists, the Montarroyos appendix simultaneously conceptualized sovereignty in such a way as to abandon Persian claims – and the Tigris and Euphrates – to the British, even as it secured the Amazon for Brazil.
