ABSTRACT
The League of Nations was functioning as a very new type of international regime. The leading British history textbook of the interwar years, by Harold Temperley and A.J. Grant, concluded with a point-by-point comparison between the League and the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe as devised by Metternich and Castlereagh, and pointed out how in each respect the League was superior. (Later editions produced after 1945 made similar comparisons between the United Nations and the League, showing how the UN was a great advance.)1
Leaving economic reconstruction to private business and the market was the only course open in the post-Wilsonian mood of the United States. American (and to some extent British) investors persuaded themselves that there would be an economic miracle producing large returns, and poured large sums of money into continental Europe. To a great extent, they set the commercial and mercenary tone of the decade. The German caricaturist George Grosz depicted the dollar as a sun lighting up the corruption of ancien régime Germany.
