The guardians : the League of Nations and the crisis of empire It is not just the staggering research in this book both far flung across the globe and incomparably deep; it is not just its exemplary and unprecedented success in combining the stories of great politicians in imperial capitals and international bureaucrats in Geneva with those of ordinary people making claims the world over; it is not just the unending drama of the tumultuous era and the lovely prose in which it is presented. For Susan Pedersen does nothing less than reconstruct the making of our times as the struggle to continue intolerable empire in the name of paternalism and progress set off unexpected forces that created our unhappy world of nation states rich and poor. With The Guardians international history reaches its contemporary pinnacle. A landmark work of global history powerfully argued and superbly researched The Guardians explains how the modern international order of normative statehood came to be. In an account rich in people and institutions structures and contingencies Pedersen demonstrates how imperial ambitions nationalist claims revanchism and idealism collided and combined in Geneva and on the ground in the Middle East Africa and the Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s. As an analysis of the unintended consequences that internationalism set in train the book is bracing. The histories Pedersen tells both human and institutional are haunting.