Abstract

Daniel Gorman titles his book The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, eschewing the currently pervasive term global for good reason. Unlike Akira Iriye, whose focus in Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (2002) is on nonstate global historical connections, Gorman mixes state, empire, and nongovernmental institutions and activities, beginning with the League of Nations. Gorman's study of international relations and international organizations—with well-done biographical sketches of public and private internationalists—is deeply researched but provides little sense of the connective tissue of global reach suggested by the phrase international society. In fact, the study is grounded in states and, surprisingly, empire. This mix produces a problem, reflected in Gorman's decision to sharply divide the book into two largely independent parts. The first, “Imperial Internationalism,” is an account of relations of the various societies within the British Empire from roughly 1900 through the British Empire Games held in Canada in 1930. Gorman mentions the innovation of a “winner's platform” at the games, which was copied by the Olympic Games at Los Angeles two years later, but he does not mention that with the exception of Bermuda, only white settler societies were represented.

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