The League of Nations

90 years ago the League of Nations convened for the first time hoping to settle disputes by diplomacy not war. This book looks at how the League was shaped and the multifaceted body which emerged, and how it was used in ensuing years to counter territorial ambitions and restrict armaments, as well as its role in human rights and refugee issues. The failure of the League to prevent the Second World War would lead to its dissolution and the subsequent creation of the United Nations. Can the UN’s fate be ascertained by reading the history of its predecessor?

DR RUTH HENIG, CBE, is an academic historian and Labour Party politician. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities from 1997 to 2000 and in April 2006 she was one of six people to receive the first Honorary Fellowships of Lancaster University. Specializing in 20th-century international history, she has written three Lancaster Pamphlets, on the origins of the First and Second World Wars, Versailles and After: 1919-1933, on the Treaty of Versailles and international diplomacy in the 1920s, and The League of Nations (1973).