The familiar description of fiduciary law erases European and US imperialism. There is no discussion of the ways in which fiduciary law framed imperial struggles over political and economic power. There is no mention of the roles that fiduciary law played in various European empires and the US Empire between the late fifteenth century, when imperial expansion began, and the time of rapid decolonization in the 1960s. This chapter is a summary of a political economy of fiduciary law and imperialism that I hope to develop at length and in detail. My argument is that the familiar description of the economic structure of fiduciary law is incomplete. So too is the autonomy-enhancing account of fiduciary law. Fiduciary law, I want to argue, may enhance exploitation to facilitate market exchange. It provided an ideological justification for imperial expansion in the interests of opening up trade between peoples. Fiduciary law, moreover, played institutional roles in the financing, administration, and oversight of imperial exploitation and the facilitation of trade among those who benefitted from it.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental health illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

This chapter engages with the Palestine Railway Arbitration of 1922 and draws out the techniques applied in the arbitration that framed new ways of protecting private property and laid the groundwork for the internationalisation of concession agreements. The chapter describes how introduction of the Mandate System and the inclusion of concession agreements into peace treaties (under the jurisdiction of mixed arbitral tribunals) enabled the advanced protection of private property on the international plane with special attention to the underlying modes of authorisation. It shows how these transformations can be understood as practices of jurisdiction that rely on a mode of self-authorisation. The Palestine Railway Arbitration is particularly illuminating of this point for two reasons. First, from a purely doctrinal perspective, the arbitration is full of formal flaws. It therefore raises the question of the source of the authority of law more pressingly than other arbitrations. Second, it appears that most legal inventions and changes were made out of a sense of necessity without much theorising. These observations point towards an account of law that is attentive to the actual practices of the actors involved.

Chapter 15 offers new perspectives on the formative struggle to establish the League of Nations as an effective international organisation at the heart of the postwar order. It argues that in spite of the global conceptions they advanced its key architects intended the League to become the superstructure of a new transatlantic international order and security architecture. It analyses how far it was possible to find common ground between the most influential American and British blueprints for an integrative League and the markedly different French plans for an institution of the victors whose main purpose was supposed to be to protect France and constrain Germany. And it illuminates why ultimately the League of Nations came to be founded as a truncated organisation dominated by the principal victors of the Great War and initially excluding the vanquished, which were required to undergo a period of probation to become eligible for membership. Finally, it explains the far-reaching consequences this had and examines how far the League nonetheless had the potential to become the essential framework of a modern Atlantic and global order over time.

Chapter 6 reveals that the ICI joined forces with the League of Nations‘ Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) in 1919 to shift the debate about decolonization from sovereignty to representivity. That focus on representivity enabled the ICI to claim that no group really represented the allegedly fragmented colonized population. On these grounds, ICI members who had joined the League of Nations also delegitimized the complaints that Africans and Asian had sent to the League’s PMC. The ICI members dismissed those “abusive petitions” to the League as forgeries by a riotous and unrepresentative minority. The PMC and the ICI strategically kept the debate about representation going, and it never ended. In the interwar period, this debate served to dismiss nationalist voices as unrepresentative and to defend forced labor against the ILO’s initiative to ban it from the colonial world in the 1930s. While styling itself as the representative of colonial authenticity, the ICI had to appease the emancipatory movements. To do so, members of the ICI designed representative councils in the colonies, such as the Volksraad in Indonesia and invited some of their protégés to represent their colonies at international organizations. Restricted representation for moderate elites delegitimized allegedly alienated Westernized anti-colonialists.

When the League of Nations was dissolved in 1946, the question arose of the status of the Palestine Mandate. Egypt, as a member of the League, argued that the Palestine Mandate became defunct. Britain, and other members of the League, said that it would continue. Britain deemed it to be in force until its withdrawal from Palestine in 1948. Britain did not conclude with the United Nations a trusteeship for Palestine, as Britain did with other territories that it had placed under the mandate system of the covenant of the League of Nations.

This chapter analyses the colonial branch of the League of Nations, the Mandate System, and its pivotal role in the transmission and reconfiguration of ‘civilisation’ between the two world wars. Focusing on the workings of the Permanent Mandates Commission, it documents how ‘civilisation’ developed a rich institutional life and became an important argumentative tool for those both supporting and opposing the emancipation of Iraq from the British Mandate. Emphasising both transformation and continuity, this chapter examines the administrative and bureaucratic turn of the ‘standard of civilisation’ and the ways it became entangled with practices of counting, reporting and standard-setting. Furthermore, the rise of a basic level of welfarism as a marker of the ‘civilised state’ indicates that the ‘logic of improvement’ is not static, but it evolves in response to the changing imperatives and ideals of the capitalist state. The case of Iraq shows that even though international law does not determine imperial interests or major political evolutions, it does nonetheless provide a vocabulary to articulate and contest them.