Preface

Summary

The Genoa Conference of April–May 1922 was the largest and most representative international gathering that had taken place since the Paris Peace Conference, and in some respects since the Congress of Vienna or even earlier. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, called it the ‘greatest gathering of European nations which has ever been assembled’; the Manchester Guardian, more cautiously, described it as the ‘largest since the Crusades’. It met to consider the economic reconstruction of the continent of Europe after the devastation of the First World War; and it was particularly concerned to re-establish a mutually advantageous relationship between the major western powers and the Soviet government in Moscow, where a revolution had brought the Bolsheviks to power five years earlier. Some thirty-four nations took part in the conference's deliberations, and no fewer than forty-two prime ministers were in attendance; it met for a month and a half, consuming five carriage-loads of duplicating paper in an attempt to deal with a set of issues that have remained at the centre of international affairs from that time up to the present. An early example of ‘instant history’, J. Saxon Mills's The Genoa Conference, appeared a few months after the conference had concluded, and subsequent scholarship has devoted considerable attention to various aspects of the diplomatic history of this period, particularly the relations between the Soviet Union and individual western powers.