Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.

This chapter deals with material approaches of the constitution in Greek constitutional thought. First, it shows that, in the interwar period, a sociological approach of the constitution was developed, which focused on socio-economic forces and on their impact on the 1927 republican constitution. Second, it demonstrates that, in the post-civil war period, a normative understanding of the material constitution was developed but it was also opposed from a formalist perspective. This perspective will be understood through the historical context of this period, which was deeply marked by the existence of a ‘para-constitution’ that undermined civil and political rights. Third, it explores the metapolitefsi period, in which the relation between the formal constitution and the social and political forces was explored by Greek constitutional scholars as an object of juristic knowledge. In this period, Costantino Mortati’s concept of the material constitution was introduced in Greek constitutional thought and was criticised. The direction of this critique was marked by the influence of Nicos Poulantzas’s theory on Greek constitutional theorists.

Chapter 8 explores the ways that China’s “sovereignty” was reconceived and reconstituted through multilateral forums and transnational legal discourses during the periods of Guomindang regime consolidation, Japanese invasion, and postwar planning. It examines how developments in China played an important but now often forgotten role in discussions of world order and state sovereignty during this period.

Krystyna Duniec and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek question the seemingly incontestable values and lineages of standard historiographies that are foundationally patriarchal and evidence how theatre profited from the trade in women’s bodies, and Duniec notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. Duniec focuses on the interwar period, which she interprets as a time of tremendous innovation in theatre practices that remain/repeat today. She notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. The Polish People’s Republic, as Adamiecka-Sitek shows, proclaimed gender equality but in reality reproduced bourgeois gender relations that excluded women from empowered positions in theatre institutions. She then charts how women’s narratives emerged outside of a ‘homosocial’ order built on fraternal ties that she traces from the establishment of public theatre.

In the two essays devoted to the Polish avant-garde, Dorota Jelewska and Anna R. Burzyńska argue that the heterarchical forms of the interwar and the postwar avant-gardes allow us to see these constellations both as destroying the existing topology of representation as well as constructing inter-reality in which art annexes real objects (Tadeusz Kantor), marginalized and broken objects are material witnesses to past and current events (Józef Szajna, Jerzy Bereś) and colour, sound and the body of the performers (Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ewa Partum) replace transmission of logos, which had been central to Aristotelian poetics and aesthetics. While dealing with the history of the avant-garde, Jelewska notes that, despite significant accomplishment of women artists in Poland, it was not until the 1970s that women developed their space for action and expression. Burzyńska specifically explores an acoustic history of the Polish avant-garde, breaking with artistic conventions that have traditionally excluded sound interpreted as mere noise, and considers ways in which different voices have been assimilated by or have resisted nationalist discourse.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and of its anti-imperialist project of Latin American unity. It details the contributions that the book brings forth not only to the study of the Peruvian APRA and populism, but also to the scholarship on Latin American exile, trans-American solidarity, and hemispheric critiques of empire. The introduction offers a methodology for centring the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of the historical analysis. Finally, it presents a summary of the book’s chapters and main arguments.

Chapter 6 studies the impacts that APRA’s engagement with transnational solidarity networks had on the evolution of its ideology, particularly that of its project of hemispheric and anti-imperialist unity. The chapter argues that Indo-América as a political project was not consolidated in the heyday of transnational exile in the 1920s. Rather, Indo-América is best understood as a form of universal appeal at which the Hayista faction arrived more definitely in the 1930s to advance a political struggle inside Peru. By that time, Apristas had all but stripped from their continental program pledges of social and moral revival for Indigenous people it had once, if briefly, comprised. Recurrent state persecution against the Peruvian APRA, the chapter shows, combined with the movement’s innovative political strategies in exile, contributed to imagining an Indo-American project that moved beyond the advocacy of social justice and the rejection of US imperialism originally at its core to focus on the defence of civil liberties and liberal democracy in Peru and the Americas.

By telling the story of interwar environmental perspectives, the introduction wishes to navigate and explain different trends in the history of global environmental law and in studies on the League. Using these questions to track possible links between history, law, and environment, the book shall explore those opportunities in environmental law and international relations in which the League was so deeply involved. As the introduction will explain, this reclaiming of the past enables us to deepen the conventional analysis beyond what we would describe as “historiographic amnesia,” which is typically characteristic of research about the League, as exemplified by the paradigm of the Rise and Fall of the League of Nations. As such, the story of the League as a whole, with its different (and sometimes inconsistent) challenges – which up until now have been missing from both the history of international law and environmental history – serves as fresh territory for new, unique exploration. The introduction will show how the two different research fields – that of the interwar period, and that of the evolution of international environmental law – can be bridged together by revealing the exciting plot of the environmental regime of the League

Taking a world historical perspective and postcolonial critique as its point of departure, this chapter goes into a survey of the state of the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism in the interwar period. The analysis is organized along the lines of the states under whose rule the Kurds came to reside; namely, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the USSR. The dissolution of empires and the emergence of nation-states that were politically, culturally and economically subjected to the Western-centred world economy since the nineteenth century was the main feature that characterized the interwar period. Kurdish reactions to the shifting borders comprised a wide array of responses ranging from assimilation to armed uprisings. Turkey and Iran adopted policies of Turkification and Persianization alongside the forced resettlement of the Kurds in interior regions. In Iraq, they were promised official recognition on paper yet it remained unfulfilled in reality. Syria under the French Mandate was home to Kurdish nationalist political and cultural activities. In the USSR, the earlier categorization of the Kurds as a ‘small nation’ later shifted to that of an ‘enemy nation’, which led to the first wave of their deportation in 1937. The chapter concludes that the interwar period in Kurdish history thus has a defining legacy in the formation of subsequent Kurdish nationalist discourses and movements.

This chapter critically analyzes Nigeria’s status as one of Britain’s imperial possessions and its strategic importance during the war. This chapter shows that the mantra of the “people’s war” was effectuated through the systematic implementation of new policies and regulations, changes in existing economic policy, and specific regulations introduced to garner support for the war. This chapter then demonstrates how Nigerians were subjected to even greater demands to fight in what was seen as a glorious defense of civilization against barbarism. It presents how Nigeria was woven “into the tapestry of British warfare and Britain’s presence on the world stage as the foremost power,” to use Ashley Jackson’s expression. It argues that government policies during the war conveyed a highly paradoxical attitude toward colonized peoples: consistent with the goals of imperialism as an economic venture on one hand, and on the other, with the Allies’ commitment to the preservation of liberty and self-determination through specific wartime colonial policies.