For six months in 1919, politicians, policymakers, experts, and lobbyists descended on Paris. The recently ended war had left ten million combatants dead and had torn up the map of Europe and the world. The collapse of four empires and their holdings had global repercussions. The conflict was billed as ‘the war to end all wars’ and as such the peacemakers who assembled in Paris in 1919 – led by the ‘Big Three’ of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau – had grave responsibilities. At the time, the Peace Conference was viewed by many, especially ethnic groups from all over the world seeking recognition as nation-states, as a utopian moment where war would be abolished through national liberation and the spread of democracy.Footnote 1
This article examines a network that was integral to the operation of the Peace Conference: that of the academic expert. Scholars played an important role at the conference as experts, brought by national governments to help shape the many settlements that followed in the wake of war. The article explores the tensions inherent in the scholarly involvement in the conference, where scholars represented their nations but maintained strong transnational and disciplinary identities from before the war, which enabled cross-delegation collaboration but also sometimes conflicted with the interests of the policymakers in their own national delegations. Hailed before it began as constituting a decisive break with nineteenth-century diplomacy, the Paris Peace Conference became synonymous with Western imperial acquisitiveness and the subjugation of non-Western national interests, leaving many of the scholars involved in the conference disaffected. Furthermore, the article argues that, while the scholarly world was global by 1919, its hierarchies and preoccupations remained Euro-American in scope, and that this, in turn, was evident at the Paris Peace Conference.
The academic world of the early twentieth century was increasingly networked. Scholars across the globe were connected in a variety of ways. Scholarship was international, with academics travelling to international meetings, corresponding with colleagues in foreign countries, and travelling to attend elite universities. While individuals travelled, so too did objects, such as books, and, at a less tangible level, ideas. Here, the ideas of Bruno Latour can be applied. Latour has argued that objects can facilitate, but not determine, social action, and this can be seen in the global scholarly networks of the early twentieth century, especially when the rupture of war halted the movement of books and periodicals between belligerents on opposing sides.Footnote 2 The importance placed on the acquisition and transmission of knowledge meant that the objects within which it was contained, such as books and periodicals, were often of fundamental importance. Similarly, other objects that were academic in origin, such as maps, took on much value when planning post-war settlements. In this way, the academic world can be understood as a series of Latourian actor networks, where object-actors, such as books, periodicals, maps, and even institutions, could possess agency and inform a network’s operation.Footnote 3
However, Latour’s ideas, which are more concerned with the non-human (or non-social) elements of a network, can only be applied in part here.Footnote 4 The connections that bound the academic world were also social, and were the result of spending time together in a shared endeavour. This could be as fellow students, who lived, socialized, and studied together at the same elite institution, later finding meaning in their alma mater’s alumni group. It could also be scholars working in a given discipline, who met their fellow academics at national and international events, read and reviewed their work, and bore an awareness of the members of their disciplinary community irrespective of where in the world they were based. Members of alumni or disciplinary networks were not necessarily friends, but understood one another to share interests and sympathies that were important to the individuals concerned. Scholars with shared interests and backgrounds frequently gravitated towards one another. The changes which had energized and amplified the international community of scholarship in the decades before 1914 – which saw a greater movement of people and ideas, leading to the creation of tight transnational and global bonds – informed how people related to one another in Paris, how they formed or reactivated connections, and, ultimately, how they attempted to make use of these scholarly connections to address the problems of peace-making.
The First World War has been called a ‘total war’.Footnote 5 It far exceeded the scope of any previous conflict in history and required the mobilization of entire societies and all of their resources for its successful prosecution. Politics, culture, and economies were all reoriented to facilitate the winning of the conflict. Consequently, expert knowledge was mobilized, with all belligerent states engaged in this process, drawing on their experts from the humanities to the natural sciences, applying their myriad skills to the war effort. In 1917, the British historian and politician H. A. L. Fisher remarked that the war was a ‘battle of brains’, where ‘the professor and the lecturer, the research assistant, and the research student have suddenly become powerful assets to the nation’.Footnote 6
The outbreak of war in 1914 significantly hindered the international movement of individuals, a key characteristic of the scholarly world. For the many scholarly experts present in Paris in 1919, the conference afforded an opportunity to build new transnational academic collaborations that had not been possible for more than four years. This sense of opportunity was complicated by the fact that scholars – many of whom were global actors before 1914 – had been involved in national work oriented towards national ends during the war, as well as at the conference itself.Footnote 7 This tension between a scholar’s national identity, scholarly interests, and global connectedness was a central feature of the era of the First World War.
The Paris Peace Conference has been the subject of many historical treatments. Writings about it fall into a number of discrete categories. Primarily, accounts have treated the conference as a key moment in diplomatic history, emphasizing the problems facing the peacemakers and the final settlements.Footnote 8 Another distinct body of literature focuses on the role of individuals in peace-making and the impact of the conference in shaping their subsequent political and professional trajectories.Footnote 9 The interest in individual experiences of peace-making derives both from the prominence and importance of many figures present in Paris in 1919 and also from the fact that many of those present wrote in detail about the proceedings.Footnote 10 As such, understandings of the peace conference invariably frame it in the context of international diplomacy, taking national examples, scrutinizing the wider international system, or using an individual national actor as an example. Meanwhile, a small but growing number of scholars have written of the peace conference utilizing a cultural history approach.Footnote 11
This article will use the Paris Peace Conference to exemplify the features and operation of the global scholarly networks in the period of the First World War, demonstrating their dynamism, resilience, and strategic importance. As it focuses on the Paris Peace Conference, it concentrates, by definition, on scholarly networks which were globally connected but essentially drawn from the three major allies of the war: Britain, France, and the United States of America. By 1919, these three powers wielded global power, and their representatives at the Paris Peace Conference would re-draw international boundaries following the end of a global war which saw the collapse of four empires, as well as advising on a host of other pressing issues, from reparations to the creation of the League of Nations. At the same time, the strength of scholarly networks and academic identity was such that scholars, present in Paris as national representatives, were also considerably attached to transnational disciplinary and institutional ideals, using scholarly connections to help in the process of peace-making and, at the same time, using the conference as an opportunity to build new scholarly collaborations.
Before the war
The modern academic world emerged in the mid nineteenth century. It was built on notions of Eurocentric universalism, mobility, and exchange inherent in earlier ideas such as the Republic of Letters, but it differed in significant ways. Revolutions in technology and communications shrank the world in the half-century before 1914 and saw the emergence of many scholarly disciplines in their modern forms. Disciplines were codified and sanctioned through the establishment of university departments, learned societies and associations, academic journals, and international conferences. Claims to universalism were also bolstered by the revolution in communications. The advent of the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway allowed for scholars, books, and ideas to circulate the globe as never before.Footnote 12 Universities exemplified these changes and in turn emerged as global actors. In the British empire, a network of settler universities had been established in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia, initially to disseminate notions of civilization which underpinned the imperial project, but later emerging as significant international institutions in their own right by the turn of the century.Footnote 13 In 1907, the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, Arthur James Balfour, noted that ‘things of the highest intellect and research … should bind together the citizens of a common Empire’.Footnote 14
Universities aspired to global connectedness, but to one that corresponded to prevailing understandings of the ‘civilized’ world. When Trinity College, Dublin, celebrated its tercentenary in 1892, it carefully invited representatives of British, imperial, European, and North American universities, articulating a vision of where it saw itself in the world and simultaneously mapping an expanding academic world.Footnote 15 This type of ceremony was typical of the age, and universities looked to their international peers for inspiration when planning such events.Footnote 16 Universities also led Christian missions to Central Africa and East Asia, further underscoring their connectedness and overlap with wider imperial policies.Footnote 17
Gatherings of scholars took place in different international venues before the First World War. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, soon began holding meetings abroad and electing foreign corresponding members, from countries such as Brazil, the United States, Japan, and Russia.Footnote 18 Famously, delegates attending the Association’s meeting were in Australia when war broke out in 1914. In 1899, an International Association of Academies was established, linking together long-established national academies in twenty-two countries.Footnote 19 The first international congress of historians was held in Paris in 1900 and there were three further gatherings – in Rome, Berlin, and London – before 1914.Footnote 20 Moreover, students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds increasingly travelled to undertake their education at elite universities in Europe and North America, a modern, and more amplified, manifestation of a long-standing trend in education. By the late nineteenth century, the German system of research universities came to be seen as the world’s best and attracted international graduate students, especially from the United States.Footnote 21 German superiority was confirmed through the institution of international awards such as the Nobel Prizes, with Germany being the most frequent recipient of awards in the natural sciences in the years before 1914.Footnote 22
The university has been described as a ‘cultural export from Europe’ to the rest of the world in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 23 Universities were established in Beijing, Beirut, and Istanbul around the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 24 The triumph of the German university system meant that it was exported globally. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Japanese government founded state universities at Kyoto and Tokyo to mirror the model established in Germany, with its emphasis on Bildung and Wissenschaft.Footnote 25 In Korea, European and American educational ideas were sought when modernizing the schooling system.Footnote 26 At the same time, universities emerged as global actors pursuing their own foreign policies. Well-resourced private American universities such as Harvard and Columbia concluded high-profile professorial exchange agreements with France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary in the decade before 1914, all negotiated directly with heads of state.Footnote 27 The French Republic also pursued educational exchanges in Central and South America in this period through a body called the France–America Committee.Footnote 28 All of these features created a wider international awareness of disciplines, institutions, and individual scholars.
Another theme in global educational movements in this period was what Paul Kramer has called ‘self-strengthening’, where students of one society from one country studied at the schools and universities of another at another country, seeking to bring knowledge home for the betterment of their nation. This was often prompted by crises of imperial subordination, as was the case with China, who began sending young men to American high schools and universities from the 1870s, hoping that on their return home they could bolster China’s standing with respect to Japan.Footnote 29 Many of these had been educated at American missionary schools in China, and by 1908 over 2,000 Chinese students had gone to the United States.Footnote 30 In October 1910, an excited New York Times headline read ‘Graduates of our colleges in high posts in China: American Educated Chinese are occupying important places in the awakened kingdom of the Far East and their influence is great’.Footnote 31 This movement was not restricted to the Chinese, and students came to the United States from Asia and Central America. Meanwhile, Germany attracted many British and American graduate students, British universities drew students from the white dominions of the empire (notably through the Oxford-based Rhodes scholarships), and French universities – especially the elite Sorbonne in Paris – attracted significant numbers of Russian students following the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894.Footnote 32 While the academic world of the early twentieth century was global in reach, it was also hierarchical; the institutions and ideas of Euro-America dominated, mirroring and underpinning wider discourses about the primacy of Western civilization.Footnote 33
The First World War provides a unique framework for analysing global scholarly connections. The rupture of 1914 demonstrated their simultaneous delicacy and strength. In some cases, transnational academic networks – particularly between belligerents – were severed for the duration of the war (and longer), while, in others, they were consolidated because of the war, its issues, and the national demands that it made upon scholars. The rupture of war highlighted the importance of mobility to the academic world. In wartime, with international meetings cancelled, travel rendered dangerous, and a blockade imposed on Germany by Britain, a fundamental feature of the academic world was removed. This was not just restricted to individuals, as the movement of books and periodicals was also restricted in wartime. In this context, Latour’s emphasis on the importance of non-human actors in networks is useful.Footnote 34 While the rupture brought about by the outbreak of war in 1914 seemed to bring new and unwanted nationally oriented trends to the fore, in reality the tension between transnational exchange and national identities had always been prominent. The war simply made it explicit.
The outbreak of war
The outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 shook global scholarship in two related ways. First, the coming of war put an end to the golden age of international exchange. Links were severed between belligerent states, and journeys which had become increasingly routine, such as those across the Atlantic, were imperilled by the threat of enemy submarines. Moreover, from September 1914, Great Britain imposed a naval blockade on Germany in late 1914.Footnote 35 Societies that had grown to positions of mutual interdependence before 1914 found themselves having to source certain goods and materials elsewhere for the duration of the war. This was especially problematic for academic communities, as both individual and intellectual mobility was temporarily curtailed.
The outbreak of war, and the associated issue of whether academics should support their national cause, was sometimes fraught. At the beginning of August 1914, British scholars issued a number of manifestos expressing their opposition to British entry into the escalating conflict. A manifesto published on 1 August 1914 by scholars affiliated to Oxford, Cambridge, and Aberdeen stated that Britain’s intellectual debt to Germany – where many British academics had taken higher degrees – would make war ‘a sin against civilization’.Footnote 36 A similar document was published two days later, signed by sixty-one Cambridge scholars.Footnote 37 However, scholarly opposition to British involvement in the war, like that of many liberals, dissipated with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August, after which intervention was presented in terms of moral obligation.Footnote 38
The circumstances surrounding the outbreak of war, with the German army accused of violating international law in their invasion of neutral Belgium (and subsequently committing atrocities), quickly outraged international audiences. Scholars soon spoke up, either to criticize the actions of the enemy or to defend the righteousness of their own national cause, and the war became cast as a cultural conflict, not only between nation-states but of universal values. As early as 8 August 1914, the French philosopher Henri Bergson had declared that ‘the struggle against Germany is the struggle of civilization against barbarism’, and this would inform much of the discourse to follow.Footnote 39 On 26 August the president of Columbia University in New York, Nicholas Murray Butler, wrote to the British liberal politician (and former ambassador to the United States) James Bryce, wondering ‘whether civilization has ever faced a more appalling crisis than this’.Footnote 40 Many scholars had been active in the international peace movement, and bodies such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was especially well populated by American and French scholarly elites but also had correspondents in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Russia, Spain, and many other European nations, ceased operations in November 1914 for the duration of the war.Footnote 41
Responsibility for the outbreak of war was the main issue exercising scholars in the first three weeks of August 1914. This was compounded by the events at Louvain of 25–28 August, when the German army destroyed the university library and its valuable collections.Footnote 42 To scholars around the world, these actions seemed to confirm that Germany was waging war on culture itself. This was exacerbated by the appearance of the infamous manifesto signed by ninety-three German intellectuals, artists, and writers in late September 1914. Addressing their appeal to the civilized world, the authors denied German culpability for the outbreak of the war and also denied that the German army had committed atrocities in Belgium. Reasserting nineteenth-century notions of civilization, they argued that ‘those who have allied themselves with Russians and Serbians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of inciting Mongolians and Negroes against the white race, have no right whatever to call themselves upholders of civilization’.Footnote 43 The document made global claims and elicited a global response. Condemnatory petitions were issued by scholars in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, Ireland, Switzerland, and elsewhere.Footnote 44 The Brazilian document expressed the profound sympathy of the signatories for their colleagues in France.Footnote 45 The autumn of 1914 saw scholars engage as combatants in a cultural war and it also witnessed the polarization of the academic world between the allies and the Central Powers.
The cultural war emerged as a major front in the war in 1914 and 1915. Committees were formed which made use of scholars and scholarship to mobilize national audiences and denigrate the claims of the enemy. These committees were formed through pre-existing scholarly connections. In the French case, it was dominated by scholars of the Sorbonne; of the two major initiatives to emerge in Britain, one primarily recruited from Oxford scholars (the ‘Oxford pamphlets’), and the other, Charles Masterman’s propaganda agency at Wellington House, drew on academic networks from both Oxford and Cambridge universities.Footnote 46 Scholars involved with the latter included Arnold J. Toynbee, Lewis Namier, and James Headlam-Morley, all of whom would later participate in the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 47
The war grew in scope in 1915, coming to encompass whole societies and requiring the mobilization of national economies, industry, and intellect. This manifested itself in an unprecedented division of labour that meant that scholars were definitively cast as national actors, working in the national interest, on initiatives organized by national government and armies. This was most pronounced in the case of the mobilization of science, with physicists, chemists, botanists, geologists, and others being appropriated to work on solutions to battlefield problems.Footnote 48 The applications of science to war revealed themselves ominously in April 1915, when the German army used chemical weapons on the Western Front for the first time.Footnote 49 Not long after, centralized bodies were set up in most belligerent states to draw on old scholarly networks where mutual acquaintance and shared institutional history provided useful connections.
The mobilization of science highlighted the tension between national objectives and transnational exchange. In France, the efficient mobilization of scientific resources required the official state-led blockade of Germany to be relaxed, to allow thirty-six different German scientific periodicals (which had not been received in France since August 1914) to be acquired, in order to facilitate the pursuit of research deemed to be in the national interest in wartime.Footnote 50 The operation of scholarly networks in wartime required the movement of ideas and publications as in peacetime. The mobilization of scientific networks in 1915 also informed how states would make use of expert knowledge later in the war, when the question of peace-making would be broached.
Mobilizing for universal peace
The United States entered the war in April 1917. With the arrival of the world’s greatest democracy on the side of the allies, the war was soon re-designated as a war for democracy, with the three main allies united by their shared political values. This reshaping of the discourse of the war also informed how scholarly networks were structured, as allied nations increasingly began forging greater mechanisms of exchange between one another. In March 1917, a meeting of eighty academics from Russia, Brazil, Serbia, and the United States, as well as many western European nations, took place in Paris, where plans were made for a post-war, reconstituted academic world that excluded German scholars.Footnote 51 The rhetorical re-designation of the conflict as a war for democracy led by the sister republics of the United States and France meant that Latin American republics and their intellectuals took on greater importance in this period, and they were frequently invoked, especially by the French, as models of political development. Moreover, there were increased attempts to build scholarly links between France and South American nations through the mechanism of the France–America Committee, a body sponsored by the French government for the greater projection of French cultural influence and given new impetus by the war.Footnote 52
From 1917, the allies began looking to the end of the war and beyond, and began, individually, to plan for the post-war peace settlement which would be based upon the doctrine of self-determination, made famous by the American president Woodrow Wilson. There would be a significant redistribution of land, redrawing of boundaries, and assessment of claims by national groups – hitherto, in many cases, part of multi-ethnic empires – to self-determination. Teams of scholars were assembled in the United States, France, and Britain to undertake the gargantuan research required to brief delegations before the peace conference began. There was some irony in the fact that national governments drew on their cosmopolitan scholars to carve out a global solution for universal peace that was, simultaneously, in each state’s best national interest. The scholar’s hybrid identity as a national and global actor was simultaneously leveraged and challenged in the process of peace-making. The three main allies formed significant expert groups to prepare for the peace conference from 1917.Footnote 53 They did so as they expected to wield power at the post-war peace conference, with the consequence that their decisions and declarations would have global reach. These expert groups were organized nationally, but they stood to benefit from, and significantly contribute to, international cooperation.
The Inquiry was set up in September 1917 in the United States under the guidance of Colonel Edward House, with Sidney Mezes, the president of the College of the City of New York, as its director. It brought together American experts to undertake research into conceptual problems and specific issues pertaining to the peace settlement. Over half of those working for The Inquiry came from five East Coast institutions: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities, and the American Geographical Society (AGS). Most of them were historians or geographers.Footnote 54 Membership of The Inquiry was based explicitly on one’s membership of (mostly) university-based academic networks.Footnote 55 Members were frequently selected on account of their membership in a scholarly network, not their specific expertise. While many members of The Inquiry were internationally renowned, they also frequently knew one another, and this personal acquaintance was important.
The historian Charles Seymour, of Yale University, was invited to join The Inquiry on the recommendation of the geographer Isaiah Bowman, who had in turn left Yale for the AGS, and had been recruited to work for The Inquiry by the historian James Shotwell. Seymour was assigned to study the territorial problems of the Austro-Hungarian empire. While he protested that he was not a specialist in this field, Bowman advised him to ‘get down to work and become an authority’.Footnote 56 Shotwell recruited others for The Inquiry, including his colleague Austin Evans, who was already working on the impact of the war on Italy as part of another project, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment (and run by Shotwell), which dated its origins to 1911. This project would be revived in 1919 at the Peace Conference and would investigate the impact of war on belligerent societies.Footnote 57
While The Inquiry valued expertise in a certain historical or geographical field, the trust born of personal acquaintance was also essential.Footnote 58 Central to this process was Woodrow Wilson. A political scientist, historian, and former president of Princeton University, he told his academic advisors to ‘tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it’.Footnote 59 However, Shotwell noted years later that Wilson’s position was problematic as it blurred the lines between technical and political advice.Footnote 60 The Inquiry had two related tasks. First, it was to provide an ideological basis for peace, which would become famous as the doctrine of self-determination.Footnote 61 Second, it was to arrange redistribution of territories and national boundaries along ethnic national lines in a manner more or less consistent with the idea of self-determination, a problematic task as no clear standard was agreed upon by which nationality might be measured or judged.
America’s major allies formed similar bodies in anticipation of the peace. In early 1917 the French government established the Comité d’études with the historian Ernest Lavisse at its head. The politician Charles Benoist, who was responsible for its formation, wrote of his desire that it be populated ‘exclusively by men of science, not admitting politicians’.Footnote 62 It was dominated by historians and geographers, most of whom were connected to Paul Vidal de la Blache, the father of the modern French school of geography. They assembled under him to begin their own work on future territorial settlements.Footnote 63 The composition of the Comité d’études was, much like its American counterpart, dominated by a small number of influential academic institutions. In the French case, the majority of the members were drawn from the academic elites of the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure, and the Collège de France.Footnote 64
In 1917, two Oxford scholars, Arthur Zimmern and Arnold Toynbee, urged the War Cabinet to create a ‘Peace Terms Intelligence Section’, resulting in the formation of a Historical Section, initially at the Admiralty before moving to the Foreign Office.Footnote 65 The Cambridge-educated historian George Prothero was appointed to lead the section, which was tasked with providing ‘the British Delegates to the Peace Conference with information in the most convenient form … respecting the different countries, districts, islands, &c., with which they might have to deal’.Footnote 66 It produced 174 different handbooks to brief delegates to the peace conference. Prothero used his academic connections to engage eighty academics, such as the Oxford-educated Toynbee, Allen Leeper, and E. L. Woodward in the production of these volumes, while the Cambridge historians James Headlam-Morley and Harold Temperley both assisted Prothero in recruitment.Footnote 67 As in the French and American cases, a small number of influential institutions – Oxford and Cambridge – provided many members. At the same time, the scholars of The Inquiry and Prothero’s Historical Section began liaising with one another; the Columbia geographer Douglas Johnson visited the Historical Section in London in April 1918.Footnote 68
Other nations did not make similar preparations in looking forward to the Peace Conference. The Japanese, for example, hoped to be viewed as among the civilized nations of the world, and therefore opted for a policy of ‘conformity to world trends’ in order to be accepted as such.Footnote 69 More significant to the Japanese, and many other nations, was the fact that they had specific rather than universal foreign policy claims that had an impact upon their respective states, concerning which they were already well informed. For Japan, this centred on their desire to secure economic rights in the Chinese province of Shandong, which had formerly been held by Germany and which was promised to Japan by Britain, France, Italy, and Russia in a secret agreement of 1917.Footnote 70
On the other side of this dispute, the Chinese hoped to gain recognition of their rights to Shandong, arguing both that it was the cradle of Chinese civilization and that it had been taken from them by force by Germany.Footnote 71 The delegation which they brought to the Paris Peace Conference would be preoccupied with this issue and reflected both the educational trajectories of Chinese students over previous decades and, more generally, the pre-war composition and hierarchies of the academic world. Many of the Chinese delegates had been recruited for diplomatic work because of their American educations.Footnote 72 Of the five delegates who were to represent the Chinese in Paris, three had been educated at East Coast American universities or colleges, providing an important link to the experts of The Inquiry. In Paris, James Shotwell exaggerated a little when he wrote that ‘they were a very dignified set of young men, none over fifty, and all of them held doctorates from American universities’, but the significance of the educational backgrounds of the Chinese delegates was clearly impressive to him.Footnote 73 Most famous among the Chinese delegates was V. K. Wellington Koo, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, who had completed a doctorate at Columbia in 1912 and held honorary degrees from both Columbia and Yale.Footnote 74 Koo’s formidable scholarly reputation meant that he had met with Wilson on a presidential lecture tour before 1912, and he had held positive meetings with Wilson in the United States before the conference, which led him to believe that Chinese aims would find a welcome reception in Paris.Footnote 75
Preparations for the Peace Conference demonstrated simultaneously the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-war academic world. Strong ties were leveraged, reasserting the dominance of the Euro-American allies. In 1918, André Tardieu was appointed French high commissioner in the United States. Tardieu had been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1908 and used his knowledge of the country, as well as his extensive contacts, in his new role. The British ambassador to Washington, DC, Cecil Spring-Rice, claimed enviously that Tardieu and President Wilson were on ‘very good terms’, although he did not indicate whether this was due to a pre-existing academic bond.Footnote 76 The geographer Emmanuel de Martonne was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University in 1916, where Nicholas Murray Butler wrote that it would be ‘a great thing for Columbia University and for American scholarship’ if Martonne could be kept ‘on this side of the Atlantic’.Footnote 77 Martonne’s connections to the American academy proved useful, and be began to liaise with The Inquiry in the summer of 1918.Footnote 78
Conversely, there was little in the way of cooperation between the French and British experts, with each remaining ‘largely ignorant’ of the other’s plans at the beginning of the Peace Conference.Footnote 79 This needs to be understood not in terms of divergent geopolitical priorities (although these would become apparent in Paris) but rather as a result of relatively few structural ties linking British and French universities. British universities had traditionally had stronger links to Germany and the white dominions, while French universities had, in the decade before 1914, worked hard to cultivate connections with scholars in the United States. In this way, the pre-war contours of the academic world had a direct impact upon planning for the post-war settlement.
Academics at the Paris Peace Conference
Paris since December has been the place of assembly for more jurists, historians, and practical shapers of the laws of nations than previously ever met for conference, professional camaraderie, and profoundly important formal action.Footnote 80
The Paris Peace Conference was a transnational moment in which a small number of allied actors wielded disproportionate global power. It presented an opportunity for scholars to begin sharing ideas again in ways which had not been possible for over four years. For many scholars, it was a reunion, albeit a difficult one: they juggled official, nationally defined responsibilities with their cosmopolitan scholarly identities, and they drew on academic connections in both the conduct of diplomacy and the pursuit of new collaborations.
At the Paris Peace Conference, membership of a scholarly network often cut across national delegations and opened doors that would have otherwise remained closed. However, the hierarchies of the academic world simultaneously limited cooperation. The majority of scholars in Paris came from a small number of elite universities in each of the major allied nations, meaning that, while scholars were addressing global problems following the war, the majority of connections between them were rooted in the scholarly communities of Euro-American universities.
The Americans brought many members of The Inquiry to Paris to continue their research and advisory work, where they were renamed the Intelligence Division of the American delegation, the largest such group of scholars at the conference.Footnote 81 The French brought few scholars to the conference in an official capacity, as they could consult the Parisian academic elite as needs arose. Only three full-time academics were appointed to the French delegation, all legal scholars from the Sorbonne: Geouffre de Lapradelle, Ferdinand Larnaude, and André Weiss.Footnote 82 Lapradelle had spent three years in the United States during the war as visiting professor and was well connected to the East Coast academic elites. The official translator of the conference was Paul Mantoux, a normalien who had been lecturing in England just before the war, held a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne and was well known in scholarly circles in France, Britain, and the United States.Footnote 83 Many British scholars were present as part of their country’s delegation, most prominently in the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Division, which brought scholars from Oxford and Cambridge, such as Toynbee, Zimmern, Rex and Allan Leeper (all Oxford), and E. H. Carr, Philip Noel-Baker, and James Barnes (all Cambridge).Footnote 84 The educational backgrounds of scholars in Paris demonstrated the hierarchical nature of national and international academia, where a small number of elite educational institutions furnished a disproportionate number of delegates.
Membership of transnational networks was a vital component of the identity of individual scholars. On their arrival in Paris, academics often sought to reacquaint themselves with colleagues from whom they had been separated during the war. The Yale historian Charles Seymour went to the American University Union, the home of American university men on active service in Europe, to meet with former students who were in France. On 17 January 1919 he sought out Charles Seignobos, a member of the Comité d’études whom he described as the ‘most prominent modern historian of France’.Footnote 85 Shotwell used his time in Paris to connect with scholarly colleagues from all over the world. He was initially employed as the librarian of the American delegation and put his academic connections to good use. At the Bibliothèque de la guerre, newly established by the French government, he discovered that:
The librarian is Camille Bloch, a historian whose volume on the care of the poor in the old regime on the eve of the French Revolution was one that I had reviewed at length in the Political Science Quarterly years before, and had sent him a copy of my review. It was a fortunate coincidence, for it opened the doors of French bureaucracy, and he set about getting the wheels started which would permit us to have free access to all their documents.Footnote 86
Shotwell also met with Paul Mantoux through academic work, noting that ‘he was surprised to know that I used [Mantoux’s dissertation on the Industrial Revolution in England] as a text book in my Columbia class in Social History’.Footnote 87 Meanwhile, during his time in Paris, Isaiah Bowman dined with the Polish geographer Eugeniusz Romer, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, having first met the last in 1912 on a transcontinental geographical excursion organized by the AGS.Footnote 88 The Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijic had also met many of the American geographers on the same excursion in 1912. Cvijic spent the war years at the Sorbonne – at the invitation of de Martonne – and thus was connected to the geographers of the Comité d’études.Footnote 89
Scholarly connections also emerged through an affinity for one’s alma mater. Charles Seymour, who worked at Yale University but who had taken a BA degree at Cambridge University, wrote that ‘I find that my being a Cambridge man has been of great help.’Footnote 90 Seymour also noted how the Oxford men tended to work together, while one of them, Harold Nicolson, wrote of his delight when a special dinner for Balliol (Oxford) men at the Peace Conference was held in March: ‘At least 60% of the Civil Service were at Balliol. We feel proud.’Footnote 91 The extent to which membership of an alumni group shaped attitudes towards the peace will be explored in the final section.
A shared alma mater also formed ties across national delegations. As noted above, a number of the Chinese delegates had been educated at American East Coast universities. This meant that, once they arrived in Paris, they had an immediate connection to some of their colleagues in The Inquiry. This institutional affinity ran deep. Koo met with Shotwell, who had lectured him at Columbia in 1909, for the first time in Paris on 21 December 1918 and, following ‘very pleasant reminiscences’, they got down to discussing ‘the problems of China at the Peace Conference’.Footnote 92 They met again in February and Shotwell wrote in his diary that ‘there were Red Cross workers … and some young officers of Koo’s student days in Columbia. We had a very pleasant time, and when I left the young people were singing Columbia songs around the piano.’Footnote 93 The Paris Peace Conference was thus a reunion for many connected to elite universities, with both scholarly and social ties linking delegations from different nations.
While the conference was a global scholarly event, it also perpetuated wartime exclusion. Shortly before the conference began, an article in the Advocate of Peace noted the emergence of ‘an educational entente’, arguing that international academia should continue to ‘include all nations that have common ideals of civilization based on humanism and democracy, and that have been willing to sacrifice men and treasure for those ideals during the war’.Footnote 94 The proceedings at Paris were dominated by the victors of the war, and, by extension, served to perpetuate the exclusion of German scholars from the international mainstream. Germany was excluded from the newly created League of Nations – a product of the Paris Peace Conference – and this in turn led to its exclusion from international scholarly bodies. The International Research Council (IRC), an international organization of national scientific research bodies, held its first meeting in Brussels in July 1919, with delegates coming from Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Romania, Poland, Serbia, Britain, and the US.Footnote 95 It represented global scientific researchers but this was restricted to the victors of the war.Footnote 96 It was not until 1926, following the Locarno treaties, that Germany was permitted to join the League of Nations and, by extension, the IRC.Footnote 97
The League of Nations had its own body to deal with educational and intellectual issues: the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC), established in 1922. The CIC also continued with the formal exclusion of German intellectuals but otherwise boasted members (and corresponding members) from beyond the Euro-American intellectual world: Brazil and India were represented among the CIC’s original members, and the number of non-Western members would rise thereafter, in what Daniel Laqua has described as ‘the expansion of internationalism’.Footnote 98 Indeed, for Brazil, participation in the CIC led to its development of a cultural diplomacy policy for the first time.Footnote 99 The post-war academic world was scarred by the conflict from which it had emerged. Euro-American institutions remained dominant, but as long as one had been on the victors’ side in the war (or at least neutral), it was increasingly global.
At an official level, the academic world was refashioned as an inter-allied one from the Paris Peace Conference until Locarno. However, individual scholars, who often identified as international academics rather than national actors, sometimes rejected this. The Cambridge-educated John Maynard Keynes, present at the Peace Conference with the British Treasury, forms a good example. Keynes was not an enthusiastic supporter of the war but was energized by the intellectual problems posed by it. In January 1919, he was part of an allied delegation sent to Trier to negotiate the renewal of the Armistice agreement with German representatives. There, he and the German banker Carl Melchior bonded out of a shared desire to overcome wartime animosity and to negotiate in a humane, rather than hostile, manner.Footnote 100 Keynes also employed his influential position as a member of the national delegation in Paris to rebuild connections between scholars who had been on opposing sides in the war. In May and June 1919 he used his proximity to Italian diplomats to facilitate the communication of a manuscript from Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher then being held as a prisoner of war in Cassino, to his former mentor, Bertrand Russell, in Cambridge.Footnote 101 In this instance, a shared alma mater and similar scholarly preoccupations bound Keynes, Wittgenstein, and Russell together and overcame the national differences of wartime.
Scholars and settlements
A number of aspects of the settlement reached at Paris highlight both the ways in which academics were utilized and how they impacted upon the peace, particularly on the territorial settlements. Wilsonian self-determination entailed the application of historical, linguistic, and geographical expertise to the post-war map in order to grant nationhood to ethnic groups. However, self-determination was applied selectively, being mostly restricted to the populations of central and eastern Europe. While Wilsonian promises of national liberation resonated globally, they were not applied globally. Instead, the victors of the war saw the extra-European sphere as one where they could consolidate and expand their imperial influence. This section will briefly assess the role of scholars and academic networks in three post-war settlements: the formation of Yugoslavia, the Shandong issue, and the fate of the Ottoman empire (the last being resolved at the San Remo Conference of 1920). In so doing, it will show that academic networks and expertise were utilized in an inconsistent manner.
The Yugoslav, or south Slav state, had been formed before the Peace Conference began, but its precise borders were decided in Paris. The issue confused many politicians, who in turn looked to their experts for advice.Footnote 102 Charles Seymour was assigned to work on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. Seymour believed, like many of his colleagues, that the city of Fiume should be ceded to Yugoslavia, on account of its location and the primarily Slav population in the surrounding region.Footnote 103 However, the Italian delegates claimed Fiume for Italy. Seymour’s proposals for drawing the borders between Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia were approved and adopted by President Wilson, despite the opposition of his colleague, the geographer Douglas Johnson. Johnson argued that geographical and topographical features, not historical development, were the best guides. This escalated into an argument between Johnson and Seymour at least once.Footnote 104 When his proposal was adopted, Seymour wrote that ‘It is a great satisfaction to me and a personal triumph, as I had the French, British, and Italian delegates on the territorial commission opposed to me as well as Johnson. But Wilson backed my point of view and persuaded Lloyd George and Clemenceau.’Footnote 105 Where scholars were united by shared preoccupations, they could also be divided by differing scholarly practices.
Another scholar who exerted influence on the Yugoslav settlement was the historian R. W. Seton-Watson, of King’s College London, a long-time advocate of minorities in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Seton-Watson travelled to Paris as a private individual and stayed in close proximity to the British and American delegations, hoping that his expertise would be required when it came to the settlements in the former Hapsburg lands, where there was a lack of general understanding. His journal, New Europe, had long pressed the claims of Slav groups and denounced those of Italy. His friend Henry Wickham-Steed was a foreign correspondent for The Times, and had access to men such as Arthur Balfour, Georges Clemenceau, and Colonel House.Footnote 106 The connection to House resulted in both Seton-Watson and Wickham-Steed being consulted regarding the Italian–Yugoslav settlement. Consequently, Woodrow Wilson adopted their proposed border as a basis for his negotiations in the Adriatic.Footnote 107 The significance of Seton-Watson’s activities lay in the fact that he was in Paris as a private individual but drew on his scholarly connections and access to expert knowledge to influence the settlement.
Seton-Watson had an important connection to the British delegation through his friend Harold Temperley, Reader in History at Cambridge. The two had visited Austria-Hungary together in 1907, where they took on the cause of Slovak minorities. Having served earlier in the war, Temperley was invalided out of the front lines with illness in 1915 and began work with the War Office. In 1917 he wrote a history of Serbia and in 1918, now transferred to the Foreign Office, he was sent to the Balkans to observe conditions there in anticipation of the peace. A serendipitous scholarly connection came into play here when he met LeRoy King, an American historian who had been sent to Serbia by the American government for similar reasons. King’s academic mentor had been Archibald Cary Coolidge, with whom Temperley was acquainted from a stay at Harvard University in 1911. This connection proved important and led to a pooling of information and ideas between the British and Americans.Footnote 108
The aforementioned Jovan Cvijic used his connections to the scholars of the Sorbonne as well as to the geographers of The Inquiry to further the Serbian national cause. He produced a map of the Balkans that was used by The Inquiry and ensured a settlement that was more favourable to Yugoslavia than might otherwise have been the case.Footnote 109 The cases of Seymour, Seton-Watson, and Cvijic show that while scholars had different motivations for action, the connections formed in the academic world and the collective identity of scholars could be vital in achieving their desired outcomes.
However, the geopolitical potential of academic connections had its limits, which reflected both the Eurocentric focus of the Peace Conference and the hierarchical Euro-American composition of the pre-war academic world. These two preoccupations overlapped in the case of the Chinese desire to have Shandong province ceded to them. The Chinese and American delegations fraternized in Paris, identifying with one another through their shared educational backgrounds in American East Coast institutions, but this fraternization did not lead to any favourable treatment of Chinese claims. Wilsonian self-determination was, practically speaking, only ever applied in Europe, and, in this instance, the American desire to placate their Japanese ally overrode other concerns. This was especially urgent for the Americans, following their rejection of a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the covenant of the League of Nations and because of Wilson’s desire not to have the Japanese walk out of the Peace Conference as the Italian delegation had. Racial hierarchies and the discourse of civilization still dominated at the Peace Conference; while an observer had previously remarked that Wellington Koo ‘had as much of America in him as he had of China’, cold geopolitical realities won out.Footnote 110
The activity of geographers at the Peace Conference demonstrated that, while connections were important, scholarly outputs could be too. Possession of accurate maps became a concern for all peacemakers, and a few delegations had a distinct advantage. The American geographer Douglas Johnson wrote that ‘The French and British in particular are continually coming to us for data, maps, etc.’Footnote 111 Frequently, they were sites of performance: Seymour recalled ‘the most important men in the world on all fours’ on a map produced by The Inquiry.Footnote 112 The prominence of maps at the Peace Conference reinforces Latour’s argument about the importance of non-human elements to networks.
Maps could be employed in a multitude of ways. In the case of the Balkans, experts used them to make arguments for national boundaries based upon geographical features, such as mountains and rivers, or on the language spoken in a given region. However, maps could also be drawn upon, changing their content to reflect political rather than geographical concerns. This was the case with the settlement of the lands of the former Ottoman empire. Here, the concept of self-determination was ignored and the imperial designs of Britain and France prevailed. Consequently, the settlement did not involve the large-scale involvement of scholars or scientific methods. However, it did utilize scholarly objects – specifically, a map produced by the Royal Geographical Society in 1910, which was used in 1916 and overdrawn to reflect the Sykes–Picot agreement, which divided the Arab lands of the former Ottoman empire between areas of British and French direct and indirect control.Footnote 113 While parts of this wartime agreement were later changed, its general substance remained the same when the San Remo conference settled the issue in April 1920.
This logic also prevailed at the Paris Peace Conference. In January 1919, it was announced that the newly formed League of Nations would assign a series of mandates, through which Western nations (and Britain’s white dominions) could ‘oversee’ the development of the former imperial holdings of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires.Footnote 114 In practice, this meant a continuation of imperialism and orientalist discourses of civilization – stark evidence that Wilson’s new world order built upon self-determination would be restricted to Europe. It was notable, too, that scholarly experts did not play a significant role in the redistribution of the Ottoman lands, as they had done in central and eastern Europe.
Scholarly identities
Despite taking on new responsibilities, many academics continued to identify as scholars while at the Peace Conference. Douglas Johnson noted that ‘There is a humorous, or perhaps you will prefer to say tragic, side to the whole matter, when you think of American college professors, near-diplomats, sitting about the table with men like Tardieu, Cambon, Sir Eyre Crowe and other veterans of the diplomatic service and Foreign Office.’Footnote 115 James Shotwell wrote privately that ‘It is sometimes a little alarming to find that your mere opinion is really going to be taken as the basis for an international agreement.’Footnote 116
Scholars identified with one another at the Peace Conference, often seeing themselves as separate from the professional politicians and diplomats. Notable, too, was the fact that many scholars were frustrated by both the processes and the outcomes of the Peace Conference. Indeed, some made unfavourable comparisons between life in a university and at the conference. Johnson claimed that he ‘used to think that for general inefficiency the average college professor had no serious competitor’, before adding that this was before he made the acquaintance of army officers and State Department officials.Footnote 117 Charles Seymour was thankful that he belonged ‘to a college faculty whose methods are perhaps unscientific but who don’t get snarled up in red tape’, referring to the inefficient processes of the conference.Footnote 118 Fundamentally, both Johnson and Seymour still saw themselves as scholars, not policymakers.
Many scholars were dissatisfied with the progress of the Peace Conference and the severity of the terms imposed on Germany. Opposition to the settlement emerged at Paris and, while it was a significant that many scholars were disappointed with it, opposition was not a uniquely academic phenomenon. That said, there were distinct reasons that led scholars to feel aggrieved. Antony Lentin has argued that opponents of an overly punitive settlement formed part of a social and intellectual elite, many of whom were educated at Oxford and Cambridge and who had, as a consequence, strong Christian values, close ties to and respect for German academia and cultural achievement more generally, and a shared liberal outlook. This belief in internationalism and liberal values stood in sharp contrast to the severity of the terms being imposed upon Germany, as well as disillusionment with the unfulfilled promise of the language of self-determination.Footnote 119
Scholars had individual reasons for becoming disillusioned with proceedings. John Maynard Keynes felt the settlement was too punitive and argued that German reparations should be based not on what they ought to pay, but on what they were able to pay. He also proposed the cancellation of inter-allied war debts.Footnote 120 Keynes resigned in June 1919 and voiced his frustrations in The economic consequences of the peace, published later that year, but he was not alone among British scholars in his disillusionment, with Zimmern and Toynbee also writing of their disgust at the settlement.Footnote 121 R. W. Seton-Watson, who was not a member of a national delegation, complained that the Great Powers at the Peace Conference ‘almost invariably disregard the advice of these experts, and sometimes do not even ask for it’.Footnote 122 The Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison resigned from the American delegation in protest at the terms of the settlement in the Baltic and what he considered ill-conceived policies towards Russia. However, despite the misgivings of many of his colleagues, he was the only Inquiry member to resign.Footnote 123 It is perhaps unsurprising that there is little documented dissent among French scholars.Footnote 124 For the French, the wartime logic of national self-defence still overrode all.
For scholars, diplomacy was not the only concern in Paris. The conference presented an opportunity for international academic collaboration that had not been possible since 1914. Moreover, the war itself became a new and intriguing object of study. A shared language and similar intellectual and university culture facilitated greater Anglo-American interaction than was the case between other nations. While in Paris, James Shotwell discovered that he had been appointed to oversee the Carnegie Endowment’s Economic and social history of the world war. This epic project would ultimately encompass 152 volumes, written by contributors who were not necessarily scholars but who had direct experience of wartime government.Footnote 125 Shotwell used his time in Paris to meet with individuals who later wrote volumes for this project, such as Camille Bloch, Charles Gide, and Gaston Jèze.Footnote 126 He took on other projects too: together with the British historians James Headlam-Morley and G. W. Prothero, he planned the publication of a diplomatic history of Anglo-German relations in the decade before the war.Footnote 127
The Oxford-educated scholar Lionel Curtis also saw the Peace Conference as an opportunity to build collaborations. He wanted to organize an Anglo-American institute of international affairs to conduct research and educate a wide public audience. In May 1919 he gathered together thirty experts from the American and British delegations, including Nicolson, Headlam-Morley, Toynbee, Coolidge, and George Louis Beer to found the Institute of International Affairs, which later became better known as Chatham House.Footnote 128 One of the Institute’s first acts was to write a collaborative history of the Peace Conference, edited by Beer and Harold Temperley. In his introduction to the first volume, Temperley argued that the Peace Conference presented a unique opportunity to write about the issues facing the globe in the aftermath of war. He argued that ‘such a diversity of minds has seldom been associated on a single task under one roof’.Footnote 129 The authorship of the history was drawn from Anglo-American university elites, with five of the sixteen contributors coming from Cambridge University, four from Oxford, two from Columbia and one from Harvard.Footnote 130 The dominance of a small coterie of Euro-American educational institutions was once more asserted. Moreover, all of this collaboration demonstrated that scholars viewed the Peace Conference as presenting an opportunity for scholarly collaboration as well as being a diplomatic event.
Conclusion
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was a unique moment in the history of global educational networks. It demonstrated both the reach of scholarly networks and the extent to which academics identified with one another globally. It was heralded as a definitive break in international relations, discarding the secret diplomacy and imperial acquisitiveness of the nineteenth century and remaking the world in a rational and scientific manner. This, in turn, followed on from the developments of wartime, where scholarship had taken on a central role in the operation of governments and the prosecution of war. Ultimately, however, the Peace Conference remained merely a moment where hopes for the universal application of self-determination were dashed and scholars did not play the role that they had envisaged.
The Paris Peace Conference was a microcosm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international scholarship. While the scholarly world made claims to universalism, it, too, was limited by its own hierarchies and preoccupations. Its power bases remained the elite universities of Europe and North America, minus the scholars of the Central Powers. While the war threatened permanent disruption to many of these networks, the conference underlined the strength of many connections, as scholars with shared interests, backgrounds, and histories all gravitated towards one another, traversing national boundaries. Institutions such as the CIC and the IRC would ultimately foster the expansion of internationalism in the post-war period, but this was done on the terms of the victors of the war, meaning that the geopolitical concerns of the peacemakers remained essentially aligned with the structures of the scholarly world into the 1920s. The Paris Peace Conference failed in its aim of preventing future wars, but it demonstrated a transformation born of the First World War: specialist knowledge, of global application, had now become an important, but still limited, part of the practice of policymaking.
Tomás Irish is Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University. His publications include The University at War 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States (2015) and Trinity in War and Revolution 1912–1923 (2015).
