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in retrospect, we know that the powers being imagined in 1919 were doomed to failure

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we have to resist the temptations to engage in the retrospective fallacy

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to read history backward as if people should have known at the time that what they imagined as doomed

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Wilson was an optimist

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lessons could be learned from the First World War

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many warned that the peace was unsustainable

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turning African and Middle East colonies into protectorates

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John Maynard Keynes

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advisor in France to the British delegation

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appalled at what he saw

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wrote one of the great polemical tracts of the 20th century: "The Economic Consequences of the Peace"

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the treaty was vengeful, unfair, and pays little attention to the economic consequences of its terms

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the victors drove too high a price over the defeated and that there would be a war in response to it

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the discourse of the Wilson and Lenin models

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self-determination

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Wilson

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the problem of self-determination would reconcile the conflicts at the core of the system

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one needed a democratic constitution in Europe as the core

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put an end to the European conflict

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what to do with the multicultural empires that were now nations

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Africa

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Asia

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resistance ensued from these territories

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India fastened on this idea of self-determination

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political cartoon

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Captain Wilson is going to sail the vessel S.S. Self Determination to freedom

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India has no passport and so cannot board

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the passport office resembles the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George

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Defence of India Act 1915

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an emergency criminal law enacted by the Governor-General of India in 1915 with the intention of curtailing the nationalist and revolutionary activities during and in the aftermath of the First World War

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the arrival of the language of self-determination mobilized India

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Ghandi (1869-1948)

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not just for home rule within the British Empire as Canada had, but a spiritual succession

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Indians to be free had to be spiritually free from the British

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escalated to patterns of direct action

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taxes upon the local people to repair the war damages

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1919 Amritsar Massacre, Punjab

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Colonel Reginald Dyer order rifles to be fired into a crowd of Indians peacefully protesting

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left 300 dead and 1000 injured

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Dyer later defended actions saying he was putting down a revolutionary army

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but most victims were civilians

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created a symbol of British oppression

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1930 Gandhi's Salt March

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long walk, thousands joined him

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led to his arrest

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led to mass unrest and uprising

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became a model for civil disobedience world wide

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back in London there was a consensus growing that while speaking of principles of self-determination in Europe, it was impossible to deny them in India

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we begin to see the slow withdrawal and hemorrhaging of domestic support for British rule in India

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the trouble was that Britain was so dependent on the Indian colony to fund British reconstruction after the war