The Making of a World Order: Global Historical Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles

Why does 1919 deserve further study and debate a hundred years later? What lessons for global history may we learn from the world order created at the end of the Great War? Drawing insight from the global turn of the past several decades that has forced us to reconsider the most important world events and processes since the French Revolution and especially the growing interest in World War I as a global conflict that extended far beyond the borders of Europe, this volume explores the global political ramifications of the treaties prepared at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 by focusing on key topics: how the Paris Peace Conference re-shaped the geo-political configurations of the Middle East, the importance of transformations in Asia and particularly China in the immediate postwar period, the shifts in Southeastern Europe, new feminist movements in Central Europe, and the pre-history of neoliberalism.

Read together, the papers demonstrate how the peace treaties signed in 1919 and 1920 marked a profound transformation on local, national, continental, and global scales.

Albert Wu is an associate research fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan. Trained as a global historian, his work lies at the intersection of the histories of imperialism, religion, and medicine. He is the author of From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950 (2016).

Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris. He has published widely on French political and diplomatic history, including two books: Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880 (2018) and Adolphe Thiers: La contingence et le pouvoir (2018).