The Mandatory Open Door: The United States and the League of Nations mandates

Thesis

The Mandatory Open Door is a global history of US engagement with the League of Nations mandates. Although the United States never joined the League of Nations, nor took on any mandates, American officials played a sustained and influential role in shaping how the mandates functioned in the Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. This thesis explores how US officials, particularly within the State Department, used the mandates to promote American interests, strategic, ideological, and commercial. In so doing, it identifies the Open Door as the dominant policy instrument through which the United States pursued access to mandated territories. It notes that although the Open Door had been a longstanding policy approach developed in earlier US engagement with China and the Caribbean, its application to the mandates significantly altered and expanded the meanings of the policy.

This thesis examines the mandates system as a framework for managing empire through international oversight, and considers how American actors, operating from a position of formal detachment, shaped its development. It highlights how US officials capitalized on the system’s institutional pliability and the United States’ ability to selectively engage with the mandates to exert influence while avoiding deeper political entanglements. The mandates appear less as a fixed structure than as a contested arena in which sovereignty, access, and imperial authority were continuously negotiated. In tracing these dynamics, the study reveals how the United States participated in reconfiguring both colonial governance and the global order in the first half of the twentieth century.

Authors: Gladstone, B

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mjrpkq2e0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: United States; Pacific; International Law; imperialism; Africa; U.S. Foreign Policy; League of Nations; Middle East; mandates
• Subjects: Diplomatic history; International economic relations--History--20th century; United States--history--twentieth century; International organization--History; Imperialism--History--20th century; International trade--History