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The place and purpose of trusteeship in the post‐Second World War world order aroused passions and suspicions that were no less pronounced than those which threatened to disrupt the peace negotiations at Versailles two decades earlier, and these tensions, which divided the US and Britain in particular, emanated from a fundamental disagreement over the purpose of trusteeship and its relation to the future of empire in world affairs. British commentators on empire tended to interpret the idea of trusteeship in the context of an imperial tradition that dated back to Edmund Burke's interest in the affairs of the East India Company, invoking trusteeship as a principle against which to judge colonial administration and, therefore, understood the tutelage of dependent peoples as a justification of empire. Americans, who were born of a very different colonial and political experience, were a great deal less inclined to see trusteeship as a justification of empire than as an alternative to the perpetuation of empire. Interrogates the claims that structured the terms of this debate, how they shaped the purpose of trusteeship as contemplated in the Charter of the UN, and the ideas upon which the anti‐colonial movement seized in order to destroy the legitimacy of trusteeship in international society. There are five sections: The Atlantic Charter and the Future of Empire; The Reform of Empire; Trusteeship and the Charter of the UN; The End of Empire; and Human Equality and the Illegitimacy of Trusteeship.

This chapter is divided into three main sections. Firstly, it embraces emergence of a vast American determination to reform the world so as to eliminate the roots of Europe's ability to b ring war and revolution to it. The vision, developed in acts such as Lend Lease and conferences such as Bretton Woods, was based on three key principles: multilateral trade liberalization, reformed collective security, raising living standards everywhere. These ideas of the postwar universe were far more important to Roosevelt than the in's and out's of his relations with Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle or whoever, and ran through much of the vast American popular debate on the future role of the US in the world. Secondly, the chapter looks at response of the British and French leadership in particular to the emergence of this design. The British understood rightly that it contained a mortal threat to the British Empire; the other colonial powers, including the Dutch, soon fought it too. There was much disdain for American naivety, and at the same time fear of the extreme ruthlessness the Americans brought to dealings over markets, currencies, raw materials, civil aviation etc. Thirdly the chapter considers speculation of European intellectuals on the world after the war and America's possible place in it. In general these people wholly underestimated the new American will to power, and ignored its contents, all agreeing that the age of free enterprise capitalism was finished in any case, and collectivisms of various types would take over. The exile component in America and elsewhere poured scorn on these ideas, but they dominated resistance and anti-fascist movements everywhere. One thing the Europeans all agreed on was that the popular masses would never go back to the miseries of the pre-war era, and that expectations for a better life had risen, not least because America had shown the way.

Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.

This chapter describes how the protection of human rights came, during World War II, to feature in schemes for creating a new world order, encouraging the drafting of comprehensive codes of rights to be protected. It considers the role of the British and American governments in this development, giving accounts both of private initiatives, such as that of H. G. Wells, and official contributions, as in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations Declaration. It describes the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, and the processes which led to the establishment of the United Nations, and the idea that it should be concerned with the international protection of human rights in the post war world. It examines the resulting expansion of the boundaries of international law at the expense of protected domestic jurisdiction.

This chapter charts Reddick’s rise as a major African American intellectual during the World War II era. As the curator of the Schomburg Collection in Harlem, Reddick helped organize Pan-African Congresses alongside W. E. B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah, became a force in the Double Victory campaign against fascism at home and abroad, collected black soldiers’ letters during the war, used the library as a base for political organizing in response to crises such as the 1943 Harlem Race Riot and those surrounding the Atlantic Charter, published pioneering articles on Africa and the US military’s evolving policies toward black soldiers, pressured the US government to recognize the military heroics of black messman Dorie Miller, and generally served as a public intellectual for black America. He also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to effect racial change and served as a member of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on Negro Studies alongside Melville Herskovits and Lorenzo Dow Turner.

Government leaders put ideas of Asian regional cooperation into practice, for instance, in the Greater East Asian Conference of 1943, a meeting of seven Asian heads of government held in Tokyo. The countries represented were neither completely independent nor treated by Tokyo as equals, but the organizers of the gathering either understood or presented them in such terms, bringing yet another influence to the multifaceted evolution of internationalism in wartime Japan. Using a combination of Wilsonian and Pan-Asianist rhetoric and structures simultaneously to fortify the commitment of the other countries of Asia to aid Japan in its war effort and to improve Japan’s image in the eyes of its enemies, the conference organizers turned these ideals to violent and imperialistic ends, but also helped solidify them in the Japanese official and popular understanding of international affairs and Japan’s regional and global role.

This chapter examines how, during the Second World War, Latin American feminists continued to push broad meanings of international women’s rights and human rights in spite of little support from their U.S. counterparts. The women from the U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus who replaced Doris Stevens in the Inter-American Commission of Women avoided promoting women’s “equal rights” because of the fraught Equal Rights Amendment debate in the U.S. Latin American feminists effectively pushed these U.S. counterparts on a number of issues, including toward advocacy for maternity legislation, which Latin American feminists asserted as a human right. The Atlantic Charter and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which underscored social and economic rights, inspired Latin American feminists’ broad calls for human rights. Their framings included women’s rights, and greater economic security and multilateral relations in the Americas. These demands came together at the 1945 Chapultepec conference where a number of Latin American feminists in the Inter-American Commission of Women also paved the way for Latin American countries to appoint women to their delegations going to the conference that would create the United Nations.

The Coda links the expressions of telegraphic optimism in two antebellum lithographs to the larger recall of affection that characterizes U.S. regard for England near the end of the Civil War. It connects this recall of affection to a larger pattern in U.S. regard for England, and suggests that in light of that pattern, transatlantic readers might attend to the ruptures in transatlantic discourse that provide terms for a useable past, possibilities for more progressive modes of transatlantic esteem.

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese taking all of Indochina, Roosevelt prepared the country for war and began to implement his grand strategy for victory. The president implemented his expansive vision of the Monroe Doctrine to allow naval escorts of lend-lease supplies across the North Atlantic, extended American aid to Russia, creating the Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and joined with London in enumerating Western war aims through the adoption of the Atlantic Charter. At the same time, he extended the economic embargo against Japan to include oil, bringing the final break in relations with Tokyo. By the fall 1941, the U.S. Navy was engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic with German submarines. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 brought the United States directly into World War II.

This chapter focuses on Harry Hopkins's role as intermediary in the conference between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in August 1941 in Placentia Bay. It examines the issues relating to lend-lease and World War II that Roosevelt and Churchill discussed during the conference, including the provisions of the Atlantic Charter and Churchill's objective of persuading the U.S. president to declare war against Germany. It also considers the agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill for a three-power supply meeting in Russia in late September 1941.

Chapter 7 (“Birthing the Liberal International Order”) focuses on the American order project after the Second World War. It argues that there were actually two distinct American visions for order in the 1940s, a universalist global order vision—manifested in the United Nations system—and a smaller Western order vision—comprised of the Bretton Woods economic and NATO security systems. Observers often posit that these layers were complementary, representing an evolving but not contradictory strategy by the United States to build an inclusive and multilayered international order. By contrast, this chapter argues that this transition from global to Western order can be best explained by American leaders’ shifting threat perceptions during this critical period. While they began with a more inclusive global order vision, they soon shifted to a more exclusive and adversarial Western order idea as they became increasingly wary of the extraordinary threat posed by their former wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The Soviet threat is the most important causal force in explaining this shift in America’s ordering strategy, and the story of the liberal international order’s origins simply cannot be told without it.

In September 1940, the League of Nations established a Mission at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. While colleagues back in Geneva were isolated, the Princeton Mission served as a hub of expertise for the US administration and social scientific communities engaged in planning a new order for international relations. The Mission was also an important resource for the British government, and for European governments in exile. Life was not without its difficulties. Money and staff where short, and there was the competing ambitions of the International Labour Organization, now based in Montreal, with which to contend. The Mission drafted Anglo-American documents supporting the Atlantic Charter and developed its own unique take on the challenges states would face once war was over. It was played a central role in the creation of an United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and supported United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Chapter 5 examines the period when Britain and America cemented the Anglo-American “special relationship,” personified in Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s deepening fraternal friendship that followed their first face-to-face meeting in August and the announcement of their shared war aims and democratic values in the Atlantic Charter. As Anglo-American relations drew closer, Anglo-Irish and Irish-American relations worsened. During this interval, David Gray and Helen Kirkpatrick stepped up their collaborations to pressure de Valera’s government to give up its narrowly “self-interested” and “dangerous” neutrality policy, as they defined it. In August and September 1941, their collusion almost caused a diplomatic incident as Joseph Walshe and other members of the Irish government believed Gray and Kirkpatrick were creating damning misinformation to force an end to the neutrality policy. During summer and fall 1941, reports of the United States’ covert efforts to fund and build bases for British and American ground troops and air forces in Northern Ireland also began to surface publicly and elicited nationalist protests from de Valera’s government. In December, when Japan, Germany’s Axis ally, attacked the United States’ Hawaiian territory and Germany declared war on the United States, America formally entered the anti-fascist war. Churchill and Roosevelt again tried to persuade de Valera that the time to join the United Nations alliance was “now or never.”

The immediate postwar years saw significant turmoil in the Laundry Workers Joint Board, the result of competitive pressures in the industry, an employer offensive (evidence that in the laundries a postwar “social contract” did not exist), and internal conflict between the leadership and members of the democratic initiative. Chapter 10 demonstrates that the racial tensions that had animated the union since its birth exploded in the late 1940s as work contracted and as LWJB secretary treasurer Louis Simon consolidated his power over the union. Adelmond publicly confronted the leadership and employers for engaging in racist and sexist practices and organized through her own local, where the workers demanded racial justice at home and for people of color abroad fighting colonialism. This chapter reveals that Robinson supported and nurtured the workers’ civil rights unionism by creating educational initiatives; by building alliances with labor and civil rights activists, including the indomitable congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; by mentoring workers of color; and by founding and supporting organizations committed to Black women’s empowerment. Adelmond’s and Robinson’s multifaceted postwar organizing illuminates the complex ways in which Black working-class women organized at the intersection of multiple positionalities, a reflection of the simultaneity of race, class, and gender discrimination in the lives, as well as their location within and commitment to diverse goals and movements, including civil rights, women’s rights, and organized labor.

Poland's travails had no consequences for American policy, and public opinion continued to oppose active American involvement in the war after the September campaign. Within months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington quite obviously had no intention of opposing Soviet territorial expansion at Polish expense and was unconcerned about the protection of Polish sovereignty. In April 1942, Theodore Roosevelt told Under Secretary of State Adolf Berle that he “would not particularly mind” if Russia seized all of eastern Poland. This was a direct contradiction of the Atlantic Charter he had signed only weeks before. The most charitable observation is that Roosevelt simply did not know what he was talking about. The Roosevelt administration was keenly aware of the influence of film in rallying public opinion and maintaining domestic unity, and hence took rapid steps to involve the film industry in the war effort.

This chapter revisits the normative frameworks on which the establishment of the United Nations were based after World War II. It includes discussion about the Atlantic Charter as a precursor to the UN Charter, and recapitulates the differences in interpretation of self-determination and sovereignty between the Western states and the nationalist movements in the Global South that were fighting against colonialism for Independence. Reference to the normative and political power of human rights discourses challenge claims that these were ineffective by Mark Mazower and Samuel Moyn. Rather, this chapter argues that their utilization by representatives of the nationalist movements in colonized territories show their relevance and the support they offered to their struggles. The condemnation of South Africa for its treatment of the Indian population is used to illustrate this point.

The late Tom Bingham spoke eloquently of the rule of law’s crucial role in the international arena, saying it is ‘one of the greatest unifying factors, perhaps the greatest, the nearest we are likely to approach to a universal secular religion’ – an ideal worth striving for. The International Rule of Law is essentially the domestic rule of law ‘writ large’. Foundations of an international rule of law are reflected in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Atlantic Charter, the founding of the United Nations, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and subsequent adoption of the Geneva Conventions. This chapter traces the post World War II development of international human rights and humanitarian law. It also discusses the path of customary international law which has been part of the landscape for several hundred years. The ‘law of nations’ is specifically recognized in Art. I , sec. 8 of the US Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court’s 1804 decision in The Charming Betsy, and then again 100 years later in The Paquette Habana. Reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Eminent Jurists Panel illustrate how the Bush-based war on terror and the US Military Commission Acts of 2006 and 2009 are in violation of numerous basic tenets of customary international law and the US Supreme Court has begun to recognize that international law does indeed have a place in US jurisprudence.