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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.

Offers some thoughts about the idea of trusteeship and its place in the history of international society. The first section, Unity, Progress, and Perfection of Humankind, puts forward the claim that trusteeship is a historic idea that is distinctive of a particular time and place, and, specifically, that it is intelligible in relation to other ideas that are especially characteristic of the Enlightenment. Thus, trusteeship discloses moral excellence, and indeed obtains powerful justification, when it contributes to the unity, progress, and perfection of the human family. The second section, A Society of States and a Family of Peoples, argues that these ideas call forth an understanding of international life that conceives international society and human society as forming a perfect identity, and which is underwritten by the duty that we should act so as to secure the good of our fellows. The third section, The Limit of Obligation, considers the limits of this duty, and concludes that in seeking the good of our fellows we must stop short of treating people paternally. This conclusion casts a pall of doubt on the legitimacy of trusteeship in contemporary international society, even when it is aimed at protecting fundamental human rights, because it proposes to treat an equal unequally—indeed, trusteeship is morally objectionable because it offends the irreducible sanctity of human personality by repudiating the essence of what it means to be human, a thinking and choosing agent.