The Abstraction of Sovereignty: The Ottoman Empire in Early Twentieth-Century Socialist Thought

Abstract

This article examines the way British socialists came to provide intellectual and political weight to the ‘internationalizing’ of non-European territory during and after the First World War. While there is now a substantial body of scholarship articulating the continuities between Victorian liberal imperialism and the liberal internationalism of the early twentieth century that gave rise, most notably, to the League of Nations’ mandates system, parallel developments within socialist thought in Britain have been less readily noted. Critically, leading Fabian Society intellectuals reaffirmed the late nineteenth-century belief that European powers had the legal as well as moral right to partition and internationalize territories and markets in the name of preserving peace and advancing prosperity. Indeed, in the drive to produce conceptually robust positions on problems of world order, in certain respects socialists went furthest in scope and ambition. An aspect of this dynamic is explored here by paying particular attention to the place of the Ottoman Empire in socialist discussions of international government and the mandates system.