The UN Fiscal Commission (1946–1954) is a void in international tax knowledge among the famed international bodies of the League of Nations’ Fiscal Committee, the OECD Fiscal Committee and the UN Group of Experts. Literature regarding it is fragmented, even perplexing, despite the Commission representing the only time in history when international tax policymaking took place under a genuinely universal forum, and when the Third World had entered the world stage. The Commission story, through an international relations lens, is central to understanding how the present international tax system came to be governed by developed countries, and is, accordingly, foundational to evaluating the fairness and inclusivity of developments on global multilateral tax cooperation.

Planning for the UN Fiscal Commission by the Princeton Mission began as early as March 1943 and would require a utilisation of the Mission’s networks to bring the body to fruition in the United Nations. The blueprint of the Commission was greatly ambitious, but decisions made by the international community affecting its establishment in the Economic and Social Council would render it unable to succeed its predecessor in fundamental ways. The far from widespread support for its creation as well as the existence of the new specialised agencies would moreover have long-lasting repercussions for the Commission’s terms of reference and scope of work.

Chapter 1 considers Streit’s early years. It begins with his path from an ambitious high school and university student in Montana to Europe: as soldier in World War I, as a low-level member of the US delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919, as a Rhodes scholar, and finally as a budding journalist. It then examines his emergence as a well-regarded foreign correspondent during the 1920s, a period often presented as the profession’s golden age. Although Streit lacked the glamor of better-known celebrity colleagues, his experiences offer another perspective on the work of interwar foreign correspondents. The final section focuses on Streit’s tenure as the New York Times’ correspondent in Geneva for much of the 1930s covering the League of Nations. This extended posting provides an intriguing vantage point for reconsidering the League’s place in US foreign relations at the time.

While supersanctions may not have improved the terms of Liberia’s loans very much, they did have unanticipated impacts on the structure of domestic political institutions. This chapter examines these effects, and in doing so offers a new interpretation of one of the more infamous phases in Liberia’s economic history: the 1930 League of Nations investigation into forced labor, when an investigative commission established by the League found that Liberian government officials had engaged in the use and export of forced labor. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, foreign financial controls imposed on the Liberian government as a condition of borrowing expanded from control over customs revenue to include nearly all sources of cash revenue by 1927. This chapter documents the Liberian government’s efforts to develop alternative sources of revenue with which to pay an expanded administrative establishment during repeated periods of fiscal crisis, and their ultimate turn toward a decentralized system of in-kind taxation in the form of forced labor and seizures of goods. These practices led to both domestic political upheaval and international isolation, and the threat of a League of Nations mandate over Liberia. This chapter contributes to a growing understanding of the contributions of forced labor to African government budgets in this period, as well as to work on the impacts of supersanctions on domestic institutions.

Chapter 3 focuses on the League of Nations Health Organization (LHNO) epidemiological intelligence service and the organization’s relationship with the Chinese government. Using Rockefeller funding, the LNHO strove to lead international health collaboration by creating an international health statistics reporting system. The organization’s statistical authority, however, was a patchwork, as it had to negotiate with stakeholders individually. The epidemiological intelligence service devised a tiered network for generating and sharing statistical standards and data. North Atlantic countries were included in the standard-making process, whereas other regions were relegated to the receiving end. A focus on the Chinese government’s strategies of cooperation with the service is illuminating as to the geopolitical context, which played a salient role in the epidemiological reporting network, especially given that the Republic of China saw its collaboration with the LNHO as a way to recover customs controls from the imperial powers.

Chapter 4 recounts the rising prominence of public health demonstrations as a policy-making method. In such demonstrations, a zone was demarcated in which public health services were provided and financial needs calculated as a policy experiment. The Milbank Memorial Fund popularized the concept through its demonstrations in New York State. Edgar Sydenstricker – former statistician at the LNHO – was hired by the Fund and directed its funding to reproduce Milbank’s demonstration in Ding Xian, a rural county southwest of Beijing. In both New York and Ding Xian, statistics were central to setting up the experiment, but less so in terms of policy follow-up. The Ding Xian demonstration, along with the Eastern European rural health savoir-faire that was introduced to China through the LNHO, served as the prototype for China’s Central Field Health Station, a national research institute where public health situations, whether social or bacteriological, were quantified. That quantification did not feed directly into policy-making, however, as the experts in charge retained the authority to make sense of the numbers.

This chapter surveys the rapid growth of globe-spanning organizations and institutions over the past 120 years – from the League of Nations to the UN to today’s International Criminal Court and European Union. Spurred by the world wars, economic crises, and environmental disasters of the twentieth century, humanity has already come much farther than most people realize in building innovative instruments of global concertation and crisis management. Therefore, the pathways of constructive change that lie ahead of us can best be understood as continuations and extensions of the remarkable gains already achieved. Four institutions – OECD, UN, NATO, and EU – exemplify distinct levels of rising integration across national boundaries. Institutions such as International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) have offered powerful new pathways for citizens’ concerted action beyond borders. The recently-adopted UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) reflects a newfound legitimacy of cross-border ethical obligations and proactive interventions to halt large-scale humanitarian disasters.

The state we now call Australia emerged through successive worlds. The old worlds did not disappear, but persist to this day. From time to time their unresolved legal contradictions burst into the present to pose radical challenges to the dominant legal order in the continent. This chapter retells the legal history of Australia through three successive worlds. The first world is the ancient history and unfinished business of inter-national relationships between First Nations, and between them and the settler state. The second world is the British Empire, a global state that aimed to impose a single legal order over its imperial jurisdictions. The third world is the international system of sovereign states that covers the globe today. If Australians have pursued a ‘rules-based order,’ this pursuit has always reflected their own conflicting desires for the liberation and domination of neighbouring peoples, lands and seas.

Chapter 22 elucidates how a consolidation of the truncated order of Versailles was first hampered by the divergent longer-term outlooks of the victors and later decisively affected by Wilson’s defeat in the battle over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations in the American Senate. It then analyses systematically, and in a global context, how in the aftermath of the American withdrawal from it the crisis of the Versailles system escalated into a full-blown conflict in postwar Europe, which culminated in the transformative Franco-German Ruhr crisis of 1923.

Chapter 11 reappraises the peace conceptions and reordering strategies of Lloyd George and the other architects of the British agenda for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that what they envisaged centred, not on containing Germany and re-establishing a workable balance of power but rather on the novel aim to create, in cooperation with the United States, a new Atlantic concert that was to stabilise a modern international equilibrium within a recast global order. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of what became an ambitious British peace programme, which included the most elaborate and influential blueprints for a League of Nations as framework for a novel, and integrative, international concert. And it highlights that British approaches to peacemaking, which were also designed to bolster the British Empire and expand British imperial influence in the Middle East, evolved and changed significantly between the armistice and Versailles as well. Finally, it analyses the extent to which Lloyd George and other key actors like Robert Cecil and Jan Christiaan Smuts had embarked on constructive learning processes – and the extent to which their evolving concepts and strategies were conducive to the creation of a durable and legitimate Atlantic and global order.

Chapter 15 offers new perspectives on the formative struggle to establish the League of Nations as an effective international organisation at the heart of the postwar order. It argues that in spite of the global conceptions they advanced its key architects intended the League to become the superstructure of a new transatlantic international order and security architecture. It analyses how far it was possible to find common ground between the most influential American and British blueprints for an integrative League and the markedly different French plans for an institution of the victors whose main purpose was supposed to be to protect France and constrain Germany. And it illuminates why ultimately the League of Nations came to be founded as a truncated organisation dominated by the principal victors of the Great War and initially excluding the vanquished, which were required to undergo a period of probation to become eligible for membership. Finally, it explains the far-reaching consequences this had and examines how far the League nonetheless had the potential to become the essential framework of a modern Atlantic and global order over time.

Chapter 7 offers a newly comprehensive interpretation of the political and ideological war that escalated at the heart of the First World War. It argues that at the core the war turned into a transatlantic struggle not only between war-aim agendas but indeed between competing liberal-progressive, imperialist and Bolshevik visions of peace and future order. It elucidates the unprecedented scope of this struggle by examining not only the aims and conceptions of the different wartime governments and leaders like Wilson, Lloyd George, Ludendorff and Lenin but also the contributions that intellectuals, opinion-makers and other non-governmental actors and associations on both sides of the trenches made to what became the greatest war for “national minds” and “world opinion” in history (up until then). And it brings out the far-reaching consequences this struggle had, both for peacemaking after the war and in the longer term. The analysis emphasises that it catalysed or brought to the fore formative ideas and ideologies of international and domestic-political order for the remainder of the “long” 20th century, including notions of self-determination and universal but hierarchical democratisation, ideas for a modern league of nations and competing blueprints for an internationalist system of communist states.

Chapter 10 reappraises the evolving plans and visions for a League of Nations and a new, progressive international order that were advanced by Woodrow Wilson and those who came to advise the American president and contribute to the American peace agenda that was presented at the Paris Peace Conference. It reinterprets Wilson’s core aspiration as, essentially, the pursuit of a new Atlantic order – rather than a “new world order”. And it not only analyses the underlying assumptions and maxims of the peace programme that he and his core advisers elaborated after the end of the Great War – and the crucial changes they made to this programme and their approaches to peacemaking during the critical phase between the armistice and the peace negotiations at Versailles. It also evaluates how far Wilson and his advisers had drawn deeper lessons from the war – and how far the president’s reorientated ideas and strategies for a “peace to end all wars” actually met essential requirements that had to be fulfilled to create a durable and legitimate postwar order in and beyond the newly vital transatlantic sphere.

Chapter 24 shows how the Atlantic peace order of the 1920s was consolidated and developed to a remarkable degree in the era of London and Locarno (1926–1929), which witnessed a revitalisation of the League of Nations after Germany’s entry in 1926, advances towards an Atlantic concert which found expression in the war-renunciation pact of 1928, and concerted efforts to pursue a pacification and accommodation process between the western powers – notably France – and Germany. It analyses the forces and reorientations that buttressed this incipient transformation and examines its impact on Europe, the United States and the world. Yet it also, finally, sheds new light on the question of why the nascent Pax Atlantica of the post-World War I era disintegrated so rapidly under the impact of the World Economic Crisis.