Philip Dehne's After the Great War revisits the peacemaking process in Paris in 1919 with a view to exposing the roots of “some obscured aspects of interwar internationalism” (2). In this sense, Dehne is the latest in a line of scholars trying to rehabilitate the 1919 Peace Settlement, providing a more nuanced and sympathetic view of the accomplishments of those who gathered in Paris after the 1914–1918 war. As the title suggests, Dehne focuses on the economic aspects of the deliberations, contending that lessons learned during the Great War (notably as regards the Allied blockade of the Central Powers) informed the economic sanctions embedded within Article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant. This emphasis allows Dehne to claim that the 1919 settlement was not, as its many detractors maintain, undermined by idealism but instead contained practical enforcement mechanisms that gave the League of Nations “some potentially sharp teeth indeed” (6). Another, albeit less pronounced, argument is that attention should shift from the well-documented internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and toward the lesser-known but arguably more pragmatic internationalism of those advocating economic and legalistic solutions to global disputes.

One such advocate was Lord Robert Cecil, a British delegate at the Peace Conference who had during the war briefly worked with the Red Cross before returning to the cabinet as minister of blockade (1916–1918). Given Cecil's proximity to the League of Nations idea, both during the war and afterward in Paris, where he chaired the Supreme Economic Council, Dehne's choice of central protagonist is unsurprising. In fact, the book could justifiably include Cecil in the title, as his is a consistent presence throughout. The book even reads occasionally like a biography, meticulously detailing Cecil's activities and his relations with other prominent politicians and diplomats, not least David Lloyd George. Much of the resultant analysis, especially in the first chapter, is not particularly novel, providing the necessary but familiar background to Cecil's time in Paris. Thereafter, the chapters progress chronologically from January to December 1919. By focusing intentionally on this single year, Dehne endeavors to show how the kernel of an international society emerged in 1919, rather than being the product of the 1920s, as Patricia Clavin and Daniel Gorman, among others, have claimed.

Cecil remains the key player throughout, and despite using some familiar sources, Dehne succeeds in offering new insights. The social dimension of Cecil's time in Paris is particularly interesting, Dehne noting how he enjoyed “celebrity and authority” (57) and how his “bustling socializing” provided an escape from work and helped him retain an “overall good humor even when facing many difficulties” (103). These occasional vignettes providing glimpses into the broader social environment of the Paris Peace Conference are much-needed interludes, breaking up what might otherwise be a formulaic and overly technical narrative. Elsewhere, Dehne writes of Cecil exhibiting tiredness, tension, fatigue, boredom, and irritability and missing both home and family. The emotional baggage that accompanies diplomacy, especially in the intense and frenetic context of conferences like Paris 1919, is something that international historians have begun to attend to only recently, and while Dehne alludes to these aspects, a more explicit focus would have been useful.

More comprehensive is Dehne's appraisal of Cecil's mastery of the press, showing how he used his considerable social reach to shape the press narrative of the Peace Conference (113). In this, argues Dehne, Cecil was replicating his earlier success in shaping the press narrative of the wartime Blockade, while also demonstrating Cecil's conviction that a favorable public opinion was essential to the success of any initiative in an era of “new” and “open” diplomacy. Dehne's main aim, however, is to trace the continuity between Cecil's wartime work as minister of blockade and the centrality of economic sanctions within a postwar League of Nations. In so doing, Dehne provides a corrective to the conventional wisdom that the Allies did little to alleviate the suffering in postwar Germany and Central Europe, an inaction attributed chiefly to the vengeful British and French (overcoming the greater morality of the Americans). Instead, Dehne shows that the Supreme Economic Council “largely succeeded in its primary goal of feeding Germany and the other peoples of Europe” (146), and that this success owed much to Cecil's and the council's embracing a “truly international” effort to alleviate the suffering of “destitute Germans” (211).

It is here that Dehne becomes more ambitious. His conclusions as regards the importance of economics in the emergent postwar order are persuasive, but taking this further to argue, first, that this infused the League of Nations with genuine teeth, and second, that it encapsulated a spirit of internationalism rooted in realism rather than utopianism, is a more difficult pitch. To do so, Dehne positions Cecil's “cautious” optimism as a middle path between the “apologists and alarmists” (159), the former seeing the Versailles settlement as just and reasonable, the latter prophesying that it sowed the seeds of future discontent. In Dehne's analysis, Cecil was an influential representative of “the world's new internationalists” (161), taking the idealist impulses of “new” diplomacy and infusing them with a necessary dose of pragmatism rooted in practicable suggestions of global economic sanctions. This important line of argument, though present implicitly throughout, emerges emphatically only in the book's conclusion. This is a pity, as Dehne's book is much more than a story of Cecil's activities at the Conference or an analysis of ideas of economic warfare. These case studies facilitate a more far-reaching contribution, emphasizing the genuine spirit of internationalism animating many of those assembled in Paris in 1919 and the equally genuine efforts made to reconcile idealism with pragmatism. Still, this is an important addition to a crowded historiographical field, deserving of a place on the shelf of any student of the Paris Peace Conference and currents of internationalism in the early twentieth century.