Peter Jackson's, William Mulligan's, and Glenda Sluga's edited volume provides a mix of scholarship by historians and experts on international relations examining the immediate aftermath of the First World War and attempts to restore, maintain, or create anew systems of peace and international order after the conflict. The volume is a collection of new works and repeat publications that graduate and doctoral students in particular will view as a useful bundle. Though readers may be disappointed with some topical omissions that would have made for more breadth in the literature coverage and an overemphasis on Woodrow Wilson and the Big Four in a number of the pieces, the novel approaches taken by authors in the sections on “Institutions” and “Actors and Networks” are engaging reads taking the scholarship on peace process and the structures that emerged from it down needed paths of investigation.

An unfortunate topical omission from the collection is the lack of pieces on international institutions of public health and aid networks. Topics on health, medical exchange, and information sharing offer a chance to examine continuity with change in the transition to the new orders. Public health and medical research collaborations have been a key form of international cooperation (even amidst competition) that is often at its height in peace time but has been an area where connections between specialists continued in various forms—for better or worse—even during periods of conflict and rupture to find itself reborn, albeit partially transformed, in both ongoing and new institutions. Though the League's Health Organization is mentioned in passing by a few pieces in the volume, it is somewhat shocking that there are no scholars included with dedicated pieces to how this entity's programs and commissions often bridged the divide between the former adversaries from WWI, including non-League Member states like Weimar Germany (until 1926), the Soviet Union (which did not join until 1934) and the United States during the interwar period.

Peacemaking and order seem confined to the areas of military, diplomatic, and economic concerns for most of the pieces in this collection. These are admittedly important areas of focus with plenty of work left to be done. That narrower categorization, however, misses out on other overlapping categories that are integral to discussions of international relations and the maintenance of peace. Health, academic exchange, aid networks, data sharing, and social questions occupied a huge portion of the League's time and resources from its inception and were also a key focus of a number of international non-governmental bodies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation. The Paris Peace Conference and the structures and international organizations born in its wake occurred and were created amid numerous famines across Eurasia, several typhus epidemics in Eastern Europe and the new Soviet Union, ongoing pandemics of cholera and plague, continuing debates over the possible prohibition of opium-derived pharmaceuticals deemed by some to be a risk to public health and welfare, and above all, the infamous Influenza Pandemic 1918–1920 that killed tens of millions globally. Health and relief organizations were a key component of restoring order and maintaining peace in this environment. One or two such chapters on public health, relief structures, and medical exchange as a source of soft diplomacy or international outreach would have been strong additions to the sections on “Institutions” and “Actors and Networks.” If an expanded edition of this edited volume were ever created, an opportunity for discussion between the areas outlined above and those represented in the collection would be beneficial to all scholars working on the period.

One of the weaknesses of the volume is excessive coverage of Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau in a number of the chapters (Chs. 1, 2, 5, 7, 16). The overreliance on Wilson as the key world historical figure may be common practice in pieces by international relations scholars, but is sort of a relic of a past era of great man historiography for historians. While Wilson is indeed significant, what happens as a result of narrowing the discussion to actions taken by Wilson, reactions to Wilson, and examining how figures tried to assess Wilson's responses to their actions is a flattening of the literature. Several of the pieces that focus on Wilson and the “Big Four” essentially boil down to the same argument with little new information or variation from what has been published on the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath, especially in the last decade. Sadly, the weakest chapter in this grouping is Jackson's and Mulligan's own on “The Crisis of Power Politics.” The chapter has glaring errors on the Mandates System on page 142, leaving out the mandatory powers of Belgium and South Africa and incorrectly ascribing mandates they held to Britain and France, erroneously classifying the B Class Mandates of Togo and Cameroon as C Class Mandates, and generally showing a cursory understanding of the formation of the Mandates System and its function, making discussion of it in pages 138–143 in their piece feel like a haphazard afterthought, especially compared to the excellent pieces in this volume that deal with the topic and non-European actors responses to it by experts Martin Thomas and Erez Manela.

The strongest pieces in this volume are those that are more interested in everything and everyone else in the orbit of the peacemaking and new international institutions created in the wake of the First World War. These pieces represent directions in which scholarship on peacemaking and international order should be moving. Here, works by Martin Thomas (Ch. 6), Karen Gram-Skjoldager (Ch. 8), Jennifer Siegel (Ch. 10), Jamie Martin (Ch. 11), Talbot Imlay (Ch. 13), and Mona L. Siegal (Ch. 14) constitute “must-reads” for aspiring graduate and doctoral students. Thomas's work forcefully asks the question “peace for who?” in a solid analysis of the imperial aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference and what it meant for millions of Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Arabs living in the French and British colonies and Mandates. Gram-Skjoldager's chapter does a careful examination of the technical functions of the emerging international civil service of the League and the ideological underpinnings needed to defend this creation against the adversarial dismissals of its role by state actors and diplomats who were wedded to an older power politics. Jennifer Siegel's fantastic breakdown of the competing plans for reshaping global finance and debt repayments of governments in the interwar era and Jamie Martin's fascinating entry on attempts to create international bodies and treaties to manage key raw materials and global trade in them are a back-to-back combination that has particularly poignant lessons for our topsy-turvy global economy in the 2020s. Talbot Imlay's contribution on competing socialist internationalisms and Mona L. Siegal's work on the wide variety of feminist international groups from Europe, Africa, and Asia, alongside Erez Manela's republished piece on colonial nationalists and their visions of a post-WWI world (Ch. 15), represent a toe-hold for a much needed range of pieces on alternative pathways and ideologies of internationalism and peacekeeping that emerged in the era.

Readers should also look to the pieces by Sara C. Dunstan (Ch. 2) and Leonard V. Smith (Ch. 4). These well-written chapters—their own independent works—provide a useful discussion with and reference to the other authors within the volume that serves as a more effective overview and introduction to the debates than the actual introduction to the volume does for those who may be new to the literatures covered here. Overall, this is an incredibly useful volume, especially for graduate students and doctoral candidates looking for a quick reference to literature on the topic, with a number of pieces within it that hopefully propel the existing scholarship in new and interesting ways.