By the late 1930s, the optimism of internationalists who had hoped to build a lasting peace after the Great War had dissipated. For decades, scholars were tempted to dismiss the alternatives they offered as quixotic. Fortunately, it has become commonsensical to recognize, as Daniel Gorman announces at the outset of The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, that internationalists, both inside and outside of the League of Nations, might have been idealists, but they helped to “recast global relations, both systemically and culturally, on a more international basis” during this era (3). Building on the seminal scholarship of Zara Steiner, Susan Pedersen, and Akira Iriye, among others, Gorman thus offers the now less controversial claim that “these bureaucrats and reformers created [a] functional internationalism that outlasted the League and helped to shape the work of the United Nations after 1945” (12). At its finest, this commitment to international society produced reform movements that reshaped imperial and transnational relations along the way (316).

At first glance, one expects The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s to offer a synthetic account of new modes of collaboration from the 1920s through the aftermath of the Second World War. Gorman's study is more modest, however. He limits his examination to the 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on how liberal, internationally minded individuals in America and from different corners of the British Empire drew on interpersonal connections to set goals and identify productive areas for compromise. Gorman characterizes this activity as pragmatic or nonnaive idealism, and he argues that it gave rise to a liberal internationalism that was able to transcend—at least briefly—continental European preoccupation with the role of force in global security (3–4).

To examine this set of Anglophone internationalists, Gorman's text offers a loose confederation of six case studies examined over the course of nine chapters. The case studies in section 1 center on the interplay of local, imperial, and international contexts in creating a role for the Dominions (Canada in particular) in League proceedings (chapter 1); in seeking citizenship for Indian settlers in East Africa (chapter 4); in forging an effective campaign to combat the trafficking of women and children (chapters 2 and 3); and in staging international sports competitions such as the British Empire Games of 1930 (chapter 5). Section 2 begins with an examination of two different Anglo-American arenas for discussion of new types of transnational collaboration. These include British and American organizations promoting the League of Nations (chapter 6) and a set of church-based organizations (chapter 7). Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the creation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which renounced the unilateral use of military force in international disputes. Despite the pact's obvious failure, Gorman scores it as a victory for pragmatism precisely because its proponents agreed on a compromise text and deferred the thorny specifics of the pact's enforcement. Gorman admits, of course, that this willingness to agree to a toothless text did not make the pact pragmatic in the sense of being enforceable. Nevertheless, he stresses that the pact did help to shift diplomatic negotiations to a more collaborative, international framework, the type that would reemerge after the Second World War. Here, however, as in each of the other case studies, Gorman follows his case up to the early 1930s and does not connect it to its successors in the postwar world.

Each case study is thoroughly researched, and Gorman ably evokes the world of 1920s internationalism, explaining along the way how each set of activists arrived at their knowledge of and interest in transnational collaboration. He brings their experiences as well as their tactics in promoting international society to life. Gorman is at his best in this endeavor, and readers will gain deeper insights about the period from his hints at comparisons between his cases and neighboring studies. His analysis of the intellectual connections between British and American pro-League associations, for example, adds a fascinating dimension to Helen McCarthy's study of the League of Nations Union (The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 [Manchester, 2011]). His analysis of Indian citizenship in East Africa expands the argument of his first book, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester, 2006), beyond the white Dominions. Other chapters seem more redundant, as does his examination of the human trafficking in light of Barbara Metzger's “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Interwar Years: The League of Nations' Combat of Traffic in Women and Children” (in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 [2007]) and Gorman's own “Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s” (Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 [2008]: 186–216).

This repetition would be less of a shortcoming if Gorman more clearly synthesized his six case studies. As they stand, however, both his introduction and his conclusion resort to “also's” in lieu of integrated analysis, though the conclusion is clearer than the introduction. The text thus leaves the reader to wonder about possible connections between, on the one hand, the examples of activism that populate the book's first section and, on the other hand, the Anglo-American efforts to promote transnational cooperation that occupy the book's second half. One wonders whether the intellectual and voluntary networks discussed in the latter helped to give rise to the strategies and collaborations explored in section 1. If so, the second section should perhaps have come first in order to make that argument. These possibilities are tantalizing, but the analytic promise of the book never truly comes together.