Lothian: Philip Kerr and the Quest for World Order

(Hardback)

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This is the story of Philip Kerr and a group of Oxford graduates that founded The Round Table (Journal of International Affairs) in 1910 and influenced British foreign policy over the following thirty years. As the principal thinker of the group, Kerr saw the need for a supra-national grouping and wanted to organize the British Empire into a federal superstate. The group also sought an Anglo-American alliance, and in 1939, joined a world federation movement that would help to inspire NATO after the war. Important questions raised by this group remain relevant today. Can a supra-national community impose laws and regulations on its members without its governing institutions being more fully accountable to a community-wide electorate Can hostile nationalism be tamed with such a union. Can it reasonably exclude the United States

Reviews

Billington's study, thoroughly informed by the Lothian papers, builds effectively on the wide corpus of recent scholarship, offering incisive judgements while mobilizing some new evidence on lingering controversies. In short, this is now the political biography to read on Lothian, whose career touched on many of Britian's central imperial and international engagements in the first half of the twentieth century. * The International History Review *

Author Bio

David P. Billington, Jr. received a doctoral degree in British/Commonwealth history from the University of Texas at Austin (1995). He is currently working to produce and disseminate scholarship that introduces modern engineering to liberal arts students and first-year engineers through examples of historically significant innovation.