National and Ethnic Challenges 973the subcontinent, Vietnamese, Armenians, and American blacks—went to
Versailles in the hope of attaining recognition of their national rights.
Lloyd George belittled these outsiders as “wild men screaming through the
keyholes.” The Allies refused to allow Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), a young
Vietnamese, to read a petition that asked that the Rights of Man and Citi
zen be applied to the French colonies. Only the representatives of Zionist
groups—Jews who wanted the creation of a Jewish national state in
Palestine—and their anti-Zionist Jewish rivals ever made it into the confer
ence halls, and then only briefly. Women’s groups, too, in vain sent repre
sentatives who hoped to be heard at Versailles.
Britain, still the world’s largest colonial power, refused to accept Presi
dent Wilson’s plan that the League of Nations or some other international
board arbitrate the future of colonies. The British government refused to
recognize the right of self-determination. Still, the war had altered the rela
tionship between Britain and its colonies, as well as that between France
and its empire. The dramatic contraction of world trade during the post
war era, and above all during the Great Depression that began in 1929 (see
Chapter 25), provided impetus to emerging independence movements.
Imperial governments had long and loudly proclaimed that empire brought
economic benefits to colonial peoples. Now such benefits were hard to find,
as Britain, in particular, abandoned a cornerstone of the construction of its
empire: free trade. The Dominions (Britain’s original “settlement colonies”
of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand) had borne a great
financial and material burden in the Great War, and a considerable loss of
life as well. While they were not fully independent, a delegation from each
had signed the Treaty of Versailles, and each had a government responsible
to its own citizens and had become a member of the League of Nations.
The “British Commonwealth” was created in 1926 and formalized in 1931.
In this union of Britain and the Dominions, each state would be indepen
dent and not subordinate to Britain but united by common allegiance to the
crown.
The powers created the “mandate system” to deal with Germany’s colonies.
The colonies were placed under the nominal authority of the League of
Nations but were actually administered by Allied powers. Through this sys
tem, Britain increased the size of its empire by a million square miles, for
example, by adding the former German colony of Tanganyika and parts of
Togoland and the Cameroons as “mandate” colonies (see Map 24.3).
In Palestine, both Arabs and Jews had reason to be disappointed by the
settlement. In 191 5, in order to encourage Arab resistance against Turkey,
the British government had promised some Arab leaders that after the war
Britain would support an independent Arab state. But a year later, the
British and French governments had secretly drawn up plans to divide the
Middle East into two spheres of influence. Moreover, in the 1917 Balfour
Declaration (see Chapter 22), Britain had promised to help Jews create a
“national home” in Palestine, without necessarily promising to establish a