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sympathy, disgust, or a little of both, statements that relied on the assumption of a civilizational scale

also ran along class and geographical lines within the borders of European nation-states. In The Road

to Wigan Pier, George Orwell described the industrial towns of the north of England as “festering in

planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dust-bins and lines

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of grimy washing and half-ruinous wcs.” Alluding to similar indices about living standards, Italians

in the north saw the rural south as “a reservoir of feudal residues, sloth, and squalor,” a pattern

matched in the language of late nineteenth-century French modernizers as they set out to transform

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rural areas of the hexagon. In short, the privileged position that the Polish journalist claimed for

himself—one that allowed him to both notice and lament civilizational disparities—was taken by

millions of “civilizing” Europeans, both within and beyond the parameters of the nation-state.

Such observations were never politically innocent. Instead, and as historians of empire well

know, they carried with them stark implications about who was equipped to govern a region and who

had the right to control the political destiny of whom. As the First World War ended, and even as the

concept of empire came under close scrutiny, statesmen in London, Paris, and Washington continued

to argue that colonial and semi-colonial regions across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East had not yet

reached the appropriate state of civilization. A new mandate system, which was set up under the

auspices of the burgeoning League of Nations, justified persistent hierarchies that permitted so-called

civilized nations like Britain and France to act as “guardians” in those regions that they deemed to be

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civilizationally backward. As the first paragraph of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant

(among many others), Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR
(Ithaca, 2015).
4 George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell. Volume Five: The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1986),
46.
5 On Italy, see Nelson J. Moe, The View From Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley,
2006), 3; on France, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
(Stanford, 1976).
6 On the relationship between formal imperialism and the mandate system, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper,
Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 381-388; Reynolds, The Long
Shadow, 83-123; Susan Pederson, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015),
4.

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