Arrears, allocations and auditors: Studying the finances of the League of Nations through its archives

A lecture with Hannah Tyler

Every year, the League of Nations faced the same awkward question: who would pay for it? Answering it was a constant struggle. Delegates haggled over national shares, officials defended their budgets line by line, and some governments simply stopped paying. Yet these struggles were more than technical disputes. Because the budget was part of the very infrastructure of the organization, determining what the Secretariat could do and whom it could employ, every argument about money was also an argument about what the League should be.

This lecture follows these arguments through the League’s archives in Geneva. It first sketches how the League system was financed in the interwar period: how contributions were allocated among member states and how budgets were drafted, contested and audited. Looking at the League itself, the International Labour Organization and the Permanent Court of International Justice, it also traces how income, expenditure and working capital developed. Reconstructing these processes, however, raises methodological questions. The lecture therefore asks what official budgets reveal and what they hide, and how historians can work with figures that are often incomplete and hard to compare. Finally, a few examples from the archives show what this kind of research can yield: following the money leads to questions of power and priorities, and into the inner workings of international administration.

All are welcome.

Bio

Hannah Tyler is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her project Monetary Knowledge: Financial Infrastructure in International Organisations, 1919-1946 examines how international organizations financed and administered themselves. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Lausanne and is an affiliated researcher of the ERC project INNER_LEAGUE. Her interest in the League’s finances dates back to her MA thesis at Goethe University Frankfurt.