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The covenant of the League of Nations in Article 22 awarded mandates to "advanced nations" to exercise "tutelage...for peoples not yet able to stand by themsleves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world". Mandates for the territories of the former Ottoman Empire (Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine) were awarded to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France. But were mandates merely a cover for imperialism while paying lip-service to President Woodrow Wilson's idea of national self-determination? David Fieldhouse, a leading historian of empire, brings together historiography and his experience in this comparative analysis of how the mandatory powers discharged their obligations and argues that far from creating modern democratic and pluralistic states on the Western model, the result was a bitter harvest of military dictatorship and civil war, and the creation of one of the most unstable and explosive regions in the modern world.