Lecture & Workshop:
The Fourth Policeman: Reconsidering FDR’s Vision for China’s Postwar Role

Prof. Erez Manela
Harvard University

Lecture: The Fourth Policeman: Reconsidering FDR’s Vision for China’s Postwar Role
Room 4.34, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
16 Oct, 2017 (Mon)
4:30-6:00pm

Workshop in International History
CPD LG-62, Centennial Campus, HKU
18 Oct, 2017 (Wed)
2:00-4:00pm

At the core of his plan for a postwar international organization, US President Franklin Roosevelt envisioned four great powers—the Unites States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China—that would work together to keep the peace. But why did FDR include China in this group, and how did its inclusion fit into his broader scheme for the postwar world? Reconsidering FDR’s vision of China as the “fourth policeman” of the postwar international order gives new insight not only into his views on China’s global role but also into his ideas about the future place of non-European peoples in international society writ large.

Erez Manela (Ph.D., Yale) is Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches international history and the history of the United States in the world. His most recent book, Empires at War, 1911-23 (2014), co-edited with Robert Gerwarth, recasts World War I as a global war of empires and has been translated into seven languages. His other books include the prize-winning The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) and (as co-editor) The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010). Manela has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others, and was a Burkhardt Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.