We saw last week that Britain wasn’t in any fit state to go fighting more wars in 1919. Having got out of the bloodiest war in history (up to then), a deep war-weariness had set in amongst the combatants, and no one felt up to more fighting. The British economy too was in no state to stand another war, what with Britain heavily in debt, to the point where its status as the banker to the world was now swiftly going down the pan. Indeed, the country taking over that role, the United States, was the very country to which a quarter of Britain’s war debt was due.

Everything was made much worse by the fact that war seemed to be brewing in every direction. The very collapse of the Empires defeated in the Great War – the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman – had produced a different and highly unstable constellation of potentially conflicting nations.

For Britain, one of the areas where war most threatened, was on its very doorstep – in Ireland.

A subject we’ll pick up next week.

Illustration: Woodrow Wilson, US President who dreamed up the League of Nations but couldn't get his own nation to join. Public domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.