'Real securities against new wars': Official British thinking and the origins of the league of nations, 1914-19

The historiography of the origins of the League of Nations has usually placed collective security at the centre of the debate during the First World War. This is anachronistic and misleading. The British government considered a guarantee of peace to be essential for any league. This was not contentious. The new proposals of 1917-18, associated especially with Philip Kerr and The Round Table, were intended not as alternatives to a guarantee, but as establishing the preconditions for it to become effective. Only after December 1918 did some persons of influence begin to argue against commitment to a guarantee system. The historiography should now move on to consider the economic questions which were more contentious at the time.