Robert Venosa, a Ph.D. student in the History Department, presented a paper at the Britain and the World Conference on April 6-8, 2017, in Austin, Texas.
Robert Venosa
Venosa’s paper is titled “The Meaning of Manchuria: The Chatham House Assessment of Collective Security in the Wake of the Manchurian Crisis.”
He argues that, despite a broad agreement within the Royal Institute of International Affairs that Britain, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth were indispensable components of world order, there was a great deal of contention and disagreement on issues vital to the international order that Britain sought to foster.
In 1935, as the threats posed by Japanese militarism, German revanchism, and Italian colonialism began to converge, some of the most prestigious members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs engaged in a prolonged exchange of memoranda about why the liberal international order had become so precarious in the wake of the Manchurian Crisis (1931-1933). They soon discovered that there was no consensus on either the diagnosis or the solution.
These memoranda, Venosa argues, are crucial in delineating the main lines of thought circulating among British intellectuals and policymakers at a moment when Britain and the Commonwealth confronted a disintegrating world order.
Venosa is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, titled “‘Freedom Will Win if Free Men Act’: Making Liberal Grand Strategy in an Illiberal Age, 1936-1956.” Therein he examines the domestic and international bases of grand strategy making in the two most prominent liberal great powers of the 20th century: the United States and Great Britain. Venosa has completed three Ph.D. fields: international history; military history; and U.S. foreign relations. He is writing his dissertation under the supervision of Dr. John Brobst, Associate Professor of History at Ohio University.
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