How the 1919 Paris peace settlements shaped today’s world, with historian Margaret MacMillan

In conversation with Simon Kuper

Just after WWI, at the Paris peace conference of 1919, the leaders of the US, UK and France met in Paris to make peace and wind up four empires. They created new states such as Iraq and Syria. They imposed reparations and other penalties on Germany, which had just lost the war. They agreed to create a League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations. It was the start of a new era that saw the spread of Bolshevism, the growing importance of international public opinion, and the notion that nations had the right to self-determination. How did the Paris Peace Settlements shape the world we live in now?

Margaret MacMillan is one of today's best-known historians and international-relations experts. She’s a professor of History at the University of Toronto and an emeritus professor of International History at Oxford University, specializing in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Paris 1919 (with an introduction by Richard Holbrook) won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. MacMillan’s other books include Nixon and Mao: the Week that Changed the World and The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.

Simon Kuper is a columnist for the Financial Times.