General Smuts: South Africa
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Jan Christian Smuts was one of the key figures behind the creation of the League of Nations; Woodrow Wilson was inspired by his ideas on the League and borrowed heavily from them, including the mandates scheme, whereby South Africa took responsibility for Namibia. Alarmed at the turn that peacemaking was taking, Smuts took the lead in urging moderation on reparations and Germany's frontiers with Poland and pleaded for a magnanimous peace, warning that the treaty of Versailles would lead to another war. Declaring I return to South Africa a defeated man', Smuts encouraged Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and denounced the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. He became Prime Minister of South Africa and a leading Commonwealth statesman. He made important contributions to the British cause in the Second World War and was instrumental in the establishment of the United Nations.
Professor Antony Lentin is Visiting Professor and Tutor in Law at the Open University, where he was previously Professor of History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a barrister. He is the author of Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-History of Appeasement and Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: from Versailles to Hitler, 1919-1940 (2001) and wrote the Historical Association booklet The Versailles Peace Settlement (1991, 1993, second, revised edition, 2003). Professor Alan Sharp is Provost of the Coleraine Campus at the University of Ulster. He joined the History Department at Ulster in 1971 and has been successively Professor of International Studies, a post in which he helped to set up degrees in International Studies and, later, International Politics and Head of the School of History and International Affairs. His major publications include The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (1991) amongst others.