Aurora Almada e Santos and Yvette Santos (eds), The League of Nations Experience. Overlapping Readings . De Gruyter, Berlin etc. 2025. viii, 314 pp. Ill. € 79.94. (E-book: € 79.95.)

Historical interest in the League of Nations has long been limited.This applied to both the number of studies and the scope of research, which focused primarily on the dramatic failure of the League as an international security system.The League of Nations could not prevent Japan's invasion of Manchuria, nor the rise of totalitarian and belligerent regimes in Germany and Italy, nor the outbreak of World War II in 1939.The only positive point sometimes mentioned, including by Eric Hobsbawm (cited by the authors), concerns the pioneering work done within the League in collecting and processing statistical data on a global scale.Over the past three decades, the situation has changed: the number of studies has increased, and the scope of research has expanded to include other areas in which the League was active in addition to maintaining the international security order -a theme that has become even more relevant in the light of current international political developments.The League of Nations Experience: Overlapping Readings fits within this trend.This volume is the result of an international symposium held in Portugal in 2019 on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of the League, under the auspices of, among others, NOVA University of Lisbon.Edited by Aurora Almada e Santos, a specialist in international organizations and decolonization, and Yvette Santos, a specialist in migration, international governance, and Portuguese history, it comprises ten contributions by various authors, somewhat arbitrarily divided into four parts describing the genesis and underlying ideas ("A contentious idea"); the ambitions and strategies of selected participating states ("Hopes and aspirations"); the attitudes of internationalists and the role of the main non-member state, the United States ("Decentering the view"); and several practical fields of activity and achievements of the League ("A plethora of varied initiatives").Although the contributions vary in style and thematic impact, the collection as a whole is successful.Remarkably, the contributions contain hardly any systematic descriptions of the League itself.A wide range of perspectives, descriptions, and analyses of external and internal actors and developments paints a kaleidoscopic picture of the functioning of the League, which is highly informative about the organization and its significance.For example, the contribution by Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus, senior research fellow at the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, "Korea and the League of Nations: from Versailles to the Manchurian Crisis, 1919-1933", focuses primarily on the Korean independence movement, which aimed at obtaining League membership.