MARGARET MACMILLAN
(Provost of Trinity College and Professor of History, University of Toronto)

The peacemakers who met in Paris in 1919 faced the formidable task of putting back together an international order that had been shattered by the First World War. They could not merely go back to the pre-war world. Four empires–the German, Russian, Austria-Hungarian and Ottoman–had gone or were about to go. Moreover powerful new ideas were mobilizing public opinion. The Bolshevik Revolution promised a new international socialism and an egalitarian society. From the New World, the American president Woodrow Wilson talked of a liberal international order with self-determination of nations, open diplomacy and a League of Nations. A whole variety of national groups demanded their own nations. In the great European empires, independence movements were stirring. Amidst all this, the Paris Peace Conference did its work and produced peace settlements which have been criticized ever since. Did the decisions made in 1919 lead to the Second World War? Could the peacemakers have done differently or better? Questions about how to end wars and make lasting peace are still with us today.

Margaret MacMillan is Provost of Trinity College and Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988) and Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001), published in the United States as Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2002). In the UK this latter book won the Duff Cooper Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize for history and the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction; in the US it won the Silver Medal in the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award; and in Canada it won the 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and the Canadian Booksellers Libris Award for non-fiction book of the year. In 2003 she co-edited with Francine McKenzie Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century (2003). Her most recent book is Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home, written with Marjorie Harris and Anne L. Desjardins (2004). Dr. MacMillan appears frequently in the media commenting on both history and current international affairs. In February 2006 Margaret MacMillan was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.