Paris 1919

I thought I would wait until 2019 before reading Margaret MacMillan's acclaimed Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2001), which is suddenly 18 years old, though it feels like it has been around forever. (Truth is I found the book outrageously discounted because of a two-inch tear in its cover.)

Paris 1919 doesn't quite sparkle as I was told it would, with much of "Part One" given over to portraits of France's Clemenceau, the UK's Lloyd-George and the U.S.'s Wilson -- too much of it densely detailed, too often at the level of the pore.

I had not read Wilson's "Fourteen Points" since my high school History 12 class, but looking it over this morning, Point V stuck out:

A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined.

I appreciate this: a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight, though I would be curious to know more about how an "equitable government" is defined. The government of the colonizer? The government of the colony? Are they one in the same? (Equally autocratic? Equally corrupt?) This is at the heart of Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North (1969), which I must to return to, having left it open on its stomach, tent-like, throughout the fall.