How to look for records of... League of Nations

2. How to find League of Nations records at The National Archives

There are thousands of records on the League of Nations at The National Archives.

Search Discovery, our catalogue, with the search term ‘league of nations’ to find most of these records.

Many government departments dealt with the League of Nations, so you can find records in many parts of The National Archives’ collection. Refine your search by government department, for example:

• Cabinet Office (CAB)
• Foreign Office (FO)
• War Office (WO)
• Treasury (T)
• Board of Trade (BT)

Use a variety of search terms to generate more results, for example:

• league of nations
• peace conference
• disarmament conference
• British Empire Delegation

Read our research guide to Cabinet and its committees for advice on searching our catalogue for cabinet papers.

The archived Cabinet Papers site has themed pages which you can browse, some with links to downloadable documents. In particular, explore the website’s collection of records relating to the League of Nations.

3. Key records

Key records at The National Archives include:

• FO 371/3439 and CAB 1/26/14: reports of an early British Government plan for a league of nations; FO 371/3439 includes a ‘Tentative Draft Convention for a League of Nations’, originating from a private organisation in the USA, the League to Enforce Peace
• CAB 29/1-40: British arrangements for the Peace Conference at Versailles
• CAB 21/217: a typescript history of the British Empire Delegation entitled ‘The Dominions and the Peace Conference’ by Clement Jones
• FO 371/4310: contains the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations – a charter signed in 1919

Some of The National Archives’ records series may be of particular interest, including:

• FO 608: Peace Conference: British Delegation, correspondence and papers, 1918-1920. This series contains information on the creation of the League of Nations. A card index is available in the reading rooms at The National Archives, Kew – reference FO 608/1
• FO 371: Foreign Office political correspondence – this is the series containing the most information on the League of Nations. Read our guide to Foreign Office correspondence 1906-1919 for instructions on how to use the card index to correspondence, reference FO 1111, online.
• PRO 30/52: League of Nations Assembly and Council documents. Includes papers circulated to the Assembly and Council, and journals (with indexes)

If you want to consult any of these documents, check the ordering and viewing options in our catalogue.

4. Records in other archives

Contact the following organisations if you have enquiries about records they hold relating to the League of Nations:

• United Nations Information Centres
• United Nations Library in Geneva

5. Further reading

You can find a history and description of the organisation of the Foreign Office and its records in The Records of the Foreign Office, 1782-1939, PRO Handbooks No 13 (HMSO, 1969).

Other books of interest:

Samuel Frederick Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times 1920-1946 (Leicester, 1986)

Donald S Birn, The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945 (Oxford, 1981)

George W Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics and International Organisation, 1914-1919 (London, 1979)

United Nations Library Geneva, Guide to the Archives of the League of Nations 1919-1946 (Geneva, 1978)

James Avery Joyce, Broken Star: The Story of the League of Nations, 1919-1939 (Swansea, 1978)

George W Baer, Test Case: Italy, Ethiopia and the League of Nations (Stanford, California, 1976)

Frank Hardie, The Abyssinian Crisis (London, 1974)

George Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations (London, 1973)