Lionel George Curtis

Lionel George Curtis (born March 7, 1872, Little Eaton, Derbyshire, Eng.—died Nov. 24, 1955, near Oxford, Oxfordshire) was a British public administrator and author, advocate of British imperial federalism and of a world state, who had considerable influence on the development of the Commonwealth of Nations.

After being educated at Haileybury College and at New College, Oxford, Curtis entered the legal profession. He fought in the South African War (1899–1902) and later became secretary to Sir Alfred Milner, British high commissioner in South Africa, whose staff of gifted young men became known as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” Curtis also filled several posts in the Transvaal government. For a time he was town clerk of Johannesburg; he also oversaw the reorganization of municipal government in the Transvaal. In 1906 he resigned to work for the federal union of the four British colonies in Southern Africa, and he began to develop a conception of a federal world order that occupied him for the rest of his life.

In 1910 Curtis founded the quarterly Round Table for the propagation of Liberal imperialist thought, and in 1912 he was appointed Beit lecturer in colonial history at the University of Oxford. In 1920 Curtis helped found the organization that in 1926 became the Royal Institute of International Affairs. From 1921 to 1924 he served as colonial office adviser on Ireland.

Curtis’s first major book was The Commonwealth of Nations (1916). He was chiefly responsible for replacing the term empire with commonwealth. His visits to India and China gave him material for Dyarchy (1920) and The Capital Question of China (1932). After 1932 he devoted himself to his most important work, Civitas Dei, 3 vol. (1934–37), in which he advocated a world federation.