Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe (eds.) (2022), Bloomsbury, London (UK), 262 p., £ 85.00 hardcover

This collectively authored book is the latest step in the research project on historical geographies of internationalism that Legg, Heffernan, Hodder and Thorpe have been conducting for several years. In the ‘Introduction’, and in their chapter ‘Towards an Historical Geography of International Conferencing’, the Editors clarify that their aim is not to make histories ‘of conferences but of international conferencing as a political practice’ (p. 2) by exploring its places, spatialities, materialities, practices and social networking. Thus, historical geographies of conferencing should overtake the limitations of historical accounts limited to the analysis of official records or merely addressing disembodied ideas. The book focuses on the ‘half-century following the first World War’ (p. 3), the period in which several kinds of internationalism, from the League of Nations to decolonisation, found in conferencing a key practice.