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Margaret MacMillan is a provost at Trinity College and Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is also emeritus Professor of International History and the former Warden of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, for which she was the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto and of Lady Margaret Hall, St Hilda’s College, and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. In 2006, Professor MacMillan was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Nine years later she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2018, she became a Companion of Honour in the United Kingdom.

In her lecture, MacMillan suggested that in spite of the prominence of socio-cultural history among academic historians, it was crucial to direct historical attention towards the political history of “great events” like the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. She focused on what she calls the ‘Big Three’ individuals involved in the Conference – David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. These men, she argued did nothing less than piece the world together anew. They bore a heavy burden and were constrained in their actions by events like the Russian Revolution and ethnic nationalism, especially since new nations in Eastern Europe had already been established by the time the Conference started and so participants needed to decide whether to recognize them. She discussed the subsequent failure of Wilson to get the treaty ratified in the US Senate, attributing to it the subsequent inability to keep German anchored within a strong international system. The decision to extend British and French empires into the Middle East, too, was short-sighted. Ultimately, she argued “individuals, with all their biases, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses, can push the great movements of history in one direction or another. In 1919, that turbulent year, the Big Three who met in Paris made their own choices about how they played the hands they had been dealt.”