Toward an Historical Geography of International Conferencing Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder, Stephen Legg and Benjamin Thorpe (From Legg, S., Heffernan, M., Hodder, J. and Thorpe, B. J. (Eds.) (2021) Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, Bloomsbury, London: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/placing-internationalism-9781350247185/) Introduction Historians of international conferencing confront some thorny definitional challenges. It is by no means obvious what constitutes an ‘international conference’ given that both words – ‘international’ and ‘conference’ – are equally ambiguous. Should the category include bi-lateral conferences involving representatives from just two nation-states? If not, how many nation- states need to be represented for a conference to qualify as an ‘international’ event? And are conferences that involve delegates from different countries who explicitly reject national affiliations ‘international’ in any meaningful sense? These problems are compounded by the complexities of the term ‘conference’. This word is often used interchangeably with traditional political and ecclesiastical alternatives such as ‘congress’, ‘assembly’, ‘senate’, ‘diet’ or ‘synod’ and has recently jostled alongside intriguing examples of semantic change such as ‘summit’ and ‘retreat’. This imprecision, and the attempts to bring clarity by applying strict definitions, has had important political consequences. Harold Nicolson argued that the reason Germany was excluded from the negotiations at Paris in 1919 lay in the initial tacit understanding that a ‘conference’ comprising representatives of the Allied forces would be followed by a larger ‘congress’ of all belligerents as well as neutral parties. As the conference progressed, this distinction gradually collapsed, along with the prospect of any