While the locus of sovereignty in the mandates was a topic of great controversy, mandatory powers were generally not considered to be sovereign. Rather, the mandates were held in trust, and the presupposition of a trust, as the conservative thinker Edmund Burke outlined in his famous indictment of the British East India Company, is that any power set over people must be exercised for their benefit.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 89