Imperialism

 


 

[1950]  Louis Fisher in, VV. AA.,  The God that failed, six studies in communism, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1950

-  "... the Soviet-Nazi pact of 23 August 1939 ... was an agreement not to gain time but to gain territory. In secret protocols, now published, it provided for a spheres-of-influence division of the areas accessible to Soviet-Nazi aggression." "The Soviet-Nazi pact was the gravestone of Bolshevik internationalism and the cornerstone of Bolshevik imperialism." (p. 223)

 

[1967] D. K. Fieldhouse, ed., The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism, Longman, Hong Kong, 1980

- "The British were more interested in the strategic relevance of Egypt to the security of India than in their holdings in the Canal Company; the Transvaal was annexed less to satisfy investors in the gold mines than to prevent the absorption of the Cape by an unfriendly Boer republic; France saw Tunisia in terms of the security of Algeria rather than as a place where France bankers had made large loans, and was determined to forestall an Italian takeover; and so on." (p. 190)

- "Thus the main reason for the general popularity of the Theory [of Capitalist Imperialism] has been its sheer probability, coupled with its neatness and universality." "Yet the evidence, perhaps surprisingly, points in the other direction. Despite the obvious explanation, colonization was more the product of political ambitions, international rivalries, and complex situations in the non-European world than of simple and universal economic forces. The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism might have been true, but in fact it was not." (p. 192)

 

[1976]  Jean-François Revel,  La Tentation Totalitaire, Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1976

-  "Si vous avez l'Etat-nation, vous avez l'impérialisme qui en découle comme une nécessité, sans distinction de systèmes politiques. Et les plus forts des Etats-nations sont les plus impérialistes, en vertu d'une loi de physique politique à laquelle je ne vois aucune exception dans l'Histoire. Si vous voulez détruire l'impérialisme, vous devez en détruire la source : l'Etat-nation." (p. 365)

-  "Aussi longtemps que le monde sera divisé en nations, il y aura toujours une de ces nations dont le tour viendra d'être économiquement et militairement dominante. L'illusion nationaliste consiste à croire que, pour dissocier la politique mondiale du phénomène impérialiste, il faut d'abord se débarrasser de cette nation-là, et non point de l'Etat-nation en général." (p. 378)

 

[1992]  Basil Davidson,  The Black Man's Burden. Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, James Curry, Oxford, 1994

-  "In the Asante case, under the conditions of the 1880's, the king and its administrative stool holders saw their route to self-defense in measures to extend the royal monopoly but this time in partnership with a British royal monopoly. Their bid for self-adjustment took the form of offering the British monarch, Queen Victoria, a huge commercial concession.
Now it might be thought that the British government, eager to acquire a monopoly of commercial control over wide West African lands, but far less eager to meet an almost certain high cost of conquest, would have jumped at this offer. But the British ministers in charge at home now wanted more than monopolist commercial control; they wanted territorial ownership. Partly in order to keep out the French, then pressing down from the interior lands of the Western Sudan, but even more, as most of the evidence seems to show, because a demand for territorial ownership had become an imperial obsession and even a popular cause." (pp. 70-71)

-  "No more than sixty years or so after preferring to invade Asante with military force rather than accept the Asante offer of a more or less unfettered commercial control of that country and its wealth - a control, moreover, that would cost next to nothing in administrative terms, since Asante would continue to administer itself - British imperial government found that it had little to gain, after all, from territorial possession and reverted to the policy of withdrawal set forth in 1865." (p. 72)