ABSTRACT
Economic and political calculations were undoubtedly also involved when Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made a stand against the slave trade and slavery and against the acquisition of new colonies. Whoever believed Adam Smith and expected a prosperous future from free trade was obliged even in his own interests to be an anti-colonialist. This chapter focuses on several more occasions with the tension which existed between the resistances of the former, that is pre-colonial, regime on the one hand, and the struggle of the new, that is post-colonial, nationalist movements on the other. The machinery which kept international relations running in the age of imperialism thus manifested itself in the foreground of Europe. It was a highly complicated machinery of real and potential, territorial, economic and military compensation demands which could be set in motion at will from the most varied quarters.
