ABSTRACT
The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was accompanied by lively debates on who was responsible for pushing Europe and ultimately the globe into the abyss. It is now widely accepted that it was not the European business community. On the contrary, those involved in international finance, commerce and industry warned against a war among the great powers, though it should not be forgotten that they were not opposed to repression and extreme violence in the colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where millions of people died before 1914. This latter point needs to be stressed to avoid a skewed understanding of the dynamics of European and American capitalism. Pondering the results of the extensive research that has been done on the evolution of colonialism and the quest for empire during the past thirty or so years, Marxist writings on the subject should not be discarded, even if it was not merely economic forces that drove the late-nineteenth-century scramble for colonies. Power-political and socio-psychological as well as cultural factors should also be considered.1 What European and American big business did not want was a major war between the great powers of the time.
