INTRODUCTION

NationalisminAsiaandAfrica,itisnowgenerallyagreed,is areactionagainstEuropeandomination.Butthenatureofthis domination,theprecisemannerinwhichithaselicitedsucha reaction,andthecharacterofthereactionitselfareissueson whichtheconsensusisperhapslessgeneral.OnewayofdescribingthesituationcurrentamongthosewhoacceptMarxismas agospel,andwidelyprevalentevenamongthosewhodonot, istotheeffectthatnationalisminAsiaandAfricaisthenatural consequenceofEuropeanexploitationoftheseareas,anexploitationwhichgoesbythenameofimperialism."Itisnoideologicalassertion,butasimplegeneralizationrootedinempirical observation,"wereadinarecentlypublishedwork,"thatthe primecontentofcolonialpoliticalrulewaseconomicexploitation."Andagain,thesameauthor,describingEuropeanrule overseas,writesasfollows:"Forthemostpart,strictlyeconomic exploitationisthepredominantelement,transformingmere politicalcontrolintoaprocesswhichinvolvesnothingshortof

the revolutionizing of social relations ... the central raison d'etre of imperialism is the extraction of profit from the labor of the indigenous people by whites by virtue of their control over the political machinery of the state." 1

This explanation of European activities overseas, now widely accepted all over the world, was invented and propagated by European publicists who have derived from it-and inculcated in their respectful Western audience-powerful and corrosive feelings of guilt. One or two examples of this prevalent attitude are worth giving. We may first look at a passage from a lecture by Professor Arnold Toynbee, delivered under the aegis of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which purports to tell us how matters look "through the eyes of the non-Western majority of mankind":" ... if any Western inquirer asks them their opinion of the West," declared Professor Toynbee in the first of his 1952 Reith Lectures, "he will hear them all giving him the same answer: Russians, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese and all the rest. The West, they will tell him, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of Western aggression to bring up against him. The Russians will remind him that their country has been invaded by Western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709 and 161 0; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind him that Western missionaries, traders, and soldiers from across the sea have been pushing into their countries from the coasts since the fifteenth century. The Asians will also remind him that, within the same period, the Westerners have occupied the lion's share of the world's last vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans," the relentless indictment continues, "will remind him that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonizers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their Western masters' greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind him that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for the West European intruders and for their African slaves."2 Let us next listen to Jean-Paul Sartre in merciless invective and self-accusation:

"You well know that we are exploiters. You well know that we have taken the gold, the metals and then the oil of the 'new continents' and have conveyed them to the old metropolitan centers. Not without excellent results: palaces, cathedrals, industrial capitals; and further, when crisis threatened there were the colonial markets to soften its impact or deflect it. Europe, stuffed with wealth, grants humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: a man, among us, signifies an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation." The unbearable situation inspires in Sartre a violent and sanguinary dialectic which elicits the victim's response to the oppressor's oppression and shows nationalism outside Europe erupting out of a dead and confining imperialism in the exhilaration of Sten-gun fire and exploding hand grenades: "When peasants handle rifles, then the old myths pale into insignificance, and one by one prohibitions are overturned: a fighter's weapon is his humanity. Because in the first period of the revolt you must kill: to slaughter a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to do away at the same time with the oppressor and the oppressed: the result is one dead man and one free man; for the first time the survivor feels a national earth under his feet. At this moment the Nation is near to him: it is found wherever he goes, wherever he is-never farther, it becomes one with his freedom." 3

This notion of European or Western imperialism with its characteristic account of economic and political history, now looming so large in political controversy, and generating, as the quotations from Toynbee and Sartre show, so vehement a flow of guilt, indignation, and moral passion, is in fact of very recent origin, and its worldwide popularity is still more recent. Up to the last decade of the nineteenth century or thereabouts the idea of imperialism, which derives originally from the Roman imperium, had almost none of the doctrinal accretions and pejorative overtones which have since become attached to it. Webster's International Dictionary in its 1890 edition, for instance, defined imperialism as "the power or character of an emperor; imperial authority; the spirit of empire." Though Webster does not record it, a change had nonetheless occurred in the meaning of the term

in his book Imperialism, first published in 1902. Hobson, moderately clever as an economist, supplemented his abilities in the discussion of social and political issues with a vast fund of moral passion mperialism in his eyes was a recent phenomenon, somr .ning not much more than thirty years old. As he makes clear at the beginning of his work, by imperialism he largely understands the division of Africa between the European Powers in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, a course of events culminating, so far as he himself was concerned, in the Boer War, the incident which burst the dams of his moral indignation and led him to the study of the subject. Hobson begins by arguing that these new African annexations do not benefit the nation at large. They are of little value to the manufacturer or the trader, since the populations which inhabit them are not great consumers of manufactured goods; again they are largely useless for European settlement. Why then are they acquired? "If, contemplating the enormous expenditure on armaments, the ruinous wars, the diplomatic audacity of knavery by which modern governments seek to extend their territorial power, we put the plain, practical question, cui bono?, the first and most obvious answer is," Hobson triumphantly concluded, "the investor." The investor is a man with money to invest; this money has come to him out of the prodigious wealth generated by modern industry. The investor acquires this wealth which is surplus to his needs because the product of industry is, under capitalism, badly and inequitably distributed. If this product were more equally distributed so that the laboring classes, who now live in misery, could increase their consumption, there would be no excess of wealth for which bloated millionaires seek investment opportunities abroad. There would be then no overproduction and no underconsumption in industrial countries, and it is these which are the root cause of economic crises in industrial societies and which drive investors to seek openings for their funds abroad. The economist Maynard Keynes recognized in Hobson a precursor, and indeed Hobson's explanation of economic crises in terms of underconsumption within industrial society has affinities with Keynes's own theory. But Hobson did more than ex-

frica plainthemalfunctionofcapitalisteconomies;heattemptedto explainbythismalfunctiontheannexationofoverseasterritories bycapitalistpowers.Sincetheinvestorwithlargesurplusfunds is,asasignificanteconomicpower,arecentphenomenon,itis clearwhyimperialismmust,onHobson'stheory,alsobearecent phenomenon.