Quotes About Imperialism

Peace reigned in Europe, but this was because domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples.

During the last fifteen to twenty years, especially since the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the economic and also the political literature of the two hemispheres has more and more often adopted the term "imperialism" in order to describe the present era. In 1902, a book by the English economist J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, was published in London and New York. This

My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. [4] That was said in 1895 by Cecil Rhodes

The distortion and shelving of the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state could not help but play an immense role at a time when states, each with its military apparatus reinforced as a result of imperialist competition, have been turned into military monsters which are exterminating millions of people in order to decide the dispute as to whether England or Germany – this or that centre of finance capital – is to rule the world.

Nehru repeatedly said that nationalism as articulated in cultural or religious terms is too narrow and parochial to solve the big problems that the country was facing. However, this economic nationalism was distinctly different from the one which was coterminous with the rise of imperialism.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

on the other hand, the Constantinian imperial churches condemned early Christian millenarianism only because they saw themselves in the Christian imperium as `the holy rule' of Christ's Thousand Years' empire. So every future hope for a different, alternative kingdom of Christ was feared and condemned as heresy.

Marx thought that capitalism's essential urge to expand and look for further markets and cheaper labour was the driving force behind the European imperialism of the 19th century.

But capitalism without some form of imperialism is actually quite a recent development. It was not even seriously considered until the end of the First World War, and not implemented on a global scale until after the Second World War. By then, European countries had lost their world domination to the USA and the Soviet Union. Imperialism was extracted from capitalism with the arrival in the late 19th century of the big corporations

In the late 1830s, China stepped up its efforts to stop the trade in opium and this led to the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60.

The Rise of the US and Germany By the time the United States was strong enough to join the imperialist land grab, very few territories remained. Beyond its small island bases in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, the US did little except relieve Spain of its last colonial post in the Philippines, and to force Japan to open itself to foreign trade.

Germany made every effort to acquire a small empire in the bits left unclaimed in Africa, China and the Pacific, only to lose it all to Britain after the First World War. All this was a signal that, by the late 19th century, being the largest empire no longer guaranteed having the largest economy.

At the end of the second Opium War (in which it was joined by France), Britain forced the Chinese to fully legalize both the trade in opium and the shipment of Chinese indentured labourers to the Americas (where they worked as slaves in all but name).

The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, was one of the first multi-national companies.

The East India Company created the Dutch empire in Indonesia by means of brute force combined with economic pressure.

One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us.

The destruction of India's village system was the greatest of England's blunders.

To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.

Socialism is the expression of the principle of violence crying from the workers' soul, just as Imperialism is the principle of violence speaking from the soul of the official and the soldier.

The nationalist, too, affirms Socialism, and objects only to its Internationalism. He wishes to combine Socialism with the ideas of Imperialism and the struggle against foreign nations. He is a national, not an international socialist; but he, also, approves of the essential principles of Socialism.

The nationalist, too, affirms Socialism, and objects only to its Internationalism. He wishes to combine Socialism with the ideas of Imperialism and the struggle against foreign nations. He is a national, not an international socialist; but he, also, approves of the essential principles of Socialism.1

The United States have no possessions in the east and do not desire to have any, as other countries do.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.

the theory and the practice of Imperialism regarded as a "mission of civilisation," in its effects upon "lower" or alien peoples, and its political and moral reactions upon the conduct and character of the Western nations engaging in it.