POWER AND IDEOLOGY
2~7
III
Philosophers of empire are made of sterner stuff. This is not to say
that they must necessarily be reactionary or aggressive. There have
been civilized exponents of the creed, including liberals and socialists
as well as moderate conservatives. The failure to recognize
this
is
among the numerous faults of the bulky textbook assembled by
Professor Snyder.
3
Judging from his selection and the preface, he is
one of those sound, forward-looking citizens for whom there are only
two kinds of imperialism: reactionary (mainly British) and revolu–
tionary (Russian). The United States, it appears, had a brief attack
of the malady around 1900, but recovered with amazing rapidity, and
has been healthy and virtuous ever since. This begs all the questions,
notably the question how the British managed to combine overseas
expansion with economic liberalism. Of course if one defines "imperial–
ism" to mean the kind of thing Britain practiced in India, France
in Algeria, and Russia in Central Asia, everything becomes simple. One
can then note with satisfaction William Jennings Bryan's rebuke to
McKinley (p. 400), and conclude that the American people would
have nothing to do with the doctrine expounded by Mahan and
Theodore Roosevelt. And, needless to say, one can devote a sizable
part of one's compilation to an indictment of the enemy, on the two–
fold ground that (a) Lenin's theory of imperialism is defective, and
(b) Lenin's successors have become imperialists themselves.
In
which
case we are back with the familiar equation: imperialism
=
domina–
tion over other people. But no one ever questioned that. The problem
that modern writers have been struggling with, and which Professor
Snyder's anthology systematically obscures,
is
how and why imperial–
ism survived into the modern age, when according to all the tenets
of free-trade logic it should have withered away.
Now for one thing Professor Snyder does not play fair with his
readers. He quotes out of context, selects what suits him, and over–
looks (I had almost employed a less restrained term) inconvenient
items. Thus by way of illustrating the thesis that European imperial–
ism was closely tied to reaction, he cites the German Conservative
party's election manifesto of 1906 (p. 89), but says nothing about
the colonialist propaganda of the German Liberals (the so-called Pro–
gressives no less than the National-Liberals) who at that time had
formed an alliance with the Conservatives. Elsewhere, Cecil Rhodes
3. The Imperialism Reader: Documents and Readings on Modern Expansionism.
Edited by Louis
L.
Snyder. Van Nostrand Company. $8.50.
