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Still, if Professor Williams had been content to trace out the agrar–
Ian origins of the oveseas-markets thesis and to demonstrate its later
acceptance by the business community, one would only be grateful for
a valuable if perhaps excessively laborious clarification of a significant
strand in American expansionist thought. Alas, he is after bigger game.
As the title of his work suggests, he thinks he has uncovered
"the
roots" of
American empire, and this argument constitutes his second book.
In
this
book he contends both that the determination to enlarge the marketplace
explains everything aggressive in American foreign policy and that Amer–
ican foreign policy will ineluctably continue on an imperialist course
abroad until it abandons the free market at home, transforms its eco–
nomic institutions and establishes a socialist (for him, a decentralized
and communal) society.
When Professor Williams insists that imperialism is totally reducible
to economic motives, he is writing, of course, in a well-defined tradition.
Half a dozen years ago in his book
The Great Evasion,
he said "Of all
the evasions in which Americans have indulged themselves the most
serious one is very probably their persistent flight from any intellectual
and moral confrontation with Karl Marx."
It
is true that Marx talked
about capitalism's need for "the conquest of new markets," but so, as
Professor Williams readily concedes, did Adam Smith; and
The Roots of
the Modern American Empire
shows few signs of any confrontation,
whether intellectual or moral, with Marx. My impression is that Profes–
sor Williams is really not much of a Marxist, except in an
epater-l'acad–
emie
sense. He is rather a native American radical, somewhat in the
school, though without the grandeur, of the earlier Charles
A.
Beard.
Actually Marx himself had a more benign view of imperialism than
latter-day Marxists, or than Professor Williams. As Shlomi Avineri's use–
ful compilation of Marx's comments on empire
(Karl Marx on Colonial–
ism and Modernization
[Anchor Books]) makes clear, while Marx con–
demned the atrocities which accompanied European colonialism, his
conception of the stages of economic development required him to be–
lieve that underdeveloped countries had to go through a capitalist phase
before they would be eligible for communism.
In
this light, he was
compelled to regard western colonialism as a progressive force in spite
of itself. Thus he could write of the British in India: "The question
is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in
the social state of Asia?
If
not, whatever may have been the crimes of
England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the
revolution." Engels put it more succinctly when the French occupied
Algeria: "The conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact
for the progress of civilisation."
