Imperialism

Imperialism, as defined by the Dictionary of Human Geography, is "an unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in the form of an empire, based on ideas of superiority and practices of dominance, and involving the extension of authority and control of one state or people over another." It is often considered in a negative light, as merely the exploitation of native people in order to enrich a small handful.

Quotes

• I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
  • Henry Adams, quoted in Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn by Leon Wolff, p. 195

• Let them take the debate which had recently been carried on with so much vivacity on the subject of Imperial expansion. There was a process of expansion which was as normal, as necessary, as inseparable, and unmistakable a sign of vitality in a nation as the corresponding processes in the growing human body. We might control and direct it by oversight and by means adapted to the end, but we could not arrest it. ... [I]t was not part of the most illustrious apostles and disciples of Liberalism to condemn expansion in the sense which he had described it.
  • H. H. Asquith, speech in Darwen, Lancashire (27 January 1899), quoted in The Times (28 January 1899), p. 8

• Our inhabitants are especially free to promote their own welfare. They are unburdened by militarism. They are not called upon to support any imperialistic designs. Every mother can rest in the assurance that her children will find here a land of devotion, prosperity and peace.
  • Calvin Coolidge, Address before the Holy Name Society, Washington, D.C. (21 September 1924), in Foundations of the Republic (1968), p. 112

• Imperialism is challenged from two sides. On the one hand, there is a rising tide of nationalism within the various empires, entailing demands for self-government and independence. On the other hand, there is an increasing realization that the whole idea of the exclusive empire belongs to an age that is past; and that the backward regions of the world, both in respect of economic development and cultural advance, should be regarded as a responsibility resting upon the international community as a whole.
  • Aldous Huxley, "Imperialism and Colonies", in An Encyclopedia of Pacifism (1937), p. 45

• The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.
  • C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. (Vintage Books, 1963)

• The conquest of foreign peoples is often described in terms of breaking animals to harness. The verbs domare, perdomare, subigere, frangere, coercere—all regularly used of taming animals—are widespread in accounts of Roman expansion.
  • Myles Lavan, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge UP, 2013), p. 83

• Take up the White Man's burden—
     Send forth the best ye breed—
  Go bind your sons to exile
     To serve your captives' need.
  • Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (1899), st. 1

• Imperialism, trying to preserve itself in the face of the oppressed masses’ anticolonial struggle, presented neocolonialism to the masses.
  • Kwame Ture, Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America (Knopf Doubleday, 1992), afterword

• The task of imperialism is to divide and rule, isolate and dominate.
  • Kwame Ture, Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America (Knopf Doubleday, 1992), afterword

• I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
  • Mark Twain on the question of U.S. involvement in the Philippines, in the New York Herald (October 15, 1900), as quoted in Frederick Anderson (ed.) A Pen Warmed Up In Hell: Mark Twain in Protest (Harper & Row, 1979)

• Germany must have her place in the sun.
  • Wilhelm II, speech in Hamburg (18 June 1901), as quoted in Alexander Duncan Mclaren, Germanism from Within (1916)

See also

• Empire
• Colonialism
• American imperialism
• Christianity and colonialism
• World view

External links

• Global existential threat

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