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Updated: May 31, 2025
I knocked about in out-of-the-way corners, where I observed and absorbed all sorts of things which became very useful in my subsequent career. A native, and by that I mean an inhabitant, of non-European countries always fascinated me, and I soon learned the way of disarming their suspicion and winning their confidence a proceeding very difficult to a European.
If to-day the most fruitful political ideas of the West the ideas of nationality and self-government which are purely products of Western civilization, are beginning to produce a healthy fermentation in many parts of the non-European world, that result is due to European Imperialism." The ethics of modern imperialism have nowhere been better formulated than in an essay by Lord Cromer.
Third, perhaps, ranks Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round; while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or slightly retrograding.
Both of these non-European nations began playing serious wealth-power roles in the same period from 1895 to 1910. Up to that point Europe continued to be the homeland of monopoly capitalism. The chief centers of heavy industry, commerce and finance were in Europe. European merchant fleets and European navies sailed the seas.
The second period of European imperialism was filled with the rivalries of the three nations which had in different degrees contributed to the breakdown of the Spanish monopoly, the Dutch, the French, and the English; and we have next to inquire how far, and why, these peoples were more successful than the Spaniards in planting in the non-European world the essentials of European civilisation.
First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern feeling. 'Ah, but excellent! said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a pause; 'and what entrain what beauty!
The general and just reason for not using non-European tribes against Europeans is that given by Chatham against the use of the red Indian that such allies might do very diabolical things. But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves.
Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the 'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The 'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European allies and subjects.
But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not that of extending the British Empire in strange lands. Rather it is restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands. It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the search for something non-European. It would be much truer to call it putting Europe together again after it had been broken.
The East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Dutch East India Company, and the French Compagnie des Indes were but a few famous examples of the chartered companies which still practically monopolized the trade of most non-European countries. Customs and companies may have been injurious in many respects, but commerce grew out of all bounds.
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