From
John A. Hobson's “Imperialism, a Study” (1902)
We
have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of
Western States, a European federation of great Powers which, so far
from forwarding the cause of world-civilisation, might introduce the
gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced
industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia
and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers,
no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and
manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor
industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy.
Let those who would scout such a theory as undeserving of
consideration examine the economic and social condition of districts
in Southern England to-day which are already reduced to this
condition, and reflect upon the vast extension of such a system which
might be rendered feasible by the subjection of China to the economic
control of similar groups of financiers, investors, and political and
business officials, draining the greatest potential reservoir of
profit the world has ever known, in order to consume it in Europe.
The situation is far too complex, the play of world-forces far too
incalculable, to render this or any other single interpretation of
the future very probable: but the influences which govern the
Imperialism of Western Europe to-day are moving in this direction,
and, unless counteracted or diverted, make towards some such
consummation.
If
the ruling classes of the Western nations could realise their
interests in such a combination (and each year sees capitalism more
obviously international), and if China were unable to develop powers
of forcible resistance, the opportunity of a parasitic Imperialism
which should reproduce upon a vaster scale many of the main features
of the later Roman Empire visibly presents itself.
Whether
we regard Imperialism upon this larger scale or as confined to the
policy of Great Britain, we find much that is closely analogous to
the Imperialism of Rome.
The
rise of a money-loaning aristocracy in Rome, composed of keen,
unscrupulous men from many nations, who filled the high offices of
State with their creatures, political “bosses” or military
adventurers, who had come to the front as usurers, publicans, or
chiefs of police in the provinces, was the most distinctive feature
of later imperial Rome. This class was continually recruited from
returned officials and colonial millionaires. The large incomes drawn
in private official plunder, public tribute, usury and official
incomes from the provinces had the following reactions upon Italy.
Italians were no longer wanted for working the land or for
manufactures, or even for military service. “The later campaigns on
the Rhine and the Danube,” it is pointed out, “were really
slavehunts on a gigantic scale.”
The
Italian farmers, at first drawn from rural into military life, soon
found themselves permanently ousted from agriculture by the serf
labour of the latifundia,
and they and their families were sucked into the dregs of town life,
to be subsisted as a pauper population upon public charity. A
mercenary colonial army came more and more to displace the home
forces. The parasitic city life, with its lowered vitality and the
growing infrequency of marriage, to which Gibbon draws attention,
rapidly impaired the physique of the native population of Italy, and
Rome subsisted more and more upon immigration of raw vigour from Gaul
and Germany. The necessity of maintaining powerful mercenary armies
to hold the provinces heightened continually the peril, already
manifest in the last years of the Republic, arising from the
political ambitions of great pro-consuls conspiring with a moneyed
interest at Rome against the Commonwealth. As time went on, this
moneyed oligarchy became an hereditary aristocracy, and withdrew from
military and civil service, relying more and more upon hired
foreigners: themselves sapped by luxury and idleness, and tainting by
mixed servitude and licence the Roman populace, they so enfeebled the
State as to destroy the physical and moral vitality required to hold
in check and under government the vast repository of forces in the
exploited Empire. The direct cause of Rome’s decay and fall is
expressed politically by the term “over-centralisation,” which
conveys in brief the real essence of Imperialism as distinguished
from national growth on the one hand and colonialism upon the other.
Parasitism, practised through taxation and usury, involved a
constantly increasing centralisation of the instruments of
government, and a growing strain upon this government, as the prey
became more impoverished by the drain and showed signs of
restiveness.
“The
evolution of this centralised society was as logical as every other
work of nature. When force reached the stage where it expressed
itself exclusively through money the governing class ceased to be
chosen because they were valiant or eloquent, artistic, learned or
devout, and were selected solely because they had the faculty of
acquiring and keeping wealth. As long as the weak retained enough
vitality to produce something which could be absorbed, this oligarchy
was invariable; and, for very many years after the native peasantry
of Gaul and Italy had perished from the land, new blood, injected
from more tenacious races, kept the dying civilisation alive. The
weakness of the moneyed class lay in this very power, for they not
only killed the producer, but in the strength of their
acquisitiveness they failed to propagate themselves.” Adams,
Civilisation
and Decay,
p.44.
This
is the largest, plainest instance history presents of the social
parasitic process by which a moneyed interest within the State,
usurping the reins of government, makes for imperial expansion in
order to fasten economic suckers into foreign bodies so as to drain
them of their wealth in order to support domestic luxury. The new
Imperialism differs in no vital point from this old example. The
element of political tribute is now absent or quite subsidiary, and
the crudest forms of slavery have disappeared: some elements of more
genuine and disinterested government serve to qualify and mask the
distinctively parasitic nature of the later sort. But nature is not
mocked: the laws which, operative throughout nature, doom the
parasite to atrophy, decay, and final extinction, are not evaded by
nations any more than by individual organisms. The greater complexity
of the modern process, the endeavour to escape the parasitic reaction
by rendering some real but quite unequal and inadequate services to
“the host,” may retard but cannot finally avert the natural
consequences of living upon others. The claim that an imperial State
forcibly subjugating other peoples and their lands does so for the
purpose of rendering services to the conquered equal to those which
she exacts is notoriously false: she neither intends equivalent
services nor is capable of rendering them, and the pretence that such
benefits to the governed form a leading motive or result of
Imperialism implies a degree of moral or intellectual obliquity so
grave as itself to form a new peril for any nation fostering so false
a notion of the nature of its conduct.” Let the motive be in the
deed, not in the event,” says a Persian proverb.
Imperialism
is a depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking
interests which appeal to the lusts of quantitative acquisitiveness
and of forceful domination surviving in a nation from early centuries
of animal struggle for existence. Its adoption as a policy implies a
deliberate renunciation of that cultivation of the higher inner
qualities which for a nation as for an individual constitutes the
ascendency of reason over brute impulse. It is the besetting sin of
all successful States, and its penalty is unalterable in the order of
nature.
See
also Lenin's “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”, for
a later, similar approche.
