Reading English economist John A. Hobson's critique of imperialism is to encotnter a deep-thinking realist musing on its causes, rationales, and brutality with considerable insight and eloquence.
It is no criticism of Hobson to say that he is both brilliant and a creature of his times. There was no "people's history" then, no statistics, no vignettes of daily life, no discussion even of personalities, as is the current fashion of historical writing. His lofty generalities evoke Thucydides more than William Shirer.
He starts by admitting that imperialism can't be defined precisely, that the concepts of history are not as definite and literal as those of the physical sciences. He goes on to add that students of modern politics should be scrupulously careful to distinguish the three elements of which he thinks imperialism consists: nationalism, internationalism, and colonialism, ideas which are "equally elusive, equally shifty" (Hobson 1902).
He then makes an interesting distinction between nationalistic movements that lead to the breaking of previous political ties such as the withdrawal from the Ottoman Empire of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, and Bulgaria, and those that tend to unite in larger aggregates or federations, such as Italy, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Then Hobson distinguishes between the federal union of diverse nationalities such as Austria-Hungary, Norway and Sweden, and the Swiss Federation and the contrasting nationalistic fights against the domination of stronger powers by the Irish, Poles, Finns, Hungarians, and Czechs.
He attributes much of the rise of nationalism to the resistance of both small and large ethnically identifiable populations against the imperial aggressions of Napoleon. The origin of imperialism lies in national, cultural, and/or linguistic chauvinism, which seeks new markets far from home when its domestic ones are saturated.
Ironically adopting the tone of the imperial...