Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 87similar, in fact, to the causes to the American invasions of Hawai’i, Cuba, and
The Philippines, and their roots went back into the late 1800s.
Capitalism did not develop only in the United States. In fact, many
European countries had their industrial capitalist revolutions well before the
Americans did. And by the late 19th Century, they faced many of the same
problems that the U.S. did. Industrial powers like England, Germany, and
France--as well as less wealthy states like Russia, Spain, Belgium, and The
Netherlands--had been conquering areas to establish as colonies for some
time, but now were finding that even with colonies, they needed new markets
and areas for investment. One of the most astute observers of this economic
situation was a Russian intellectual who was kicked out of that country
because he wanted to overthrow the government of the Tsar. His name was
Vladimir Lenin and while exiled in Geneva, Switzerland wrote one of the more
influential works of the 20th Century, a pamphlet titled Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism. Lenin ‘s overall work was often sophisticated, but the basic
ideas were fairly straightforward. In the most powerful countries, he began,
the industrial and financial elites dominated the economic and political sys-
tems, and they were facing similar problems of overproduction and surplus
capital. But areas to colonize were becoming harder to find since the globe
was already divided up quite a bit. So Lenin predicted that there would be
“inter-imperial rivalries,” meaning that the empires would start to fight
against each other for lands already possessed. Capitalism had to continually
grow or it would face crisis [like a shark has to continually swim to stay alive]
so the great powers began to come into conflict with one another in their
quest for markets to sell goods, areas where they could invest capital, places
to find cheap labor, and lands where they could get vital resources like ores
for industry, land for agriculture, or water for commerce and navies.
Lenin could make such observations because the situation he described
was already in the works. In South Africa, settlers from Britain and The
Netherlands [the Dutch] had been fighting throughout the 1800s for control
of the land, with the British gaining the upper hand and controlling most of
South Africa, and the gold recently discovered there, by the late 19th Century.
From 1899 to 1902, the British fought against Dutch settlers known as the
Boers in the Boer War, with Britain ultimately victorious. At that same time,
England and France nearly came to blows over an outpost in Sudan called
Fashoda. Though it had little economic value--it was near the northern Nile