Joseph Chamberlain in 1902.^77 Expansion, said Cecil Rhodes, the
British-born South African who gave his name to Rhodesia – now
Zimbabwe – is everything, and a country “must take as many pieces
of the world as possible.”^78 Indeed, inaction would only lead to the
occupation of a territory by a rival power. The politics of abstention,
affirmed Jules Ferry, probably the politician who best articulated
France’s colonial ambition, could only lead to decay. France “must
make its influence felt all over the world, and bring in everywhere
possible its language, its way of life, its flag, its army, and its genius.”^79
Second, in an age of spectacular economic expansion, industrial
nations felt the need to secure natural resources, markets for their
goods, and opportunities for capital. At the turn of the twentieth
century, J. A. Hobson noted that the word “imperialism” was “on
everybody’s lips,” and that it had acquired a distinctly economic
meaning.^80 On the right, imperialism was perceived as a commercial
and economic necessity. “Colonial policy,” explained Ferry, was “the
daughter of industrial policy.” On the left, the same evolution was
understood more critically, but it remained seen as basically
unavoidable. In his famous essay on imperialism, Lenin presented it as
the “highest stage of capitalism.”^81
Third, colonialism was widely interpreted as a moral duty. The
British referred to the “white man’s burden” and the French to their
“civilizing mission.” At the 1884–85 Berlin Conference convened by
European powers to regulate the division of Africa into colonies,
European states insisted on the “preservation of the native tribes”
and on the importance of “bringing home to them the blessings of
civilization.”^82 There was, of course, a paternalistic, even racist,
dimension to this moral imperative, but the idea of bringing the
(^77) Joseph Chamberlain, quoted in Winfried Baumgart,Imperialism: The Idea and
Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914, Oxford
78 University Press, 1982, p. 72.
Cecil Rhodes, quoted in Duroselle,L’Europe de 1815 anos jours, p. 342. Our 79 translation. Jules Ferry, quoted in Raould Girardet,L’ide ́e coloniale en France de 1871 a
801962 , Paris, La Table Ronde, 1972, p. 86. Our translation.
81 J. A. Hobson, quoted in Hobsbawm,The Age of Empire, p. 60.
82 Ferry and Lenin, quoted in Beaud,A History of Capitalism, pp. 137 and 140.
General Act, Berlin West Africa Conference, quoted in Neta C. Crawford,
Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and
Humanitarian Intervention, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 210.
The rise of the modern state system (1776–1945) 103