Farewells To Empire

Abstract

Imperialism has already begun to be thought of as a thing of the past, with not much relevance to the present day. It appears in this light in some, though not all, of the books that have come out in this country in the last few years, in which the modem empires, chiefly the British, are weighed up and their epitaphs variously written. Before looking at and comparing some of these books, it is appropriate to recall an earlier work that most of them in one way or another look back to, Lenin's Imperialism of 1916. This "popular outline" as its author called it has remained in memory partly on the strength of Lenin's other achievements, theoretical and practical; and its prominence has tended to obscure the fact that it came at the end of a whole generation of radical and socialist thinking on the subject. Lenin himself made no pretence of inventing all his ideas out of his own head; he began by acknowledging his particular debt to the English Liberal J. A. Hobson, whose book Imperialism in 1902 laid the foundations of the theory of capital concentration and capital export as the prime mover in imperial expansion.