Volume 13, Number 11 · December 18, 1969
Guide to Imperialism
By Geoffrey Barraclough
The Lords of Human Kind. Black Man, Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire
by V.G. Kiernan
Little, Brown, 336 pp., $7.95
Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1880-1914
by Heinz Gollwitzer
Harcourt, Brace & World, 216 pp., $5.95
Critics of Empire
by Bernard Porter
St. Martin's Press, 369 pp., $10.50
Britain and the Russian Civil War
by Richard H. Ullman
Princeton, 395 pp., $10.00
The Fall of the British Empire, 1918-1968
by Colin Cross
Coward-McCann, 368 pp., $8.95
Britain in the Century of Total War
by Arthur Marwick
Little, Brown, 514 pp., $8.50
Sitting down to review these books on the morning of October 15, my window overlooking Boston Common and the crowds gathering in the sunshine for the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, I could not help reflecting on their peculiar relevance. Imperialism is a chameleon, a 'prehensile-tailed' animal, adept at changing its color. Historians and sociologists have chosen to regard it simply as an offshoot of nationalism, the nationalist hysteria writ large. In reality, it was alive and kicking long before men thought of nations and nationalities, and we shall do better to think of it as the spontaneous offspring of the primordial urge to force other men into subjection and make them work to produce the 'surplus' for the lucky few—the conquering, imperial warband—without which (historians assure us) the proud structure of civilization could never have been raised.
Review, 4562 words
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