[ssf] the White Man's Burden Re: [sheffield-anti-war-coalition] Fw: [bangla-vision] It was a hoax -- Re: The WTO announces formalized SLAVERY MARKET for AFRICA
wulf t. saxon
adam at diamat.org.uk
Wed Nov 29 10:09:03 GMT 2006
> WTO ANNOUNCES FORMALIZED SLAVERY MARKET FOR AFRICA
...
> A system in which corporations own workers is the only free-market solution to African poverty, Schmidt said. "Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits--out the door. Get sick, get
> fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care. With each life valuable from start to finish, the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."
> http://www.whartonglobal.com/africa/panels.asp#Trade
Empire,
claimed Rudyard Kipling,
was ''the White Man's Burden''.
Behind it
lay not desire for conquest
or lust for power,
but a ''heavy harness'' of duty
to bring law and civilisation
to ''sullen peoples''.
It was a yoke
the White Man shouldered
with especial enthusiasm
between 1870 and 1914,
the era,
historians claim,
of a ''New Imperialism''.
During that time,
two things dominate world diplomacy:
the expansion of empire
and
the self-conscious speed of that expansion.
Large stretches of the globe were annexed.
Hitherto isolationist countries
( Germany,
the United States,
Japan )
acquired a taste for empires,
joining countries
( Britain,
France,
Russia )
with an already well-developed taste
and
a still unsatisfied appetite
for them.
They also acquired a sense of urgency.
If empires were to be won,
they must be won fast.
Thus the ''scramble for Africa'',
which ( predictable )
produced a scrambled Africa --
almost an entire continent
parcelled out
in 20 years
from 1880
on a principle
not much more sophisticated than
''first come, first served''.
The scale of absorption was enormous.
Each year
between the late 1870s and 1914
an average of 240,000 square miles
of territory came under colonial control.
At the outbreak of the Great War,
the colonised world
had a population
of more than 560 million people.
It was moreover
a world not merely colonised
but conquered.
Indigenous resistance
was squashed by structures
of Government established.
A key to glory, a call to duty
------------------------------
All this took men,
money,
machines.
It also took ideas.
Without them,
imperialism would have appeared mere caprice,
a baseless belligerence.
It needed a justification.
The church militant
was highly serviceable here.
Missionaries
( whose sincerity need not be disparaged )
could claim the souls of Christ
if their Governments
also claimed territory.
Culture,
broadly defined,
was adduced:
it was the White Man's Burden
to introduce native people
to law and order,
if not as yet,
to ''democracy''.
Commerce too,
seemed reason enough.
Joseph Chamberlain,
Britain's Colonial Secretary
( 1895 - 1903 )
believed that ties of trade
could bind
mother country and colonies closer,
almost spiritual union.
Finally to possess an empire was a glory.
Lord Curzon,
erstwhile Viceroy of India,
put it well.
"In Empire,"
he wrote in 1908,
"we have found not merely
the key to glory and wealth,
but the call to duty
and the means to service mankind".
Imperialism had its passionate critics too,
who noticed the disparity
between the high-minded ideals
of Empire
and its high-handed methods.
Betrice Webb,
the Fabian Socialist,
deplored the ''impossible combination''
of ''sentimental Christianity''
and ''blackguardism''.
The individualist liberal philosopher
Herbert Spencer
decried the enslavement of natives.
Even a moderate Liberal
such as Henry Campbell-Bannerman,
a future British Prime Minister ( 1906-08 ),
condemned the
''methods of barbarism''
( he was thinking of concentration camps )
by which Britain
had fought the Boar War,
1899-1902.
The underlying assumption
was that conquest brutalised
the conqueror as much as the conquered.
Militarism,
anti-intellectualism,
racial intolerance,
greed:
were these,
critics of empire wounded,
the real products of the new colonial era ?
The highest stage of capitalism
-------------------------------
It is important
to set aside these arguments
for and against imperialism
to try and understand the phenomenon
in a more profound way.
What really lay behind it ?
According to the English economist
J A Hobson,
the explanation was to be found
in the investment requirements
of the capitalist class.
In 1902 he argued
that the wealthy sought outlets
for their savings abroad
because there was under consumption of goods,
and thus capital,
at home.
He proposed
that fairer distribution of income
would rectify this
by boosting domestic consumption.
Hobson was not a Marxist,
but his views
found an audience
with Marxist disciples.
Lenin borrowed from them
in *Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism*
( 1916 ),
wherein he argued
that capitalism
had entered a new
( and final ) phase
in the late 19th century.
Increased wealth
in fewer hands
( monopoly capitalism, he called it )
meant that the competitive urge
had to express itself in imperial rivalry
between great monopoly capitalist nations,
with their huge
( and, he thought, self-destructive )
demand for new materials
and new markets.
Lenin's argument was sophisticated,
but was it true ?
An alternative reading
views imperialism
not as the inevitable outcome of capital
but as a deviation from it.
J A Schumpeter,
writing shortly after Lenin,
proposed that for capitalist economics
imperialism is irrational.
Capitalism flourishes
in peaceful times;
it prefers free trade above all.
Imperialism,
on the other hand,
causes wars and tariff controls.
The explanation of the phenomenon
was therefore to be sought
in political terms;
the desire of statesmen
to win popular support,
the residual militarism
of a warrior class,
and the need to provide employment
for surplus administrators.
Some of this as the ring of truth.
In every country which practised imperialism,
military success brought political benefit,
military failure brought defeat.
''Jingoism''
-- the word was coined at this time --
is a potent political device.
Spoils of empire, road to war
-----------------------------
In the end
the diversity of the late 19th century
imperialism eludes such general theories.
Each empire
had its own reasons
for existence,
and no two empires
were exactly the same.
There were national styles in imperialism
as in other things.
Russia was anxious
to acquire warm water ports;
Britain was keen
to maintain the route
to India;
the United States
wished to become
the major power
in the Caribbean
and Latin America;
France sought,
as ever,
''la gloire'',
hoping,
no doubt,
to obliterate the memory
of Napoleon III
by recreating the days
of Napoleon I.
All,
having acquired empires,
wished to protect them.
Preservation of empire itself
became the reason for imperialism
This quality of self-protection
was a necessary feature of empires,
but it caused problems.
Sometimes they grew too large,
sometimes too great a distance separated
centre and periphery.
Most of all,
it ensured conflict
with other imperial powers.
The colonial era is peppered
with occasions that threatened war or,
indeed,
turned into it:
the confrontation between Britain and France
at Fashoda
( 1898 )
for control of the Nile;
the ''Agadir Incident''
( 1911 )
between Germany and France
for control of Morocco;
the war between the United States and Spain
( 1898 );
the Russo-Japanese War
( 1904-05 );
the Boer War
( 1899-1902 ).
The inherent instability
of large-scale territorial aggrandisement
is obvious.
It was reasonable,
therefore,
for people to wonder
how long imperial pretensions
could be sustained
without more serious conflict
between world powers.
One way of interpreting
the years prior to the outbreak
of the Great War
is to see in them
a grim ineluctability:
from international competition
to international tension
to international war.
Certainly 1914
marked a definitive shift.
After the war,
the victorious powers sought
to divide the spoils of empire,
to resume the imperialism
dramatically interrupted in 1914.
But things could never be the same again.
Independence movements
in the 1920s
increasingly challenged
colonial authorities,
and although it took another World War
to bring about
full scale ''decolonisation'',
the seeds were clearly sown
in the years
after 1918.
-- Longman's Chronicle of the World
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