Strachey on Empire
Williams, William Appleman
identified and ordered the problems technology has cast up for us. But neither he nor anyone else has yet drawn up a cohesive and compelling program of action which will bring our domestic concerns...
...And the great merit of Strachey's volume is that he understands that colonialism (formal or administrative) is not the crucial element that defines imperialism...
...Strachey would have made his point far more effectively if he had formulated the issue in such blunt terms...
...In the next breath, however, he repeats Gunnar Myrdal's observation that the rich grow richer and vice versa...
...But neither he nor anyone else has yet drawn up a cohesive and compelling program of action which will bring our domestic concerns into clear international focus...
...By thus slighting America's imperial economics, Strachey weakens his own analysis and denies himself a clue for dealing effectively with the problem of ending imperialism along with colonialism...
...it is rather the way in which each stage of frontier development provided the same kind of one-shot stimulus to the established metropolitan economy...
...And he says boldly that the reason we should now help the former colonies is the simple and obvious one...
...The fascinating thing about this is that American leaders saw the implications of the pattern as early as the War of 1812...
...For only the United Nations can really handle the necessary aid without sustaining the same pattern of unbalanced economic relationships between the advanced and the underdeveloped nations...
...It can fairly be called the ideological tie of their philosophical regiment...
...An end of the imperialist epoch is then both possible and a precondition of our survival...
...Strachey on Empire The End of Empire, by John Strachey...
...Hence he concludes—as he did in the earlier volume about Marx's law of increasing misery in domestic affairs—that vigorous action is necessary in order to prevent the same old tendency from reasserting itself in a new kind of empire...
...Yet the rich continue to accumulate more wealth rapidly while the poor improve their condition slowly...
...An open door for equal competition (with reciprocity treaties) would sustain the unbalanced relationship that was so favorable to the United States...
...Let it be said at once that Strachey's position is neither so crass nor so crude as that of a good many who follow his analysis in one or another of its various forms...
...They are human beings: "It is morally right...
...The dilemma still exists...
...351 pp...
...He also comments quite accurately that it was just as ruthless...
...Observing that empire is now dying and leaving but few embers in the ashes, he concludes that the tendency was not in fact a law...
...And surely Strachey realizes that Cor-dell Hull's vigorous efforts to break into Britain's imperial preference system was merely a later manifestation of the same policy—as was Harry Dexter White's militant campaign against the proposals advanced by Lord Keynes at the end of the war...
...It just may be, therefore, that the British Labor Party debate about nuclear weapons is the wrong argument at the wrong time...
...It offers a convenient review of the issue and the literature, some pertinent and provocative comments (along with some oversize boners) on American diplomacy, and an insight into the foreign policy dilemma of the British Labor Party...
...Yet, in opening his writer's notebook and sharing his developing thoughts about problems and priorities, Stuart Chase has made a useful contribution to the discussion of national goals...
...Yet American readers may find it worthwhile on several accounts...
...Random House...
...An act of that character would compare in American history with the importance of Britain's decision to withdraw from India...
...Perhaps the real issue is how to wheedle the United States into channeling its economic aid into the United Nations, and then keeping its hands off what is done with it...
...Now this is the kind of sophisticated having-it-both-ways upon which a good many British and American intellectuals seem to pride themselves...
...Strachey works from the assumption that Hobson and Lenin provided a close approximation to the actuality of their eras (1870 to 1915) and a viable generalization about the tendency of imperialism to continue onward to catastrophe...
...But here the point is not whether the American West was treated politically as a colony...
...Hence the truth of the matter would seem to be that colonialism is ending without automatically destroying imperialism...
...Perhaps he would have done so if he had exploited the insight which leads him (as it did Lewis Corey a generation ago) to view America's continental expansion as the economic equivalent of European colonialism...
...And in May, 1823, John Quincy Adams explicitly explained that America did not need colonies in the Western Hemisphere: its relative economic advantage as a more developed country made them unnecessary and even bothersome...
...And it just might have even more important consequences for the peace and the general welfare of the world...
...He recognizes the difficulty and confronts it squarely...
...Reviewed by William Appleman Williams As the second of his projected studies of modern industrial society and its dynamics, John Strachey's reflections on empire prove rather less stimulating than the first volume on Contemporary Capitalism...
...Men like Thomas Balogh, Paul Prebeisch, and Myrdal are quite prepared to use it effectively and equitably...
Vol. 24 • September 2006 • No. 7
