Imperialism

Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780547705200
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist traces the decline of European colonialism and the outbreak of WWI.

Since it was first published in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism has been recognized as the definitive philosophical account of the totalitarian mindset. A probing analysis of Nazism, Stalinism, and the "banality of evil", it remains one of the most referenced works in studies and discussions of totalitarian movements around the world.

In this second volume, Imperialism, Dr. Hannah Arendt examines the cruel epoch of declining European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of the First World War. Through portraits of Disraili, Cecil Rhodes, Gobineau, Proust, and T.E. Lawrence, Arendt illustrates how this era ended with the decline of the nation-state and the disintegration of Europe's class society. These two events, Arendt argues, generated totalitarianism, which in turn produced the Holocaust.

"The most original and profound—therefore the most valuable—political theorist of our times."—Dwight MacDonald, The New Leader

Footnotes

1 The figures are quoted from Leo Model, “The Politics of Private Foreign Investment and Kenneth M. Kauffman and Helena Stalson, “U.S. Assistance to less developed Countries, 1956–65” respectively, both in Foreign Affairs, July, 1967.

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2 L. Model’s article quoted above (p. 641) gives a very valuable and pertinent analysis of these problems.

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3 This is what Mr. Dulles said in a speech at Yale University in 1957, according to David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government, New York, 1964, p. 2.

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4 According to Mr. Dulles, the government had to “fight fire with fire,” and then with a disarming frankness by which the former bead of the CIA distinguished himself from his colleagues in other countries, he went on to explain what this meant. The CIA, by implication, had to model itself upon the Soviet State Security Service, which “is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.” (Italics added.) See Allen W. Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence, New York, 1963, p. 155.

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5 See the very instructive article by Orville L. Freeman, “Malthus, Marx and the North American Breadbasket,” in Foreign Affairs, July, 1967.

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1 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1905, 1938, p. 19: “Though, for convenience, the year 1870 has been taken as indicative of the beginning of a conscious policy of Imperialism, it will be evident that the movement did not attain its full impetus until the middle of the eighties.., from about 1884.”

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2 S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p. 138.

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3 These figures are quoted by Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, New York, 1941, p. 237, and cover the period from 1871–1900.—See also Hobson, op. cit., p. 19: “Within 15 years some 3¾ millions of square miles were added to the British Empire, 1 million square miles with 14 millions inhabitants to the German, 3½ millions square miles with 37 millions inhabitants to the French.”

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4 See Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Weltpolitik, Flugschriften des Alldeutschen Verbandes, No. J, 1897, p. 1.

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5 Ernest Renan in his classical essay Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, 1882. stressed “the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down” as the chief elements which keep the members of a people together in such a way that they form a nation. Translation quoted from The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and other Studies, London, 1896.

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6 Hobson, op. cit.

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7 This bad conscience springing from the belief in consent as the basis of all political organization is very well described by Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925, Boston-New York, 1934, in the discussion of British policy in Egypt: “The justification of our presence in Egypt remains based, not upon the defensible right of conquest, or on force, but upon our own belief in the element of consent. That element, in 1919, did not in any articulate form exist. It was dramatically challenged by the Egyptian outburst of March 1919.”

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8 As Lord Salisbury put it, rejoicing over the defeat of Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill. During the following twenty years of Conservative—and that was at that time imperialist—rule (1885–1905), the English-Irish conflict was not only not solved but became much more acute. See also Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Crimes of England, 1915, pp. 57 ff.

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9 Why in the initial stages of national development the Tudors did not succeed in incorporating Ireland into Great Britain as the Valois had succeeded in incorporating Brittany and Burgundy into France, is still a riddle. It may be, however, that a similar process was brutally interrupted by the Cromwell regime, which treated Ireland as one great piece of booty to be divided among its servants. After the Cromwell revolution, at any rate, which was as crucial for the formation of the British nation as the French Revolution became for the French, the United Kingdom had already reached that stage of maturity that is always accompanied by a loss of the power of assimilation and integration which the body politic of the nation possesses only in its initial stages. What then followed was, indeed, one long sad story of “coercion [that] was not imposed that the people might live quietly but that people might die quietly” (Chesterton, op. cit., p. 60).
For a historical survey of the Irish question that includes the latest developments, compare the excellent unbiased study of Nicholas Mansergh, Britain and Ireland (in Longman’s Pamphlets on the British Commonwealth, London, 1942).

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10 Very characteristic is the following statement of J. A. Froude made shortly before the beginning of the imperialist era: “Let it be once established that an Englishman emigrating to Canada or the Cape, or Australia, or New Zealand did not forfeit his nationality, that he was still on English soil as much as if he was in Devonshire or Yorkshire, and would remain an Englishman while the English Empire lasted; and if we spent a quarter of the sums which were sunk in the morasses at Balaclava in sending out and establishing two millions of our people in those colonies, it would contribute more to the essential strength of the country than all the wars in which we have been entangled from Agincourt to Waterloo.” Quoted from Robert Livingston Schuyler, The Fall of the Old Colonial System, New York, 1945, pp. 280–81.

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11 The eminent South African writer, Jan Disselboom, expressed very bluntly the attitude of the Commonwealth peoples on this question: “Great Britain is merely a partner in the concern . . . all descended from the same closely allied stock. . . . Those parts of the Empire which are not inhabited by races of which this is true, were never partners in the concern. They were the private property of the predominant partner. . . . You can have the white dominion, or you can have the Dominion of India, but you cannot have both.” (Quoted from A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924.)

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12 Ernest Barker, Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1941, p. 4.
See also the very good introductory remarks on the foundations of the French Empire in The French Colonial Empire (in Information Department Papers No. 25, published by The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1941), pp. 9 ff. “The aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not possible in more primitive communities, to ‘associate’ them, so that more and more the difference between la France metropole and la France d’outremer shall be a geographical difference and not a fundamental one.”

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13 See Gabriel Hanotaux, “Le General Mangin” in Revue des Deux Mondes (1925), Tome 27.

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14 W. P. Crozier, “France and her ‘Black Empire’” in New Republic, January 23, 1924.

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15 David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, New Haven, 1939, I, 362 ff.

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16 A similar attempt at brutal exploitation of overseas possessions for the sake of the nation was made by the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies after the defeat of Napoleon had restored the Dutch colonies to the much impoverished mother country. By means of compulsory cultivation the natives were reduced to slavery for the benefit of the government in Holland. Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, first published in the sixties of the last century, was aimed at the government at home and not at the services abroad. (See de Kat Angelino, Colonial Policy, Vol. II, The Dutch East Indies, Chicago, 1931, p. 45.)
This system was quickly abandoned and the Netherlands Indies, for a while, became “the admiration of all colonizing nations.” (Sir Hesketh Bell, former Governor of Uganda, N...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Epigraph
• The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie
• Race-Thinking Before Racism
• Race and Bureaucracy
• Continental Imperialism: the Pan-Movements
• The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man
• Bibliography
• Index
• Read More from Hannah Arendt
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes