I

Imperial expansion, wrote the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1918, as more than one European empire was coming to an ignominious end, was “the purely instinctual inclination towards war and conquest”. This, he declared, confidently, had “no adequate object beyond itself. … Hence the tendency of such expansion to transcend all bonds and tangible limits to the point of utter exhaustion.” The desire for expansion, conquest, and possession which had been the driving force behind every empire, from the Achaemenid to the British, had been, as he phrased it, entirely without “external objects”. They had had no motive other than expansion itself; they had simply gone on and on until they had reached the natural limits of their resources or come up against a stronger power. But why this apparent blind rush into a seemingly shapeless future? “The explanation lies”, Schumpeter replied, “in the vital needs of situations that moulded people and classes into warriors.” If the members of the dominant warrior class wished “to avoid extinction”, they had to continue to be warriors since transformation into something else was unavailable to them. “Imperialism”, in Schumpeter's view, “is thus atavistic in character. It falls into that large group of surviving features from an earlier age …. In other words it is an element that stems from the living conditions not of the present but of the past.” On this account imperialism was not the inescapable consequence of some profound, and eradicable, human aggressiveness, much less was it the expression either of class or economic interests – as the Marxists maintained – both of which could have been perpetuated, albeit in some other form, into the present. It was simply a phase in human history which would “tend to disappear as an element of habitual emotional reaction, because of the progressive rationalization of life and mind”. If this were so then, “cases of Imperialism should decline in intensity the later they occur in the history of a people and a culture”.