I can best summarize the content of this paper by exhibiting four quotations:

A trading community like early Victorian England, which can still profitably employ all its capital in its mills and ships, becomes indifferent to the acquisition of territory, and even tends to regard the colonies previously acquired as a useless encumbrance. That was the normal state of mind of our commercial classes during the middle years of last century. They dealt in goods, and in order to sell goods abroad, it was not necessary either to colonise or to conquer. To this phase belongs the typical foreign policy of Liberalism, with its watchwords of peace, non-intervention, and free trade. The third phase, the modern phase, begins when capital has accumulated in large fortunes, when the rate of interest at home begins to fall, and the discovery is made that investments abroad in unsettled countries with populations more easily exploited than our own, offer swifter and bigger returns. It is the epoch of concession hunting, of coolie labour, of chartered companies, of railway construction, of loans to semi-civilised Powers, of the “opening up” of “dying empires.” At this phase the export of capital has become to the ruling class more important and more attractive than the export of goods. The Manchester School disappears, and even the Liberals accept Imperialism. It is, however, no longer the simple and barbaric Imperialism of the agricultural stage. Its prime motive is not to acquire land, though in the end it often lapses into this elementary form of conquest. It aims rather at pegging out spheres of influence and at that sort of stealthy conquest which is called “pacific penetration.” The old Imperialism levied tribute; the new Imperialism lends money at interest.

The era of modern colonialism has also been the period of rapid and accelerating population increase throughout most of the world. The beginning of this trend was in Europe, and along with the expansion of European-originating influences, shock waves of demographic change seized larger and larger parts of mankind. The culmination of this trend may not yet be in sight; the lack of economic balance which it has brought to many countries belongs to the legacy of the colonial era and constitutes one of the principal socio-economic problems of the present and the immediate future. Its probable continuation cannot be ignored here; forecasts of population growth made by the United Nations or found in other recent literature will therefore be discussed along with the historical data on population change. The latter as well as the former must perforce be presented in rather broad terms, as magnitudes rather than as precise data.

One of the first problems confronting a colonial power after establishing de facto or de jure sovereignty over a new territory is to set up procedures for settling disputes arising within the dominated society, and to establish a whole range of rights in relation to property and obligations of individuals and groups to one another and to the state.

If “colonial politics” denotes the objectives of a metropolitan power vis-à-vis its colony, then, for purposes of this paper, we may define “colonial psychology” as the frame of reference that determines the attitudes of “metropolitans” vis-à-vis the “colonial problem.” By “metropolitans” we mean the inhabitants of those Western societies that are linked to part of the non-West by the historical, political, economic and psychological ties that have always accentuated the dominance of the West. By “colony” we shall here mean only the areas with a multiracial population of which a white element considers itself so integrally a part that it feels itself more strongly associated with its own “colonial” society than with the metropolitan country of its origins.

We have had a little over forty years of experience of countries we conventionally dub “satellites.” In looking at this slice of recent history two questions come to mind. Can one fit the type of relationships he finds within the Sino-Soviet bloc into the perspectives which economic history has developed in the debate on colonialism and imperialism? Has Nature made a leap and produced a new historical type, or do we have merely a new subtle change in form?