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Of Greek and Roman imperialism there are admirable histories, but to what convenient volume can one turn for a similar general account of the greater imperialism of our own times? What Rome required three centuries to achieve has been dwarfed by modern nations in barely fifty years. The imperialism of these last five decades will rank, in the writer's opinion, as one of the major phases of modern history and one of the two or three foremost problems in world politics and world economics.

Seeing the trees but not the wood is so natural a tendency that world events such as the industrial revolution, the rise of democracy, and contemporary imperialism are not easily envisaged in their full magnitude until we have had time to put their many specific incidents together in some intelligible synthesis. In the case of imperialism, making such a synthesis is as difficult as it is important, because it means fitting together into one narrative such apparently unrelated persons as Gladstone and Gandhi, Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes, Menelik and Mussolini, Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Thebaw; because it means combining in one story the Entente Cordiale and the Chinese Consortium, Dollar Diplomacy and pound sterling politics, alliances and loans, foreign missions and raw materials; because it means viewing as parts of one political panorama the Near East and the Far East, Mexico and Morocco, the Philippines and Fiji, Turkestan and Transvaal, Congo and Cuba. Difficult as it may be to accomplish the task at all satisfactorily, such a synthesis seems well worth attempting. That is the primary purpose of this book.

The second purpose is to present a more realistic view of world politics than is offered by conventionalized, chronological narratives of European diplomacy. Nothing is more striking in the mass of "secret treaties" and confidential official documents published since the war than the overwhelming evidence that the old diplomacy of Europe was feverishly and more or less

frankly devoted to gaining economic or strategic advantages and political prestige by appropriating the backward lands of Asia, Africa, the Balkans and the Pacific. Imperialism was the reality, diplomacy its superficial expression. If this is true, as it appears to be, then the story of international relations before 1914 cannot be interpreted simply as a matter of narrowly European vendettas and erratic personalities. More attention must be given to the mines and railway concessions, the colonial markets and naval bases, in which the diplomats themselves were so vitally interested. By emphasizing the fact that the Great Powers are not nations but nation-empires, and by devoting a series of chapters to the reasons for international rivalry in arenas of conflict such as North Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, the Far East, and the Pacific, the writer has endeavored to concentrate attention on the things for which diplomats have contended, rather than on the diplomats themselves.

An effort has been made, likewise, to study the economic and social forces behind diplomacy. To say that Germany threatened France with war about Morocco, or that France seized Tunis, is worse than meaningless. Probably a majority of Frenchmen would have refused to seize Tunis, had they been consulted. Certainly on the Moroccan question the Kaiser and his own ministers were at variance. Nations are rarely units in such matters. The habit of regarding them as units has unfortunately been strengthened of late by passionate controversies respecting the causes of the Great War. Attempting to indict one nation and vindicate another, to make "Germany' or "the Allies" guilty or innocent, has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the dynamic factors of which the German and other governments were-and are-instruments. Stressing these factors, the first few chapters of this book analyze the business interests, the social groups, the professional propaganda, the popular sentiments, the theories, and the economic conditions which seem to have dominated imperialist diplomacy. Throughout the book, it is to be hoped, the reader will see the exporter, the factory-owner, the concession-hunter, the missionary, the admiral, peering over the shoulder of the diplomat.

The narrative might be more conventional if it culminated in the Great War. Instead it continues into the present year.

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Perhaps we are now far enough removed from 1914 to realize that it is historically and psychologically inaccurate to treat European diplomacy before that fatal year as if its sole trend had been toward Serajevo. The ideas and interests productive of war in 1914 had caused many previous wars, and in large measure they have continued to exist since 1914. The present volume, therefore, is written around ideas and interests, rather than around the War, and its concluding chapter is devoted, not to the indictment of any nation or any diplomatist, but to an evaluation of the past achievements and present problems of imperialism. For the problems the author candidly confesses that he can see no solutions except more enlightened public opinion and more effective international cooperation, but no panacea is offered, for the purpose of this book is analytical and historical rather than controversial.

For specialists there exists an appalling number of works on various regional and topical subdivisions of the subject. With these the present volume is not intended to compare or compete. It is designed for the general reader and for college classes as a survey of the causes and motives, the history and the effects of imperialist world politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can make no claim to finality. Before the definitive history of imperialism can be composed, there are many monographs to be written by qualified specialists. To exhaust even the existing printed matter bearing on the subject would require a busy lifetime. The writer does not pretend to have utilized more than a modest portion of the innumerable books, pamphlets, articles, and archives available on almost every chapter. Nor has any consistent effort been made to cite all sources or to give extensive bibliographical references, since in a book covering so broad a field a morass of footnotes could easily swamp the reader without satisfying the scholar. Here and there, however, a few notes are given to indicate some of the more interesting documents published in the post-bellum flood of diplomatic revelations, and occasionally other important public papers and secondary works are mentioned. For readers who wish to venture farther afield, the footnotes may be supplemented by consulting the selected bibliographies in my Syllabus on International Relations and the quarterly lists of books and documents in Foreign Affairs.

For their generous courtesy in permitting the use of maps previously published in their own works, I am grateful to Professors Carlton J. H. Hayes (for the maps of Asia and Africa from his Political and Social History of Modern Europe and the map of the British Empire adapted from a map in his Brief · History of the Great War), Arthur M. Schlesinger (for maps of the Far East and the Pacific from his Political and Social History of the United States), Edward M. Earle (for the map of Turkish Railways from his Turkey, the Great Powers and the Bagdad Railway), Leonard O. Packard and Charles P. Sinnott (for the map of the Lands of the Caribbean Sea from their Nations as Neighbors), and Mr. James A. Williamson (for the map of South Africa from his Brief History of British Expansion). These maps are reproduced with the gracious consent of Macmillan and Company, Ltd., the publishers of Mr. Williamson's book, and of The Macmillan Company, the publishers of the other books mentioned. Credit is due also to the skillful engravers who transformed eight rude manuscript sketches into intelligible maps.

Full acknowledgment of my debt to the scholars and statesmen whose works have been drawn upon, often without special mention, and to the librarians here and in Paris, Geneva and London, who aided and tolerated a troublesome reader, would be impossible in these few lines.

Nor can I, finally, find fit words to thank that tenth Muse whose constant encouragement made the completion of this task possible, and for whose sake I would this were a better book.

New York,
September 3, 1926.

PARKER THOMAS MOON.

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