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Zanzibar Imperialism

Satisfactory Essays

Moderation and confusion were the only rewards of any statesman's con- sistent opposition to imperialist expansion. Thus Bismarck, in 1871, rejected the offer of French possessions in Africa in exchange for Alsace-Lorraine, and twenty years later acquired Heligoland from Great Britain in return for Uganda, Zanzibar, and Vitu-two kingdoms for a bathtub, as the German imperialists told him, not without justice. Thus in the eighties Clemenceau opposed the imperialist party in France when they wanted to send an ex- peditionary force to Egypt against the British, and thirty years later he sur- rendered the Mosul oil fields to England for the sake of a French-British alliance. Thus Gladstone was being denounced by Cromer in Egypt as "not a man to whom the destinies of the …show more content…

Conquest as well as empire building had fallen into disrepute for very good reasons. They had been car- ried out successfully only by governments which, like the Roman Republic, were based primarily on law, so that conquest could be followed by integra- tion of the most heterogeneous peoples by imposing upon them a common law. The nation-state, however, based upon a homogeneous population's active consent to its government ("le plebiscite de tous les jours" G ) , lacked such a unifying principle and would, in the case of conquest, have to assimi- late rather than to integrate, to enforce consent rather than justice, that is, to degenerate into tyranny. Robespierre was already well aware of this

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