Martin Jacques Quotes
When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal.
Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. Penguin Press, 2009, p. 43.
The reason that his quotation is memorable is that it illustrates how rapidly political norms can change. Here in 1872, there was general agreement that imperialism was undesirable. By the turn of the century—only 27 years later, imperialism would be the accepted foreign policy of the United States with only a minority holding to is undesirability such as Mark Twain and his Anti-Imperialist League.
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was not inhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the sparcely populated areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring native tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
This was in the first article of their Constitution upon gaining their independence. With a long tradition of Dutch colonialism and a particularly brutal Japanese colonization during WWII, the Indonesians were most preoccupied with this issue.
Martin Jacques is a British journalist and academic. Jacques was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, becoming, in his own words, "a member of its Executive Committee, probably the youngest member ever at about twenty-two". He was editor of the party's journal, Marxism Today, from 1977 until its closure in 1991.
