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Hobson (1902)

The great test of Western imperialism is Asia, where vast peoples live, inheritors of civilizations as complex as our own, more ancient and more firmly rooted by enduring custom in the general life. The races of Africa it has possible to regard as savages or children, "backward" in their progress along same general road of civilization in which Anglo-Saxondom represents vanguard, and requiring the help of more forward races. It is not so easy to make a specious case for Western control over India, China, and other Asiatic peoples upon the same ground. Save in the more recent developments of the physical sciences and their application to industrial arts, it cannot be contended that peoples are "backward", and though we sometimes describe their civilizations "arrested" or "unprogressive", that judgment either may imply our ignorance the pace at which civilizations so much older than our own must continue moving or it may even afford unconscious testimony to a social progress which has won goal in securing a well-nigh complete adjustment between human life and its stable environment…

If it is unreasonable to expect that China can develop a national patriotism which will enable her to expel the Western exploiters, she must then be subjected to process of disintegration, which is more aptly described as "the break-up" of China than by the term "development".

Not until then shall we realize the full risks and folly of the most stupendous revolutionary enterprise history has known. The Western nations may then awaken to the fact that they have permitted certain little cliques of private profitmongers engage them in a piece of Imperialism in which every cost and peril of hazardous policy is multiplied a hundred-fold, and from which there appears no possibility of safe withdrawal. The light-hearted, casual mood in which the nations have been drawn on to the opening up of a country with a population almost as large as that of Europe, nineteen-twentieths of whom are perfectly unknown to us. is crowning instance of irrational government. In large measure such an enter; must rank as a plunge in the dark…

How far the advent of Japan into the status of a first rank political and industrial power will affect the problem of Imperialism in Asia is a question which pre ever more vigorously upon the consideration of Western nations. It is, however, impossible to deny that the recent manifestation of Japan as an Eastern nation equipped with all the effective practical arts of Western civilization is likely to profoundly the course of Asiatic history in the future.

(Source, John Hobson, The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism, 1902)

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