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15-06-06, 01:38 AM
THE WHITE MAN'S dilemma:CLIMAX OF THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM
The "dilemma" of Peffer's title is the refusal of colonized nations to accept imperialism and the inability of industrialized states voluntarily to renounce their
imperialistic practices without fundamentally changing their political and economic order. His advice is that colonies cannot be held, and it 'Is best to liquidate them before it is too late.
PREFACE
THIS book is based on a course of lectures given at the New School for Social Research in New York City in the autumn and winter of 1926-27 and now reorganized and rewritten from notes. The writer's object has not been to present a text-book, work of reference or historical treatise. Footnotes, citations of authority, documentation, appendices and the other impedimenta of scholarship are therefore dispensed with; all the demands of modesty do not enjoin the writer, however, from claiming authenticity for his facts. The object of this book has been to analyze a living issue relentlessly flung out at a world already overburdened with issues. Remote as are the materials of which this issue is compounded, it is none the less immediate and vital in its impact on the lives of individual men and women. What could have been more remote than Serajevo or a railroad through Anatolia connecting Berlin and Bagdad? A recent writer has said that if it were not for imperialism, "Mr. Man-in-the-Street would have to go without automobiles because the price of tires and of gasoline would be prohibitive." If that were all, there were small cause for a book or for lamentations. Of the span of the race only an infinitesimal
part has been enriched by the automobile; and men have been happy before, and created civilizations. But there is more.Without imperialism the outward aspects of Mr. Man-in-the-Street's world would be materially altered; also he might be taxed less, and he might be less likely to find his last earthly restingplace on some distant battlefield. The object of this book, then, is to trace the growth of a system, examine its body of ideas, bring out the causes and consequences, and draw the implications to us as nations and individuals. The book is aimed at those who want to understand the forces giving shape to their times, among which none is more decisive than imperialism. Parts of Chapters XII and XIV have appeared in the Century Magazine and are reproduced by courtesy of the editors.
NATHANIEL PEFFER
New York City, July, 1927.
your opinion...confused3
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