The Balance Sheet of Modern Colonialism

Abstract

It was no secret that the modern colonial empires were acquired for the advantages they brought the European states. As one colonial propagandist wrote in 1912:

if colonies, the foundation of which nearly always costs the metropolis so much money and sacrifices and which exposes them to such great risks, were not made to serve those metropoles, they would have no raison d’être (Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation, quoted in Young, 1994, p.100).