Introduction: Explanations of Imperialism

The word ‘imperialism’ is now most often used to designate a phase of

Western expansion which began with the partition of Africa in the 1880s.
The usage is not strictly accurate, because the phenomenon had existed in
various forms for much of history—Lichtheim starts his account of it with
the Roman Empire1—but it will serve well enough for the purposes of this
discussion. Japanese imperialism dates from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-
5. It is therefore with modern Western imperialism that one tends to
compare it.
Characteristically, this is ‘economic imperialism’, so called because it is
held to derive from a particular stage in the economic development of
Western society. The argument was first stated at length by Hobson in 1902.
He identified ‘the tap-root of imperialism’ as being overproduction, leading
to a surplus of capital seeking investment:
Overproduction in the sense of an excessive manufacturing plant, and surplus
capital which could not find sound investments within the country, forced Great
Britain, Germany, Holland, France to place larger and larger portions of their
economic resources outside the area of their present political domain, and then
stimulate a policy of political expansion so as to take in the new areas.2

It was investors, notably bankers and financiers, who in Hobson’s view most
profited from this policy: ‘To a larger extent every year Great Britain is
becoming a nation living upon tribute from abroad, and the classes who
enjoy this tribute have an ever-increasing incentive to employ the public
policy, the public purse, and the public force to extend the field of their
private investments.’3 Such investors, ‘essen' George Lichtheim, Imperialism
(1971).
2
See extract from Hobson’s Imperialism: a study (1902), printed in Boulding and Mukerjee
(edd.), Economic Imperialism (1972), at p. 8. Another useful volume of extracts and articles is H.
M. Wright (ed.), The ‘New Imperialism ’(1961), in which there is some duplication, but also a
wider spread.
3
Quoted in Wright, op. cit., p. 16.
daily parasites upon patriotism’, were able to rally support from groups
which could anticipate ‘profitable business and lucrative employment’ as a
result of empire. They included those who looked forward to securing
military or civil posts in the colonies, those who traded there, those who
manufactured armaments for colonial wars, those who provided the capital
for transport and colonial development.
This pejorative analysis of imperialism, which was by no means
universally accepted in Hobson’s time, has since become in large part
orthodox, at least among intellectuals. Lenin put it into a Marxist
framework in 1916. Imperialism, he maintained, was the inevitable product
of capitalism in its monopoly stage. As industry raised the production of
goods to a point at which domestic markets could no longer absorb them,
capitalism ceased to be dynamic. Competition was replaced by monopolies
and cartels, which served to maintain profit margins within protected
markets. One result was surplus capital. To use it to raise the standard of
living of the masses would have reduced profits. Hence it seemed more
beneficial to Western capitalists to export it to areas where profits remained
high because capital was scarce, labour was cheap, and the cost of raw
materials was low. These conditions could best be ensured when the
territories concerned were subject to political direction, that is to say, in
colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. Political domination also
made it possible to secure the basic requirements for investment: the
development of railways and ports; financial stability; law and order.1
The Hobson-Lenin concept has been criticized on a number of grounds.
One is that is does not accord with the financial facts, as subsequently
determined. Before 1914 Britain had the largest empire and the greatest total
of overseas investment. Yet the bulk of that investment was not in the
colonies acquired after 1870, so much as in the independent countries of
Europe and the Americas, or the older white setdement colonies, like
Canada and Australia.2
Recognizing this disparity between the expectation and the event, several
writers have tried to shift the emphasis from the ‘push’ that Lenin’s ‘crisis of
capitalism’ provided to the ‘pull’ of external circumstance. Langer, writing
in 1935, identified the economic motives of the powers as being chiefly the
protection rather than the extension of markets and investment
opportunities. He therefore attached priority to international rivalries as an
explanation of imperialism, especially the rivalries that arose from the
challenge to Britain’s former commercial supremacy by the emerging
industrial states of Western Europe.3 Landes, examining the subject in 1961,
argued that the economic motivation for imperialism was ‘important but
nevertheless insufficient’. He preferred to define Western expansion as ‘a
multifarious response to a common opportunity that consists simply in

1 See extract from Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (1916) in Wright, op.
cit., pp. 33-8. On Marxist ideas on capitalism and imperialism more generally, see Mark Blaug,
‘Economic imperialism revisited’ (1972), and Michael Barratt Brown, ‘A critique of Marxist
theories of imperialism’ (1972).
2 Brown, ‘A critique’, 54-5; Blaug, ‘Economic imperialism’, 144-9; D. K. Field- house,
‘Imperialism: an historiographical revision’ (1972), 195-9.
3 Extract in Wright, op. cit., 68-76.
disparity of power’. This led to the conclusion that the West’s overwhelming
military and economic superiority encouraged a recourse to political or
financial controls whenever its economic aims were obstructed overseas,
whether direcdy by opposition or indirecdy by disorder. 4 Field- house put
the two strands together in a book published in 1973. He agreed that after
1880 statesmen chose ‘imperialist’ solutions to problems with increasing
frequency. The reason, however, was not in his view a change in the nature
of capitalism. It was a change in the situation with which the powers had to
deal: the occurrence of multiple crises, geographically dispersed, which
reflected partly ‘a fundamental disequilibrium between Europe and the rest
of the world’, partly a failure to find any system of control, short of
annexation or protectorate, in areas where ‘indigenous states were too weak
to provide a satisfactory framework for European enterprise and where
rivalry between European states was excessive’.5
Interpretation of economic imperialism has been modified in a different
way by writers who broaden the chronological basis of discussion. In a
seminal article, published in 1953,6 Gallagher and Robinson identified three
stages of development. The first was early modern mercantilist imperialism.
In this the homeland secured economic advantage through the exploitation
of its political authority in colonies direcdy to the benefit of its own revenue
and commerce. The third stage was that of Hobson’s analysis: the search for
monopoly markets and investment opportunity. Between them came the
imperialism of free trade, exemplified above all by Britain. Since it was
characterized by a willingness ‘to limit the use of paramount power to
establishing security for trade’, in many parts of the world—China and Latin
America are the outstanding examples—where these ends could be attained
without colonial rule, the result was ‘informal empire’: protectorates,
spheres of influence, or privileges embodied in treaties. Nor was there any
reason why formal and informal empire should not coexist. Both were
‘variable political functions of the extending pattern of overseas trade,
investment, migration and culture’. Britain profited from the one in India,
from the other in Latin America, during much of the nineteenth century.
This view of imperialism was compatible with that of Langer and Landes,
in so far as it identified the progression from the second stage to the third
with an intensification of international rivalries, not a transformation of the
metropolitan economies. Once Britain’s wishes ceased to be paramount
outside Europe, because its trade was successfully challenged, then, it was
argued, informal empire no longer worked. Even men like Salisbury and

4 David Landes, ‘The nature of economic imperialism’ (1972).

5 See D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830-1914 (1973), at pp. 459-77.
6 J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ (1953).
Chamberlain were forced to accept territorial acquisitions as ‘a painful but
unavoidable necessity’.
The Gallagher-Robinson thesis, too, has been subject to criticism, but as
many of the objections to it focus on points concerning the interpretation of
British history, rather than the nature of imperialism, we can disregard
them here. There is, however, an elaboration worked out by Cain and
Hopkins7 which opens up a new approach to it. Examining British expansion
over the whole span from 1750 to 1914, they introduce two variables into the
analysis. The first is the changing influence over time of different sectors of
the British economy— agriculture, industry, finance—on the shaping of
external policy. The second is the relevance of British economic relations
with Europe and the United States to the character of British imperialism in
different periods. The result is to suggest a pattern in which relative failure
to penetrate the more advanced economies of Europe and America becomes
an explanation of expansion elsewhere: between 1815 and 1859, for example;
then after 1875.
So far this discussion has focused on the economic elements in
imperialism. Most of the scholars who have been quoted above agreed that
these were decisive, no matter how much they disagreed about interpreting
them. Nevertheless, there were others who preferred explanations that were
much less obviously economic, or not economic at all. Staley, considering
pre-revolutionary Russia, attributed its expansion to ‘political ambition,
dynastic megalomania, military lust for conquest’. 8 Carlton Hayes saw
imperialism as ‘a nationalistic phenomenon’, a search for prestige abroad
which developed once the powers found it hard to come by in a Europe
newly stabilized after the wars of 1854 to 1870. Colonies were acquired for
political reasons, he believed; economic justification was asserted ex post
facto.12
The most influential of such arguments was Schumpeter’s. 13 Writing after
the First World War, he defined imperialism as ‘the objectless disposition
on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion’. It was not a
manifestation of capitalism, which Schumpeter, like Herbert Spencer,
thought to be rational, hence unwarlike. Rather, it was atavistic, reflecting
the continued influence in society of a military, landowning aristocracy,
whose traditional ideology, which included elements of protectionism and
territorial expansion, had not been wholly replaced by that of the
bourgeoisie. In other words, where Lenin took imperialism to be the
consequence of a capitalism past its apogee, Schumpeter ascribed it to a

7 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘The political economy of British expansion overseas, 1750-
1914’ (1980).
8Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Industrial growth and early German imperialism’ (1972).
period of capitalist immaturity.
He was no doubt moved towards this by his own Central European
origins. Germany loomed much larger in his consciousness than Britain.
Indeed, Germany also makes the better starting-point for a discussion of
Japan, since both countries were ‘late developers’ in industry and empire.
Japanese imperialism, as we shall see, possessed some of the features to
which Schumpeter referred.
It can also be related to the kind of social tensions that Wehler takes to be
the key to Bismarck’s policies.14 As Wehler describes it, the social tensions
deriving from industrialization, especially working-class unrest, were widely
thought to threaten the stability of the Bismarckian structure inside
Germany. Expansion had two attractions as a means of reducing them. First,
it could divert discontents from domestic grievances to the pursuit of
prestige overseas. Second, it could provide the resources with which to
improve the lot of the economically disadvantaged, so helping to reconcile
them to the regime’s blemishes.
Despite Bismarck’s own preference for a free trade version of imperialism—
because it minimized both costs and risks—these considerations led him to
use the authority of the state ostentatiously to promote foreign trade and
acquire colonies. His purpose was political, that is, to win support and
foster unity at home. Thus he made imperialism into a weapon for holding
back revolution: ‘an integrative force in a recently founded state which . . .
was unable to conceal its class divisions’. There were Japanese conservatives
in the early years of the twentieth century who would gladly have made
Bismarck in these respects a model for themselves.

It is apparent that the student of Japanese imperialism has no lack of

Western examples from which to choose for purposes of comparison. They
differ from one another partly because of the choice of countries from
which supporting data are drawn. By the same token, when considering
Japan one must take account of differences between its historical
experience and the West’s. Whether one sees imperialism as a phenomenon
determined by the nature of the metropolitan society, or as a response to
international circumstance, it matters that Japanese imperialism came into
existence in a way quite unlike that of Britain or France or Germany or the
United States.
In the middle of the nineteenth century Japan was incorporated into the
treaty port system, which the powers, led by Britain, had devised to regulate
their access to the trade of China on advantageous terms. It imposed on the
countries of East Asia a number of commercial and political disabilities,
such as have led Chinese and Japanese scholars to describe the position of
their countries within it as ‘semi-colonial’. The Japanese reacted vigorously
to this situation. A political revolution in 1868 brought to power a group of
leaders determined to make Japan strong. Within a generation they had
dismantled feudalism, substituting an emperor-centred bureaucratic state;
created a modern army and navy; instituted legal codes and education of
the Western type; and taken the first major steps towards industrial
development. Using the bargaining-power this gave them, they successfully
demanded revision of Japan’s ‘unequal treaties’. Thereafter they built an
empire: Taiwan, taken over from China in 1895; the southern half of
Sakhalin (Kara- futo) and a sphere of influence in south Manchuria,
acquired from Russia in 1905; Korea, made a protectorate in 1905, a colony
in 1910.
The nature of its origins gave a special character to Japanese imperialism.
This is evident in writings about it by both Japanese and
 foreigners. For instance, in so far as the processes of social and econ-
omic change which made Japanese expansion possible can be described as
the development of capitalism in Japan, the way is open to an
interpretation of it based on Marxist thought; but the application of that
thought to the Japanese case has produced analyses that are not quite
orthodox in European terms. As stated by Tanin and Yohan in
9
1934. the initial stage of Japanese expansion after 1894
derived from samurai desires to extend Japanese influence on the Asian
mainland as a means of resisting ‘white’ imperialism. Japan’s weakness
within the treaty port system made this practicable only in unequal
partnership with Britain. Until the Russo-Japanese War, therefore,
Japanese actions were not a product of finance capitalism, but an
opportunistic attempt to increase ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’ in
order to enhance the country’s strength. Even after 1905, when Japanese
imperialism became more obviously capitalistic in its motivations, its
social base was still an alliance between the military and the emerging
bourgeoisie under the aegis of the monarchy. This balance of political
forces reflected the fact that the preceding bourgeois revolution had been
incomplete. In fact, late ninteenth-century modernization had been made
politically acceptable in Japan only by a compromise between the
modernizing bureaucrats and the former feudal ruling class. Because of
this, it had been impossible, Tanin and Yohan argue, for the bourgeoisie
wholly to do away with the medieval structure of agriculture, with the
result that the growth of Japan’s domestic economy was impaired by lack
of purchasing power, so forcing industry to look outward for markets.
Japanese imperialism was therefore ‘immature’, concerned more with
trade and sources of raw material than with exports of capital.
This analysis has been modified and elaborated by Japanese Marxist
writers since 1945, but not basically rejected. In an article published in
10
1956. Fujii Shoichi described Japanese imperialism before
1904 as ‘feudal, militarist and dependent’, a product of ‘the traditional
ambition of the emperor system for territorial acquisition . . . reinforced
by the emergence of industrial capitalism’. Its early successes, manifested
in wartime profits, reparations, and the opening of new markets, made
possible a rapid advance in Japanese capitalism, especially for those large-
scale companies, the zaibatsu, which had

9 O. Tanin and E. Yohan, extract (1934) in Marlene Mayo (ed.), The Emergence of Imperial
Japan (1970), 69-73.
10 Fujii Shoichi, extract (1956) in Mayo, op. cit., 76-82.
strong government links. They quickly evolved into examples of monopoly enterprise. It was such companies that
took the lead in promoting Japanese economic expansion overseas after 1905. Japanese finance capitalism, however,
remained weak. Accordingly, in the years before the First World War Japanese imperialism was still characterized by
‘the concentration of power in the hands of the military’, and showed itself ‘dependent upon and subordinate to the
imperialism of other powers’.
In effect, Fujii identified two distinct sources of imperialism in modem Japan. One was domestic: the ‘absolutist’
alliance of bureaucrat, landlord, and bourgeois, which was to keep the masses in subjection. The other was
international: the need for Japan to conform with ‘a world structure dominated by capitalism and imperialism’ in
order to survive as an independent state. Inoue Kiyoshi, the most influential Marxist writer on the subject/ 7
associated these two concepts with the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ types of imperialism which in Lenin’s view existed
side by side in Tsarist Russia: the first designed to maintain Tsarist autocracy over the subject peoples of the Russian
empire; the second aimed at the extension of Russian power in Persia, Mongolia, and Manchuria.
Inoue, like his predecessors, acknowledged the importance of the Russo-Japanese war as a turning-point,
marking the transition from a pre-modern feudal to a modern capitalist stage of Japanese imperialism, but he chose
to treat Japan’s partnership with Western imperialism as belonging to the capitalist stage—that is, based on
community of interests—rather than as simply a response to force majeure. In one sense, he argued, Japan fought the
war against Russia as a proxy for Anglo-American imperialism, opening up Asia more completely to exploitation. Its
reward was economic privilege, the gains from which increased the influence of capitalists at home. Yet this was not
accompanied by a decline in the power of the military. On the contrary, their power grew, because of Japan’s
involvement in international rivalries. Defence was vital to national policy; colonies contributed to defence; the
military had a key role in the government of colonies. Moreover, although territorial expansion, which the military
urged, was not always the policy the zaibatsu would have chosen, such companies derived profits from military
expenditure and secured access to markets over-
17
Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon teikokushugi no keisei (1968). Much of the argument is incorporated into Jon Haliday, A Political History of Japanese
Capitalism (1975), especially 100-2, m-13.
seas from the use of military force. Consequently, the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the military bureaucracy
held firm. It follows that the Japanese social order was not typically that of the ‘final’ stage of capitalism even after
1905.
Marxist writers about Japanese imperialism have thus had to come to terms with the fact that it did not quite
relate to capitalism in the way required by Leninist theory. They have done so by a process of implicit intellectual
borrowing. Modifying Schumpeter, they hold that the weakness of the bourgeois element in nineteenth-century
political change left Japan with a military bureaucracy—ideologically, if not genetically, the heirs to a feudal class—
which exercised an exceptional influence on policy. Equally, they maintain that the existence of an international
imperialist structure, by which Japan was threatened, provided an external impulse working in the same direction.
So Japanese imperialism becomes the illegitimate child of Western capitalism, with international rivalry as midwife.
Inevitably, eclecticism of this kind increases the overlap between Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations. The
latter, too, recognize the importance of the military and of the international environment. They accept that Japanese
capitalism was weak and that this has implications for the nature of Japanese expansion. Indeed, were it not for the
different theoretical propositions underlying them, Marxist and non-Marxist arguments could in the case of Japan
be treated as part of a single spectrum of ideas.
The most recent statement of a non-Marxist viewpoint has been made by Jansen. 11 His emphasis is not on ‘the
defensive and reactive’ characteristics of Japanese expansion—countering European domination of East Asia—but
on the fact that imperialist ambition was a logical response to awareness of living in an imperialist world. At the end
of the nineteenth century, he believes, ‘most articulate Japanese were prepared to accept the argument that
Darwinian selection and competition in the international order made imperialist expansion the expected path for a
vigorous and healthy polity that expected to compete’. The relevance of Japanese domestic society to this is that it
contained no significant inhibitions against the growth of such an attitude. Religion tolerated or supported it, as did
the monarchy. The emerging parliamentary system developed in an atmosphere that equated empire with
patriotism. Hence outright opposition came only from those who were on the periphery of contemporary society,
mostly socialists and romantic idealists. This makes imperialism the social norm, not an aberration to be excused or
defended: there is no need to seek ‘some special center of political, military or economic conniving on which to
fasten the blame’.
Not everyone is willing to be so positive. Iriye, whose books and articles constitute the most convincing body of
English-language writing on the subject in the last ten to fifteen years, 19 agrees on the importance of the West’s
example, but identifies a variety of Japanese responses to it, the relative importance of which changes over time.
One was broadly economic: an attempt to secure Japan’s position in the world through trade and emigration.
Another was military and territorial: the pursuit of strength through the direct control of over seas bases and
11 Marius B. Jansen, ‘Japanese imperialism: late Meiji perspectives’ (1984).
resources. In the early phase of Japanese imperialism, he argues, the two strands existed side by side. As Japanese
industry grew stronger, notably during the First World War, so it became common to give priority to economic aims,
pursued in rivalry with other powers, but within an international framework to which both they and Japan were
willing to conform. Only after the trading crisis of 1929-30 did Japan decisively reject this form of co-operation.
From that time on, a renewed sense of national danger, seen primarily in economic terms—that is, of a Japan shut
out by its rivals from markets for its manufactures, from outlets for its surplus population, from access to the raw
materials it required—brought back a commitment to military solutions. The consequence was the plan to build a
Co-prosperity Sphere, necessitating war.
Both Jansen and Iriye have been influenced by a corpus of historical writing on the origins of the Pacific War,
stimulated by the war crimes trials. After 1945 the search for scapegoats, both by victors and vanquished, focused
attention on the power of the Japanese military and the inability of political institutions to restrain it in the years
before Pearl Harbor. This is the aspect of Japanese expansion most familiar to Western readers. All the same, the
many books concerning it deal more with foreign affairs—Japan’s relations with the powers—than they do with the
nature of Japanese empire, or the relationship between the Japanese and other peoples within the Co-prosperity
19
See especially, Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement. Japanese and American expansion i8g7~ign (1972); ‘The failure of economic expansionism,
1918-1931’ (1974); and ‘The failure of military expansionism’ (1972).
Sphere. Even the recent history of Japan’s colonial empire by Myers and Peattie 12 defines its subject-matter in such a
way as to leave out Manchuria and the other territories into which Japan expanded after i93i-
The first wide-ranging study of the Co-prosperity Sphere, based on evidence assembled for the war crimes trials,
was that by F. C. Jones.13 As he described it, there were two competing themes in Japanese external policy: Western-
style imperialism, and Asian solidarity. There would have been no important conflict between them had the
Western powers consented to Japanese hegemony in East Asia, but since they did not, foreign relations became the
subject of a struggle within Japan between adherents of the two. A central element in it was ‘the effort of the Army to
regain for itself that pre-eminence in the shaping of national policy . . . which it had appeared to be losing in the
nineteen- twenties’. The actions to which this gave rise rested on a number of attitudes and motivations: a heritage
of feudal attitudes towards civil authority; a literal belief in the constitutional provisions concerning the emperor’s
command prerogative and the functions of the General Staff; and the prevalence among groups of younger officers
of ideas deploring the changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization, whether in Japan or in the
world at large.
This assessment of the military roots of Japanese imperialism after 1931 was refined and given more detailed
application by Japanese scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, working from newly available official archives. One
important series of volumes was published in 1962-3 under the title Taiheiyd Sensd e noMichi {The Road to the Pacific War),
an English version of which has been prepared under the editorship of James Morley. 14 Morley has also edited a
compendium on modern Japanese foreign policy, including a long article by Crowley on the military element in it. 15
Two Japanese historians, Tsunoda Jun and Kitaoka Shinichi, have examined military involvement in the formulation
of mainland policy for the years before 1918.16
Taken together, these books have greatly increased our knowledge of the part played by military considerations in
the extension of Japanese authority overseas. They have also made some of Jones’s conclusions about policy-making
out of date. Despite this, there are still important gaps. One concerns the political structure of the Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere and Japanese aims concerning it. There are useful studies of parts of the subject, 17 but not
enough for confident generalization. Another is the role of banks, companies, and business organizations, both
before and after 1930. Almost everyone makes some reference to economic factors: trade, government loans, railway
rights, mining operations. Yet it is only quite recently that there have begun to appear the specific studies that can
elucidate (or in some cases, provide) the bare statistics on these matters.18 Until such weaknesses in the literature are
made good the interpretation of Japanese imperialism in its later stages will remain in some respects unbalanced
and unsatisfactory.

One purpose of this introduction has been to indicate briefly the problems and issues that arise in a discussion of
Japanese imperialism. I hope that the rest of the book will provide enough facts and narrative to enable the reader to
make a judgement on them. Before entering upon it, however, it is proper that I should make clear the personal

12 Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie (ed.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, /S95-J945 (1984).
13 F. C. Jones, Japan’s New Order in East Asia: its rise and fall 1937-45 (r954)> especially 2-13.
14 James Morley (ed.), Deterrent Diplomacy (1976); The Fateful Choice (1980); The China Quagmire (1983); Japan Erupts (1984).
15 James Crowley, ‘Japan’s military foreign policies’ (1974).
16 Tsunoda Jun, Manshu mondai to kokubo hoshin (1967); Kitaoka Shinichi, Nihon rikugun to tairiku seisaku igo6-tgi8 (1978).
17 For example, on China, J. H. Boyle, China and Japan at War 1937-1945 (1972); on economic policies, Kobayashi Hideo, Dai-Toa-Kyoei-Ken no
keisei to hokai (1975), and Asada Kyoji (ed.), Nihon teikokushugi-ka no Chugoku (1981); on aspects ofjapanese central government organization,
Baba Akira, Nitchu kankei togaisei kiko no kenkyu (1983).
18 On the South Manchuria Railway Co., Ando Hikotaro, Mantetsu: Nihon teikoku- shugi to Chugoku (1965); on the Okura company, Okura
zaibatsu no kenkyu: Okura to tair- iku (1982).
prejudices and preconceptions with which I start (so far as I am aware of them).
First, I do not believe in mono-causal explanations of complex
historical phenomena, especially those which endure over long
periods of time. Even a concept as broad as economic
determinism, central though it is to this subject, does not
seem to me a sufficient basis on which to analyse imperialism,
either in the case of Japan, or more generally. Hence I do not
find it necessary to make a choice between the theories of
internal ‘push’ and external ‘puli’. Both are relevant.
Second, I do not believe that the human impetus towards
imperialism needs explaining. Men, acting individually or in
communities, have always sought to establish dominion over
others, where they could. What the character of a society, or
the international circumstances with which it has to deal,
does indeed determine is the timing and direction of the
impetus, the degree of its success and failure, the kind of
advantages that are sought, the institutions that are shaped
to give them durability. That is what I understand by the
nature of imperialism. That is what I propose to examine with
respect to Japan.