“The ‘last wave’ of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. As Marx put it in his inimitable way: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe.’ But capitalism had also, not least by its dissemination of print, helped to create popular, vernacular-based nationalisms in Europe, which to different degrees undermined the age-old dynastic principle, and egged into self-naturalization every dynasty positioned to do so. Official nationalism – weld of the new national and old dynastic principles (the British Empire) – led in turn to what, for convenience, one can call ‘Russification’ in the extra-European colonies. This ideological tendency meshed neatly with practical exigencies. The late-nineteenth-century empires were too large and too far-flung to be ruled by a...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51