and every place and in any and every way, estimating possibilities of finding raw materials there, and fearing to be left behind in the insensate struggle for the last available scraps of unappropriated territory, or for the re-partition of that which was already appropriated.
The British capitalists are performing prodigies in order to develop cotton growing in their Egyptian colony. (In 1904, out of 2.3 million hectares of land under cultivation, 0.6 millions, or more than a quarter, were devoted to cotton growing.) The Russians are doing the same in their colony, Turkestan. And in each case it is because they can thus beat their competitors more easily, and more easily achieve the monopolisation of the sources of raw materials and the formation of a united textile trust, economical and profitable, embracing all the processes of production and of manufacturing under a single control.
The interests which export capital press on in their turn to the conquest of colonies, for it is easier on the colonial market—and sometimes it is only possible on the colonial market—to drive away a competitor by means of monopoly, to make sure of orders, to strengthen the necessary "connections," etc.
The non-economic super-structure which grows up on the basis of finance-capital, its politics and its ideology, supports the tendency to colonial conquest. "Finance-capital does not want liberty, it wants domination," as Hilferding very truly says. And a French bourgeois writer, developing and supplementing, as it were, the ideas of Cecil Rhodes, whom we previously mentioned, writes
