V. I.   Lenin

NOTEBOOK “γ”

(“GAMMA”)

Henri Russier, The Partition of Oceania, Paris, 1905. (Thesis.)

A very detailed summary of a mass of material. Unfortunately, there are no exact statistical totals (à la Supan). Well compiled. Many source references, maps, photographs.

Author divides the history of the “political partition” into periods:

1. 1) discovery (16th–18th centuries)
2. 2) missions (1797–1840)
3. 3) “first conflicts” (1840–70)
4. N.B. ||| 4) “international competition”, 1870–1904.

{{ Author quotes, inter alia, the summary table (of the partition) from Sievers and K\"ukenthal, Australia, Oceania and the Polar Countries, Leipzig, 1902. Pp. 67–68. To be looked at. }}

This is followed by detailed economic, commercial and geographical information about each of the colonies.

To the economic causes of colonial policy the author adds (N.B.)—social causes:

“To these [enumerated above and well-known] economic causes must be added social causes.—Owing to the growing complexities of life, which weigh heavily not only on the masses of the workers, but also on the middle classes, gem!! || one sees accumulating in all countries of old civilisation ‘impatience, rancour and hatred that are a menace to public order, declassed energies and turbulent forces, which must be taken in hand and given employment abroad in order to avert an explosion at home’”^[1] (Wahl, France in Her Colonies, Paris, p. 92)—(pp. 165–66).

N.B. ||| References to British imperialism (p. 171);—to American (p. 175), after the Spanish-American war of 1898;—to German (p. 180).

__ __ __ N.B. |||| He quotes, among others, Driault, Political and Social Problems at the End of the Nineteenth Century, etc. (Paris, 1900), Chapter XIV, “The Great Powers and the Division of the World”.

Notes

[1] See present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 262–63.—Ed.