If imperial expansion were really nothing other than a phase of the natural history of a nation it would be as idle to protest against it as to argue… - John Atkinson Hobson

Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.

Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.

[T]he instinct for control of land, drives back to the earliest times when a wide range of land was necessary for a food supply for men or cattle, and is linked on to the "trek" habit, which survives more powerfully than is commonly supposed in civilised peoples. ... The animal lust of struggle, once a necessity, survives in the blood.