The
American Historical Review
ORIENTAL IMPERIALISM[1]
RESTATEMENT of our ideals in government, and especially with reference to that phase which deals with smaller, backward, or dependent peoples, is imperatively demanded by the present world-crisis. To secure the requisite foundation for such an investigation, the anthropologist advises the study of the less advanced races of the present-day world. Large as is the degree of truth in his claim, in the almost universal backsliding to a regime of tooth and claw, which has proved that after all the so-called retarded races are not such distant brothers, far more can be learned from the history of the ancient Near East. The one shows us parallel development, the other the very elements from which have arisen our present-day conceptions.
Long centuries before written history developed elsewhere, the historian has an adequate knowledge of the Near East. The tribal stage was long past, urban civilization well developed. In Egypt and in Babylonia alike, we have the city-state, a section of land, rarely more than a man could cover in a day's walk, devoted to agriculture, and with its centre in a village which in time of peace furnished a market-place for the simple industrial needs of the peasant, and in war could furnish protection against enemy raids. In them ruled representatives of the deity, patesi they were called in Babylonia, kings we can hardly name them with accuracy.
Much that is attractive is found in these early city-states, developing behind the protection of their mud brick walls the first civilization the world had seen, and conjecture may play with the dream of what might have been had there been a more delicately poised
- ↑ [The three articles which follow, on Oriental Imperialism, Greek Imperialism, and Roman Imperialism—sketches or "short studies of great subjects"—were prepared for the meeting of the American Historical Association held at Philadelphia in December, 1917, and were read in the ancient history section of that meeting as a series of papers on Ancient Imperialism. Ed.]
