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generally involves some territorial holding which is likely to expand with the expanding importance of that trade. The rise and growth of our great Empire in India furnish the crucial example. The East India Company, a purely trading concern in origin and motive, actually carried out the great imperial process of expansion until the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the early days of territorial acquisition the South Sea Company and other private groups of trade adventurers were authorised by the State to conduct their distinctively commercial missions. If several advanced countries engage upon the same process, as in India, collisions of interest, partly political, partly commercial, are likely to arise in which the competing groups enlist native forces in their cause, and conduct a conflict which leads to the supremacy of that commercial group which can rally to its profitable cause the largest governmental and native support. It is a confused procedure widely differing in the older and populous civilisations of Asia and the more primitive and thinly peopled areas of Africa and North America. But, in nearly all cases where white peoples have brought under their sway lands peopled by coloured races, the earliest contacts have been of a commercial nature, and though considerations of political acquisition, colonial settlement and missionary services have been conscious supports, economic motives of trade and the exploitation of natural resources have been the dominant urges. Nor has this aggressive Imperialism been confined to the acquisition of backward countries. When this book was written the conquest of the Boer Republics and the incorporation of those territories in our South African Dominion furnished the latest and most striking example. of the imperialist process. Here the directly economic factor was paramount over all the political and humanitarian considerations invoked to justify the forceful seizure. The mine-owners