Out of the legion of contemporary books about the postwar world, this slender volume ought to be among the half-dozen judged indispensable. Clearsightedly it connects the political and economic structure of the modern world and Western civilization with its historic roots of capitalism and colonialism, and sees in the double dilemma of political and economic imperialism the crux of the world crisis.
It diagnoses the fundamental issue as that of a world half-slave, half-free, with the protagonist forces not just democracy versus fascism but democracy versus colonialism. This world condition, with 750,000,000 colonials or near-colonials, has been, in Dr. Du Bois’s judgment, the basic taproot of most modern wars, and will be the basic problem of world reconstruction and world peace. The future of colonies and the treatment of colonial peoples, he says, is the really crucial issue of any just and stable settlement of world order and system of world peace.
Dr. Du Bois documents his thesis with facts: historic ones—a list of over a hundred modern wars with imperialist objectives and rivalries clearly the cause of the majority; economic ones, with the stakes of colonial holdings just as patently unmasked.
The argument comes fittingly out of the author’s lifetime of special experience. A prime mover in the first World Races Congress held in London in 1911, Dr. Du Bois organized and led three Pan-African Congresses, one of which attempted unsuccessfully to center the attention of the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 on the issues of colonial reconstruction.
This book is really Dr. Du Bois’s appeal to the San Francisco World Organization Conference; it emphasizes that unless the Economic and Social Security Council can safeguard more effectively and constructively the rights of colonial peoples, the world will still not be either safe for democracy or secure from future war.
“Colonies are the slums of the world,” he says. “Not until we face the fact that colonies are a method of investment yielding unusual returns, or expected to do so, will we realize that the colonial question is a part of the battle between capital and labor in the modern economy. … This profit has been the foundation of much of modern wealth, luxury, and power, and the envious competition to dominate colonial fields of industrial enterprise led to the first World War and was a prime cause of the second World War,” Dr. Du Bois’s final prescriptions are:
1. The direct representation of the colonial peoples alongside the master peoples in the World Assembly.
2. The organization of a Mandates Commission under the Economic and Social Council with definite power to investigate complaints from and conditions in colonies and make public their findings.
3. A clear statement of the intention of each imperial power to take, gradually but definitely, all measures designed to raise the peoples of their colonies to a condition of complete political and economic equality with the peoples of the master nations, and eventually either to incorporate them into the polity of the master nations or to allow them to become independent free peoples.
In this drastic and democratic way would Dr. Du Bois have us implement the new World Charter. And interestingly enough, the same logic and the same bill of minority rights is applied to the American race question, which the author construes as “an internal colonial situation and problem.”