![]() ![]() ![]() “This new imperialism,” Williams writes, “underwrote the maturation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global capitalism.” The result, Williams adds, summing up Du Bois’s words, “was the World War, a tangle of national jealousies and suspicions arising from the ‘spoils of trade-empire’ and the desire for expansion, ‘not in Europe but in Asia, and particularly in Africa.’” What, then, was the answer? For Du Bois, democracy was the answer - but democracy extended to “yellow, brown, and black peoples,” not only to Whites. European officials and captains of industry camouflaged naked theft and profiteering in the name of progress. Chad Williams, history professor and author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, presents The Wounded World. “In a very real sense,” Du Bois asserted, “Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see.” He zeroed in on the Berlin Conference of 1884, where European powers convened to partition the African continent and divide the spoils of plunder among themselves. In the May 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Du Bois published an essay, “ The African Roots of War,” in which he analyzed World War I as the fallout of inter-imperial rivalry. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic. ![]() ![]() Du Bois’s thinking about World War I, however, was far more complex than the “Close Ranks” article suggests. Du Bois and the First World War, released this April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, historian Chad L. ![]()
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