Eugen Peter Schwiedland · 1921
Schwiedland’s signed review of Adolf Lenz’s 1920 book presents economic imperialism as a system of coercive competition whose destructive effects require international legal regulation. Moving from the mechanisms of economic expansion to proposals for allocating essential resources, the review connects Lenz’s diagnosis to the recovery of postwar Europe.
Its initial conceptual distinction separates economic domination from political empire:
This economic imperialism is distinct from political imperialism.
The defining feature is the use of force to secure a nation a permanently increasing share of the world economy. Schwiedland traces Lenz’s account through protection and exclusionary tariffs, export bounties and dumping, and the concentration of industry into cartels and trusts. Industrial control of foreign markets works alongside financial expansion through loans; joint-stock enterprise generates further pressure to find investments. Economic imperialism thus emerges as an interlocking process involving industrial, financial, and commercial capital, rather than simply territorial conquest.
The review gives this analysis an urgent normative conclusion:
The antithesis between economic lords and slaves among nations has now reached a point where it threatens to destroy civilisation, and the only remedy, according to Lenz, would be to prohibit all forcible methods by the lawful regulation of the share of each nation in international economic relations.
Schwiedland then turns from diagnosis to reconstruction. Wartime autarchy characterized both the Central Powers’ policies and the Allies’ economic planning. War damage and the pursuit of reparations now obstruct equal international economic relations. The proposed response is to subordinate individual national policies to common needs, restricting exclusive national control over resources through the socialization of supplies exceeding domestic requirements.
Every recognised political unit should be granted an economic minimum of subsistence.
This minimum concerns food and raw materials, intended to prevent both bodily deprivation and industrial collapse. International lending must likewise support recovery without imposing disabling conditions. Yet the proposal contains a sharp limit: Schwiedland reports that redistributing surpluses would ultimately extinguish nations dependent on continuous support and maintained only for political purposes. The review leaves this tension between guaranteed subsistence and conditional national viability unexplored.
Its significance lies in presenting reconstruction as a problem of international economic obligation, not merely renewed production or trade. Schwiedland’s closing assessment credits Lenz with using criticism of past coercion to indicate a route toward continental recovery; the short review offers a concentrated exposition of that program rather than a sustained examination of its practicability.
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