 
                         20060123.00

     Imperialism, and specifically the imperialism of Great
Britain and other European nations in the 19th Century is a
concept analysis and understanding of which are encumbered
with preconceptions of "history" its basis in reality and its
documentation in textbooks, monographs, contemporaneous
diaries, chronicles, correspondence, literary and scientific
publications.  Arguably it might be requisite to unravel or
disentangle such a panoply of assumptions and preconceptions
before proceeding to a description and analysis of what might
be meant by 19th century British imperialism. Arguably, if I
undertook to investigate imperialism by following this
circuitous route, I might never get there, having been
distracted or waylaid by inherently insoluble epistemological
problems; or if I did get there, (i.e. to the logical
juncture where I would be prepared to discourse meaningfully
on imperialism) the preparatory analysis would have made the
issue seem trivial, inconsequential or insubstantial.

     Alternatively it is plausible to proceed on the more
conventional path, prepared to acquiesce to all the
assumptions that "common sense" requires of me, willing to
acknowledge all the "facts" that are recorded in the
documents that the libraries have preserved; and then,
accepting this product of the intellectual tradition for what
it presents itself, begin with the analysis of the purported
"facts".  Either approach I suspect, if it were possible to
follow it to the end, would lead to the same result.
However, more likely, the discussion by either path would bog
down at some point, and the location of this point where the
argument became mired in complexity or in obscurity, would
differ depending on the direction in which it had been
pursued.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
