Churchill’s history of the conquest of the Sudan remains as instructive to us today as it was for its first audience.
“…Churchill was indeed an imperialist, but his critics seldom meet his argument for imperialism. Throughout the modern West he sees young men who belong to “the only true aristocracy the world can now show”—the aristocracy of “brains and enthusiasm.” What will these young men do? In the United States, they go into commerce, building great corporations. In France and Germany, they go into the military. In England, they venture “to the farthest corners of our wide Empire, and infuse into the whole the energy and vigor of progress”—ending slavery in the Sudan, for example, and building irrigation systems, railroads, and other infrastructure that would benefit men and women who might otherwise fall prey to squalor, disease, “war, slavery, and oppression.”
