Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The fine British workmanship in mechanical arts, the American boldness for gigantic enterprise, the French systematic mind, and the German pedagogy, are becoming international capacities.

The world--the wide, wide world--is now the true domain of knowledge; and if each nation displays some special capacities in some special branch, the various capacities of different nations compensate one another, and the advantages which…

Those who dream of monopolising technical genius are therefore fifty years behind the times.

As to the honest longing for more technical education--surely let us all have as much of it as possible: it will be a boon for humanity; for humanity, of course--not for a single nation, because knowledge cannot be cultivated for home use…

But force is reciprocal; and if the god of war always sides with the strongest battalions, those battalions are strongest which fight for new rights against outgrown privileges.

To endeavour to revive the past would be useless: a new departure must be taken by civilised nations.

It has shown the growth of quite new conditions, and new conditions require new adaptations.

It was not a mere shifting of the centre of gravity of commerce, such as Europe witnessed in the past, when the commercial hegemony migrated from Italy to Spain, to Holland, and finally to Britain: it had a much deeper meaning, as it…

The industrial and commercial history of the world during the last fifty years has been a history of decentralisation of industry.

Each region will become its own producer and its own consumer of manufactured goods.

To return to a state of affairs where corn is grown, and manufactured goods are fabricated, for the use of those very people who grow and produce them--such will be, no doubt, the problem to be solved during the next coming years of…

Under the present conditions of division into capitalists and labourers, into property-holders and masses living on uncertain wages, the spreading of industries over new fields is accompanied by the very same horrible facts of pitiless…

No use to send floating shops to New Guinea with British or German millinery, when there are plenty of would-be customers for British millinery in these very islands, and for German goods in Germany.

And they can be that, once we organise our economical life so that they might issue from their present destitution.

The true consumers of the produce of our factories must be our own populations.

Woe to Europe, if on the day that the steam engine invades China she is still relying on foreign customers!

As to the yet neutral markets, China will never be a serious customer to Europe: she can produce much cheaper at home; and when she begins to feel a need for goods of European patterns, she will produce them herself.

Nay, some of the British colonies already threaten to become serious competitors with their mother country; others, like Australia, will not fail to follow the same lines.

There is not a second India in the world, and the old conditions will be repeated no more.

The fact is so well felt, if not understood, that the race for colonies has become the distinctive feature of the last twenty years.

But, as soon as any industry has taken firm root, it calls into existence hundreds of other trades; and as soon as the first steps have been made, and the first obstacles have been overcome, the industrial growth goes on at an accelerated…

Wars and several accidental causes may check for some time the scattering of industries: they will not stop it; it is unavoidable.

Each nation becomes in its turn a manufacturing nation; and the time is not far off when each nation of Europe, as well as the United States, and even the most backward nations of Asia and America, will themselves manufacture nearly…

Industries of all kinds decentralise and are scattered all over the globe; and everywhere a variety, an integrated variety, of trades grows, instead of specialisation.

It is time to conclude, and, for every unprejudiced mind, the conclusion is self-evident.