Engels on Colonialism and National Independence

The following letter, from Engels to Karl Kautsky, was written in September 1882.

…You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers are cheerfully consuming their share of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies. In my opinion the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by a European population—Canada, the Cape, Australia—will all become independent; on the other hand, the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated—India, Algeria, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions—must be taken over for the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution, and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipation cannot conduct any colonial wars, India would have to be given a free hand; things would, of course, not pass off without all sorts of destruction, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also happen elsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. A reorganised Europe and North America will have such colossal power and provide such an example that the semi-civilised countries will automatically follow in their wake; they will be pushed in that direction even by economic needs alone. It seems to me that we can only make rather futile hypotheses about the social and political phases that these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation. One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. This does not of course exclude defensive wars of various kinds...