Imperialism

Marxist theories of imperialism

Other explanations of European expansion

The wider meanings of imperialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The word “imperialism” is widely used as an emotive—and more rarely as a theoretical—term to denote specific forms of aggressive behavior on the part of certain states against others; the concept refers primarily to attempts to establish or retain formal sovereignty over subordinate political societies, but it is also often equated with the exercise of any form of political control or influence by one political community over another.

The word impérialiste was originally coined in France in the 1830s to denote a partisan of the one-time Napoleonic empire (Koebner & Schmidt 1964). “Imperialism” soon developed into a term of abuse employed before 1848 to castigate the Caesar-istic pretensions of Louis Napoleon. It was later used in a similar way both by French opponents of Napoleon III and by British adversaries of French rule and expansionism. In the 1870s British antagonists of Disraeli began to use the word as a domestic invective. But other British writers and politicians sought to rehabilitate the term. They applied it first to the policy of establishing a “Greater Britain” (Dilke 1869), through “the expansion of England” (Seeley 1883) into an “imperial federation” of Britain, its overseas settlements, and India. The acquisition of a large colonial empire in Asia and Africa led to the view that it was the “white man’s burden” (Kipling) to assume a “dual mandate” (Lugard 1922) for offering civilization to “backward” peoples and for opening their territories for the benefit of the world. Thus the term became increasingly identified with British colonialism.

The need for colonies was often argued in economic terms, both by British advocates of colonial expansion, who saw in an enlarged empire a means of preserving markets in an increasingly protectionist world, and by writers on the European continent who ascribed Britain’s wealth to her possession of colonies and hence demanded colonies to increase their nations’ wealth. While some identified “imperialism” with British world politics, others used the term to include the widespread desire for expansion on the part of European states generally.

Developments in China first, and later the Boer War, which was popularly regarded on the European continent as “la guerre de la Bourse contre les Boers,” initiated a powerful anti-imperialist current, eloquently articulated in J. A. Hobson’s study Imperialism (1902). Hobson (an economic heretic of radical-liberal persuasion) sought to explain European expansionism as based on the undercon-sumptionist tendencies of modern capitalism and the particular manipulations of groups of profiteering capitalists. Such views were systematized into a more elaborate theory by a number of Marxist writers in Germany and Austria (Bauer 1907; Hil-ferding 1910; Luxemburg 1913; Sternberg 1926; Grossmann 1929) and in Russia (chiefly Lenin 1917 and Bukharin 1918), by English radical writers (e.g., Brailsford 1914; Woolf 1920; Dobb 1937; and, in a much revised form, Strachey 1959), by the American economists Sweezy and Baran (see Sweezy 1942; Sweezy & Baran 1966), and by numerous historians who have increasingly influenced textbooks the world over.

In the interwar period such views achieved a massive political influence, mainly through Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (see Lenin 1917), but also through the propaganda efforts of such ill-matched groups as pacifists and isolationists, who agreed in ascribing wars to the insidious influence of armaments manufacturers, and National Socialists, who lashed out at Anglo-Saxon-cum-Jewish plutocracy.

Since World War ii, the frequent identification of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism has become rarer in the Western world; the aggressive policies of Germany, Italy, and Japan have made many observers aware of the unwarranted optimism in the theory that imperialist aggression was simply the product of a passing social system, like capitalism, or of particularly evil men, like capitalists. While after 1945 western Europe witnessed the demise of practically the whole of its colonial system, communism did not seem to lessen the expansionist policies of Russia and China.

“Imperialism” has now become part of a propaganda battle. In communist parlance the word remains restricted to the policies of the West, in particular the United States, whose Wall Street imperialism is thought to supplant that of the older European colonial powers. Western authors have, for their part, sought to identify communist policies with “the new imperialism” (Seton-Watson 1961; Kolarz 1964). Writers in the emerging countries have practically made the word interchangeable with “neocolonialism,” defined by Nkrumah (1965, p. ix) as a situation in which “the state …is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty” but where “its economic system and thus its political system is directed from outside.” Others have extended the term to refer to the economic, political, and military policies of all industrialized states, including the Soviet Union, or of the white race as such, or even of any unsympathetic foreign state. The word has thus become one of the most powerful slogans of our time, used indiscriminately against any state, or even any group, regarded as inimical to a speaker’s interest.

From this development, some have concluded with Lenin that the phenomenon of imperialism represents the most important problem of our times. Others have regarded it as a “pseudo-concept which sets out to make everything clear and ends by making everything muddled ... a word for the illiterates of social science” (Hancock 1950, p. 17). Whereas many historians reserve the term by preference for the period of European expansion after 1870, others regard this modern imperialism only as one example of an age-old phenomenon, defined by Schumpeter as “the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion” ([1919-1927] 1951, p. 7) and specified by Langer as “simply the rule or control, political or economic, direct or indirect, of one state, nation or people over other similar groups, or …the disposition, urge or striving to establish such rule” (1935, p. 67).

Marxist theories of imperialism

The Marxist theories of imperialism still represent the most elaborate and influential attempt to explain the alleged propensity of capitalist states to engage in imperialist expansion.

Marxist authors (building on the non-Marxist Hobson) have agreed in finding the causes of European and American expansion in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth in changes which took place within a maturing capitalist system, but they have differed about particular causes. Some theorists have regarded imperialism as a necessary condition for capitalist growth, whether because of the impossibility of continued accumulation of capital unless an effective demand is found among noncapitalist groups and societies (Luxemburg 1913), or because of the desire to acquire investment opportunities (Hobson 1902), or because of the need to offset the periodic depressions which were a characteristic of capitalist economies. Others explained imperialism mainly as a particularly profitable (though not inevitable) policy of powerful capitalist groups, like the attempt of “finance capitalists” to overcome the alleged secular tendency of profits to fall, or to find profitable uses for idle capital resulting from the increasing tendency toward monopolies, or to achieve the largest possible protected market which trusts and cartels could exploit and use as a basis for their further struggle for the world market (Bauer 1907, Hilferding 1910). While some authors have concentrated mainly on negative domestic factors which pushed capitalist economies into imperialist policies, others have given greater weight to positive colonial assets that pulled capitalists into foreign lands: cheap labor, raw materials, enforceability of favorable terms of trade, job opportunities, and new lands suitable for exploitation or settlement.

The various theories were formed mainly to account, post factum, for the scramble for Africa. But they served a more revolutionary purpose, since at least Luxemburg and Lenin used imperialism to explain the inevitability of world wars, once the world was fully brought under the control of rival capitalist states. Using his theory, Lenin explained the role of part of the working class (the “labor-aristocracy,” or social-democrat “lackeys of imperialism”) who supported their governments in 1914. Against them he called on true socialists to convert the war into a revolution at home. He also fashioned the explosive formula that the nationalist bourgeoisie in the colonial countries and the communists in the more advanced countries should combine their forces for a joint onslaught on the citadels of capitalism. Theories of imperialism still serve Marxists to explain the survival of capitalist economies, and the persistence of great inequalities in economic development levels between the onetime colonial powers and their former subject colonies. They also claim to provide a definite criterion by which to distinguish progressive from reactionary, historical from antihistorical, wars. But disputes have arisen among communist theoreticians over the question whether imperialism will inevitably lead to the holocaust of a new world war (as Chinese doctrine states) or whether the suicidal nature of modern armaments, coupled with the increased strength of the peace-loving forces in the world of the mid-1960s, may enable socialist and capitalist states to coexist more or less peacefully (as is argued with some hesitation in the Soviet Union).

Criticism of the Marxist theories

There has been a barrage of criticism of the Marxist theories which has taken three forms (in order of decreasing generality): (a) a rejection of the premise that wars are fought primarily for economic reasons; (b) a denial that capitalism is especially likely to foster imperialist tendencies; and (c) a critique of the attempt to explain late nineteenth-century colonialism as the result of capitalist forces exclusively.

Economic causation of war. Numerous authors (e.g., Robbins 1939; Wright 1942; Morgenthau 1948) have questioned the view that modern war has been waged primarily for economic motives. Norman Angell documented the unprofitability of war before World War I in The Great Illusion (1910). L. F. Richardson (1960) found that only 29 per cent of the wars from 1820 to 1929 can be directly attributed to economic factors. No serious historian would today subscribe to the prejudice, widespread in the 1920s and 1930s, that World War I was the direct result of the nefarious activities of armaments manufacturers, and few would hold that the entry of the Soviet Union into World War ii in 1941 suddenly transformed a war of capitalist economic imperialism into one of patriotic idealism.

Capitalism and imperialist tendencies. Critics of the Leninist theory have pointed to the frequency of war and imperial conquest long before capitalism, and to the expansionist record of postcapitalist Russia, to deny any special relationship between capitalism and imperialist policies. On the contrary, many theorists have held with Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Richard Cobden that capitalism per se is likely to foster international understanding and peaceful tendencies. Even the Marxist Karl Kautsky envisaged (1915) the possible disappearance of intercapitalist wars through the establishment of an ultraimperialism in which international finance capital would exploit the world. Criticizing Marxist theories, Schumpeter (1919-1927) held, in line with Auguste Comte and Thorstein Veblen (cf. Aron 1958), that capitalism was inherently a democratizing, individualizing, and rationalizing force which channeled potentially aggressive energies in entrepreneurial, and hence relatively peaceful, directions. He regarded imperialism as mainly the result of atavistic drives of a precapitalist era and believed popular imperialism in modern states to be a logical impossibility. He later retracted this view, subscribing to Karl Renner’s doctrine of social imperialism (Renner 1917; see also Schumpeter 1939, vol. 2, p. 696), but continued to regard the forces behind imperialism as fundamentally irrational (Winslow 1948, p. 235). Hannah Arendt (1951) has attributed imperialism to an alliance between mob and capital, which ultimately destroyed capitalism.

Capitalism and colonialism. The virtual identification of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism has also come in for considerable criticism from historians.

First, economic historians have questioned the assumption that the new colonies acquired by European powers in the latter part of the nineteenth century played an important role in capitalist development. By far the greater part of European investments after the 1870s flowed not to the colonies but to independent states in Europe (which had absorbed more than half the French and German foreign investments by 1914), to North and South America (which accounted for more than half the British foreign investments by 1914), and to South Africa and Australasia (Staley 1935; see Hobson 1914; Feis 1930; Cairncross 1953; Imlah 1958; Segal & Simon 1961). Trade with the colonial dependencies was generally only a small fraction of all British and French foreign trade, and an infinitesimal share for Italy, Germany, and Japan. Noncolonial countries had generally easy access to markets of colonies of other states, and these colonies in turn traded more with foreign lands than with their imperial masters (Clark 1936). Raw materials were important in the case of some colonial acquisitions, but their share in the raw material market as a whole was relatively slight. Advanced states did not lack access to raw materials in peacetime, and in wartime strategic and military, rather than economic, factors were decisive. Similarly, the terms of trade were not particularly favorable to Europe during the high tide of imperialism; indeed, they were less favorable than they are in the present period of large-scale “dis-imperialism” (Strachey 1959). There was almost no emigration to the new colonies, while most emigrants even from colonial nations went to other lands.

Second, the alleged identity of imperialism with colonialism and capitalism is also proved false by the circumstance that many nonimperialist states (like Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries) found little difficulty in attaining a high level of growth, foreign trade, and foreign investments, while capital-importing states with underdeveloped economies, notably Italy and tsarist Russia, followed starkly expansionist policies.

Third, historians have disproved the universality of the correlation between monopoly capitalism and imperialism (Feis 1930; Langer 1935; Hancock 1950). This viewpoint originated mainly in Germany, where there was indeed a relatively close connection between banks, heavy industry, and militarist and colonialist circles, though even in Germany colonial conquest predated somewhat the strong cartelization drive. In England and France, on the other hand, monopolies were hardly present at the time of strong imperialist expansion, and relations existing between the ordinary banking and industrial world and the investment brokers dealing in foreign loans were far from close. In the United States the situation was again different. The growth of trusts and cartels long preceded any strong overt inclination toward imperial conquests. In some countries the money market was relatively open to all, and in others (e.g., France and Germany) political interests manipulated foreign investments, rather than the reverse. Studies of the types of foreign loans issued in the heyday of colonial expansion reveal that much the greater part were in fixed-interest government securities; that the profitability of foreign investments was only marginally higher, if not lower, than that of domestic investments; and that in the end many European investors lost their money through defaults (see Feis 1930; Cairncross 1953; Blaug 1961).

Finally, the specific attribution of colonial policies to small groups of profiteering capitalists has also been challenged. Special interests have often pressed for colonial conquest and have frequently profited from them. But actual study of the entire record (Staley 1935) reveals that traders and investors have often been used as instruments by rulers and governments set on imperialist expansion for other reasons; private interests usually proved ineffective when such other concerns were absent.

The idea of a monolithic capitalism fully bent on imperialist conquest is, therefore, a myth. Many capitalist interests have opposed imperialist policies, while others have cheered them on. But in that case the real problem is not to identify the role of particular capitalist interests in certain imperialist exploits, but to indicate other factors which explain why, in particular instances, capitalist forces pressing for imperialism could be stronger than those that did not or those that actively resisted particular imperialist policies.

Other explanations of European expansion

If neither monopoly capital, nor domestic underconsumption, nor the need of markets for goods, or capital, or sources of raw materials was the special factor accounting for changes in European expansionist policies, what were the relevant factors?

Some Marxist writers have attempted to save economic determinism by insisting that annexations of areas of little economic importance were really “strategic,” “protective,” or “anticipatory” (Sweezy 1942). But this goes far to destroy the causal link between economics and politics on which the Marxist theory really rests.

A review of modern historical writing on European expansionism (see Langer 1935; Hallgarten 1951; Brunschwig 1960; Fieldhouse 1966) shows three predominant trends: (a) greater stress on noneconomic, and especially on purely political, determinants; (b) more attention to the considerable differences in the causes of particular imperialist incidents; and (c) increasing emphasis on the need to regard events after 1870 in a much longer time perspective than that usually called the period of “modern imperialism.”

Newer historians have thus found the mainspring of the movement of European expansion less in the expanding industrial economy and more in the political area of world strategies and ideologies of competing expansive nations. They have strongly emphasized (a) the unification of Germany and Italy, which fanned a new assertive nationalism in these countries; (b) the effects of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which tempted France into colonial adventures in order to regain a sense of glory and grandeur, to give employment and experience to the country’s military cadres, and to expand its potential manpower reservoir for possible revanche; (c) the continued expansion of Russia toward Constantinople, Persia, India, and the Far East, which increasingly threatened long-established British imperial interests; (d) the fact that Britain could not remain aloof from formal annexations when others threatened to move in, thus threatening the foundations of splendid isolation and of traditional balancing policies; or, more generally, (e) the search for compensation and for diplomatic advantage outside Europe, since the powers were deadlocked on the Continent itself. But the spread of European rivalries changed the pattern of international politics. As extra-European powers such as Japan, the United States, and China became increasingly involved, European dominance gave way to world politics in the true sense of the term.

Others have explained European imperialism less in terms of intra-European conflict than as a culmination of a great number of local conflicts. Detailed historical research of particular imperialist adventures has revealed the operation of a great variety of forces in each instance. Sheer power play, diplomatic maneuvering, strategic and geopolitical concerns, humanitarian interests and racial ideologies, economic drives and cultural expansionism have often intermingled without a priori dominance of any single factor. Frequently, particular conflicts resulted merely from the exploits of “private imperialists,” whether traders, explorers, concession hunters, or missionaries. Outside powers got entangled in indigenous warfare and disputes, while the inevitable instability of unsettled borders and the feared action by rival groups and governments often led to improvised interventions. Hence, new imperialist actions often resulted from past imperial commitments (India being a prime example). In this view, local rivalries slowly developed into imperialist policies on a world scale, to be interpreted only afterward and anachronistically as deliberate and planned expansion on the part of particular “imperial powers.”

At the same time, other writers have continued searching for more determinist explanations than either intra-European rivalry or localized imperial exploits provide. They have focused on longer-term technological, political, and social developments. Some have thus singled out the effects of the great changes in world communications which started when improved weaponry and navigation technology basically altered the relations of power between Europe and the rest of the world. To explain the upsurge of imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, they have stressed the impact of the change from wooden ships to steamers, which revolutionized the entire scale of international trade, affected the traditional dominance of the British navy, and led to a demand for coaling stations and for safeguards and control over international arteries like the Bosporus, the Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal. This view logically extends to the later strategic concern with oil supplies. Railways posed similar strategic issues and facilitated the penetration of hitherto practically untouched inland areas. The advent of the telegraph immeasurably speeded the flow of information and held out the tempting prospect of direct rule over outlying lands, but again demanded safeguards for cables and cable stations. Of even greater influence was the simultaneous growth of a world press, which, coupled with the growing literacy rate in Europe and the United States, created mass publics that were often violently jingoistic.

Certain authors (e.g., Gallagher & Robinson 1953; Robinson & Gallagher 1961; 1962) have underscored this trend by emphasizing in particular the sociological effect of European expansionist policies on political regimes outside Europe. Rejecting the conventional view that there was a sharp break between the older mercantilist imperialism of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and the new high tide of imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, they have spoken of the intervening period as one of “the imperialism of free trade.” In this period European power and commerce were extended mainly through diplomatic and economic leverage, not by direct colonial rule. But while this was to a large extent feasible and successful in the Americas, in the Ottoman Empire, in north Africa, and in China—and could even be accompanied by a withdrawal of imperial controls in Canada, Australasia, and South Africa—it broke down increasingly in Afro-Asia after 1870 through the corrosive political and commercial effects that European policies had upon key African and Asian governments. The political and financial collapse of these governments brought European interests into play and led to a process of direct competitive annexations. European imperialism, in this view, is therefore a long-standing process in which, in Afro—Asia at least, extending imperialist activity was the result of the preceding activities of informal penetration and the protonational reactions that they eventually provoked.

Thus, on the one hand European expansion after 1870 is regarded as part of an almost self-evident process through which European power, enterprise, and culture spread over land and sea by formal as well as informal methods. On the other hand, exact study of this process leads to increasingly complex interpretations of the forces behind actual events and incidents.

The wider meanings of imperialism

The view of imperialism as a general and age-old phenomenon which predates and postdates the period of European overseas expansion (whether dated from the fifteenth or from the nineteenth century) poses new theoretical complications.

On the one hand, there is a tendency to regard as imperialism any form of more or less sustained aggressive action of one political system toward another. Thus defined, the term gets easily lost in vague generalities. Theoretical interpretation loses contact with concrete social and historical situations and is inevitably reduced to overgeneral explanations, attributing the phenomenon to postulated universal behavior traits of man (i.e., to psychological mechanisms) or of men (i.e., to group interaction). Imperialism has thus been explained by such presumably universal human emotions as fear, the will to power, pride, prestige, pugnacity, predacity, etc.

On the other hand, the attempt to narrow the definition of imperialism so as to make it suitable for more specific analyses has led other theorists into a tautological trap. They have found only those factors significant in the explanation of imperialism which their own definition has already singled out as determining or important. Thus some authors have spoken of imperialism only in the case of expansion by certain countries, or by states with a specific social system, or by particular groups within states. Some have restricted the word to specific types of aggressive policies, reserving the term for cases of overseas expansion but not for extension of power over contiguous land areas, or regarding as imperialism only the annexation of tropical or agrarian countries or territories with particular raw materials. Others have restricted the word to certain expansionist goals, e.g., economic exploitation, racial domination, cultural messi-anism. Still others have thought of imperialism only when certain conditions are fulfilled as to methods and duration of control, demanding as a criterion direct occupation but not indirect mechanisms like bribery, economic intervention, or military threats. Finally, certain authors have limited imperialism to attempts by states to reverse an existing status quo; imperialist policies are those which aim at acquiring new power (dynamic imperialism to others), but not those which seek to maintain an existing empire (which others call static imperialism). Such restrictive definitions often prejudge explanations of actual power relations and may be motivated by the political desire to defend or attack the policies of particular states.

These complications, which are the immediate result of the complexity of the numerous phenomena that have been subsumed under the term “imperialism,” make it doubtful whether a satisfactory theory of imperialism can ever be evolved. Many theorists of international relations have therefore dropped the term, as useless for theoretical analysis. Other authors have preferred to speak of imperialisms (in the plural) following Schumpeter (1919-1927). This suggests the phenomenon of “imperialism” must at least be broken down into a number of subtypes, which could be classified according to (a) goals pursued, (b) methods used, and (c) activating forces.

Imperialist goals

Expansionist political systems have historically pursued one or more of the following goals.

Economic gain. Throughout history forceful appropriation of material benefits has been a powerful factor in imperialist policies. Gains have consisted both of booty (e.g., precious objects, crops) acquired in single raids and of labor and products of populations subjected to enduring servitude and often forced to suffer a drastic overhaul of property relations and production systems.

Political power. Conquest of foreign lands was often motivated by the desire to augment political power. This could be in a direct sense, for instance, when foreign manpower was used to reinforce the armed strength of the imperialist nations, or when strategic raw materials were monopolized, or when areas of a strategic nature were occupied. It could also be indirect, as when foreign dominion brought added prestige and increased bargaining power for the imperialist state or for leading persons and groups within it.

Ideology. Frequently imperialist ideologies have been merely convenient cloaks to cover other drives. But throughout human history certain political, religious, or cultural beliefs have sometimes waxed so strong as to force states independently into “missionary” activities, to spread “civilization,” or the “true” gospel, or a particular national culture or dominant political creed.

Diversion of domestic unrest. Aggressive action abroad has often been believed capable of deflecting domestic tension. Once set in motion, however, this mechanism has frequently gone beyond its original purpose. In Schumpeter’s words, “…created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required” ([1919-1927] 1951, p. 33). Other writers have suggested that totalitarian regimes are particularly prone to expansionist policies. Since internal rule cannot be maintained unless the system is insulated from foreign influences, totalitarian countries tend to show the twin reactions of isolation and expansion in order to avoid or destroy threatening foreign forces (Feier-abend 1962).

Methods of control

Imperial relationships may be further classified according to the way control is exercised over subject peoples.

Types of pressure exerted. Pressure can range from relatively peaceful practices (normal financial and economic transactions, cultural activities, diplomatic argument) through more forceful measures (bribery, economic sanctions, military intimidation) to outright violence (varying from a temporary show of arms to actual conquest and permanent repression).

Legal instruments. International law contains a great variety of instruments that can be used to exercise control: leases, concessions, capitulations, suzerainty, protectorates, mandates, trusteeships, forced alliances, temporary occupations, permanent annexations, etc.

Actual political relations. Following Hans Kohn (1958, p. 4), one may distinguish five types of imperial relationships, according to whether (1) a subject people has full autonomy within an imperial framework; (2) individual subjects enjoy full citizenship in the imperial state but are denied the expression of separate nationhood; (3) subject peoples are reduced to permanently inferior status; (4) subject peoples are physically exterminated; or (5) one nation establishes and maintains political domination over a geographically external political unit inhabited by people of any race and at any state of cultural development. Kohn reserves the term “colonialism” for the last of these categories.

Activating forces

Different kinds of imperialism, as well as theories about imperialism, may be distinguished according to whether particular individuals, special social groups, a particular condition of nations, or the general characteristics of the international system are thought to constitute the core of imperialist action.

Individuals as the main agents of imperialism. Imperialist policies can stem mainly from the special ambitions of, or the particular psychological pressures working on, people in positions of effective political influence. This influence can result either from their formal or informal political roles at home or from their strategic importance in connection with particular diplomatic constellations abroad (e.g., Cecil Rhodes and other “private imperialists”). This category would also include those theories which attribute imperialism to the parallel but individual psychological reactions of people which sustain group aggression. Usually, however, both the role and the reactions of individuals can be explained satisfactorily only on the basis of particular social conditions and relationships.

Social groups as the carriers of imperialism. Nearly every kind of social group has been held responsible for imperialist actions: ruling dynasties, out for glory, wealth, and dominion; aristocratic warrior castes, depending on wars for status and income; military officers and civilian officials, whose loyalties are swayed by their exclusive identification with the interests of the state they serve; the middle classes as the natural supporters of national states; religious and intellectual ideolo-gizers who extol a particular political system or culture; the peasantry, sensitive to traditional love for the fatherland and easily persuaded of the value of gaining new land through foreign conquest; the urban proletariat, likely to cheer foreign adventures in compensation for their own downtrodden existence, etc. But closer analysis usually reveals the inadequacy of single-group explanations, partly because their postulated unity is proved false by detailed historical inquiry and partly because the special importance of certain groups can itself be accounted for only by other factors.

Imperialism as an extension of nationalism. Whereas older sociologists saw the roots of imperialism in racial struggle, more modern thinkers have pointed particularly to the forces behind assertive nationalism. These, in turn, they have explained as the inevitable outcome of particular communication processes which constantly reinforce nationalist cohesion at the expense of international interaction; as a deflection of widespread insecurity (itself a product of manifold social changes) toward alleged enemies at home and abroad; as the inevitable result of the distortions or stereotypes in the perception of other groups and nations; or as the product of new ideologies that ascribe to particular nations special rights in the assumed international struggle for survival. Such theories have the merit of wide applicability, but they fail to account for the lack of expansionist policies on the part of some nations, as well as for the occurrence of imperialism long before nationalism developed as a dominant factor in world politics.

Imperialism as the natural consequence of international power relations. Many observers have held imperialism to be the inevitable result of the simultaneous existence of independent sovereign states. Some have started from the assumption that a balance of power situation leads automatically to attempts by rivals on either side to strengthen their positions at the expense of weaker states and territories; this then initiates a vicious circle of fear, distrust, and armaments which strengthens aggressive tendencies. Others have laid more stress on the objective instability of power relations, as each war sows the seeds of a new one through the continued expansionist spirit of the victor or revanchist desires on the part of the loser. Seemingly stable power relations can, moreover, become unstable through changes of will or modifications in power variables which stir up new fears and new hopes for conquest. Others have regarded the relations between stronger and weaker states as unstable by definition.

As is clear from these and similar models, the explanation of imperialism shades into a general theory of international relations. The term loses its historical connotation and becomes a purely theoretical concept, differently defined in the context of specific theoretical systems.

The word “imperialism” is, therefore, entirely at the mercy of its user. It has been corroded by over-frequent, emotional usage, but if overuse has blunted it as an intellectual tool, the resulting vagueness has certainly not diminished its potency as a political slogan.

Hans Daalder

[See alsoColonialism; Foreign aid; Modernization; Nationalism;Pan movements; Trusteeship. Other relevant material may be found inEconomic growth; Empires;International relations; Social movements; and in the biographies of Fanon; Hobson; Kautsky; Lenin; Luxemburg; Schumpeter.]

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Koebner, Richard; and Schmidt, Helmut D. 1964 Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840-1960. Cambridge Univ. Press.

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Landes, David S. 1961 Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism. Journal of Economic History 21:496-512.

Langer, William L. (1935) 1951 The Diplomacy of Imperialism: 1890-1902. 2d ed. 2 vols. New York: Knopf.

Lenin, Vladimir I. (1917) 1947 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Lenin, Vladimir I. 1939 New Data for V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Edited by E. Varga and L. Mendelsohn. New York: International Publishers. → Posthumously published materials originally intended for Lenin’s Imperialism.

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Luxemburg, Rosa (1913) 1964 The Accumulation of Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. → First published in German.

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IMPERIALISM

IMPERIALISM. Americans have long thought of themselves as an "anti-imperial" people. The nation was, after all, founded in revolt against the British Empire. In the twentieth century, the rhetoric of national "selfdetermination" pervaded American discussions of foreign affairs. From Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, the United States defined itself in opposition to the imperialism of other empires.

Imperialism, in this American usage, refers to the domination of another society against the expressed will of its people. Imperialism can be both formal and informal. In the case of formal empire—as in the British rule over the thirteen American colonies during the eighteenth century—a powerful foreign state manages the day-to-day political, social, and economic affairs in another land. Informal empire, in contrast, refers to a more indirect arrangement, whereby a foreign state works through local intermediaries to manage a distant society. In early nineteenth-century India, for example, British authorities negotiated favorable trade arrangements with native monarchs rather than bear the heavy costs of direct imperial control.

Close attention to these two kinds of imperialism has led many scholars to conclude that, despite popular assumptions, imperialism as a general term applies to American history. In particular, the years after the Civil War show abundant evidence of Americans expanding their economic, political, military, and cultural control over foreign societies. The post-1865 period is distinguished from previous decades, when the young Republic was both struggling for its survival and expanding over contiguous territory that it rapidly incorporated into the constitutional structures of the United States. Imperialism implies something different from continental expansion. It refers to the permanent subordination of distant societies, rather than their reorganization as states of equal standing in a single nation. America extended its federalist structure of governance across the North American continent before the Civil War. After that watershed, a powerful United States established areas of domination in distant lands, whose people were not allowed equal representation in governance. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had a large informal empire and a smaller but still significant formal empire as well.

From the Civil War to the Twentieth Century

William Henry Seward, secretary of state during and immediately after the Civil War, recognized that the United States needed an overseas empire for its future peace and prosperity. The wounds of the bloody North-South conflict would heal, he believed, only with the promise of overseas benefits for all sections of the country. Informal U.S. expansion into foreign markets—especially in Asia and the Caribbean—provided farmers and industrialists with access to consumers and resources. At a time when the U.S. economy had begun to employ factory manufacturing, mechanized agriculture, and railroad transportation, large overseas outlets became necessary for prosperity. Americans were dependent on assured access to international markets, Seward believed, and this required expansion across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Seward began by building a "highway" to Asia. This included annexation of the Brooks Islands in 1867 (renamed the Midway Islands in 1903). The secretary of state also negotiated a treaty guaranteeing American businesses access to the island kingdom of Hawaii. The U.S. Senate eventually approved this treaty in 1875. Seward expected that the Brooks Islands and Hawaii would serve as important stepping-stones for American influence in the lucrative markets of China and Japan.

When the United States encountered resistance to its post–Civil War expansion in Asia, the government employed diplomatic and military pressures. In 1866, after the Japanese government closed itself to foreign trade, the United States joined other imperial powers—the British, the French, and the Dutch—in forcing Western access to the island nation over the objections of native interests. Seward dispatched a warship, the U.S.S. Wyoming, to join in naval exercises off the Japanese coast.

In China, the largest and most promising market, Seward used diplomacy instead of explicit force. According to the Burlingame Treaty, signed in September 1868, the Chinese government gave the United States trading access to designated coastal areas, with the additional right to build railroads and telegraphs facilitating penetration of the hinterland. In return, the United States allowed thousands of Chinese laborers to migrate across the Pacific. This arrangement helped to relieve China's overpopulation difficulties, and it provided American companies—particularly on the West Coast—with a large pool of low-wage workers. The U.S. government worked with the Chinese emperor to guarantee a market for the export of American products and the import of cheap labor.

Seward's imperialism set the stage for succeeding secretaries of state, but his policies inspired strong domestic resistance. By the time he left office in 1869, Seward had built an American overseas empire that included formal possessions, including the Brooks Islands and Alaska (1867), as well as larger informal areas of influence, which included Hawaii, Japan, and, most important of all, China. Many Americans expressed discomfort with this evidence of imperialism, including Republican Senator Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. Seward's other ambitious plans—including acquisition of the Danish West Indies (the U.S. Virgin Islands) and the construction of an isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through a sliver of Colombia—died at the hands of anti-imperialists on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Despite these setbacks, Seward and his successors recognized the overriding imperialist trend in American foreign policy at the time. In addition to the economic advantages derived from overseas expansion, a series of internal social and cultural pressures pushed the United States to become more involved in managing distant societies. Religious belief—in particular a desire to spread Christian "civilization"—had motivated Western settlement across the North American continent during the period of manifest destiny, before the Civil War. Now these same urges inspired overseas proselytism. Ministers like Josiah Strong of the Home Missionary Society called upon thousands of their followers to establish churches and schools throughout China and other foreign countries. Christian missionaries would not only save less privileged souls, they would also display the profound righteousness of American society. As was the case with Britain and many other imperial powers in the nineteenth century, the United States defined its national identity by asserting superiority over—and a duty to convert—"Oriental" heathens.

American imperialism, in this sense, was part of a much larger international competition. Britain, France, and Russia—and by the last decades of the nineteenth century, Germany and Japan—were all competing for in-fluence in Asia, Africa, and other "open" spaces for expansion. American leaders felt they had to adopt imperialistic policies of their own. Otherwise, the United States risked permanent exclusion from future opportunities abroad. Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 codified this argument, proclaiming that the United States would assert its presence in China and other countries to make sure that other imperialist powers did not close off American access. As a self-conscious great power with a civilizing mission and a growing dependence on foreign markets, the United States needed its own empire—preferably informal. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner's influential 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," captured this sense that the proving ground for American society was no longer on the North American continent, but now overseas.

One could not build an empire—even an informal one—without an adequate military. After an initial decade of demobilization after the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a period of extensive naval construction in the late nineteenth century. Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the newly created Naval War College, outlined a new military doctrine for American imperialism in his widely read lectures, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. First published in 1890, Mahan's text mined the history of the Roman and British empires to show that a large trading state could ensure its wealth and security by asserting dominance of the sea. A large battleship navy, in control of important strategic waterways and coaling stations across the globe, would guarantee the flow of commerce. It would also allow for the United States to influence foreign societies, transporting concentrated forces across great distances.

Largely as a consequence of Mahan's influence, the U.S. naval fleet grew consistently between 1890 and 1914. More ships created new opportunities for force projection. New overseas naval interests, in turn, justified ever larger estimates of strategic necessities. By 1898, the U.S. Navy had become both an advocate and a tool of American imperialism.

The United States used its growing naval power to force the declining Spanish empire out of Cuba and the Philippines. In both areas, America became the new imperial power. In 1901, the United States—now in formal control of Cuba—forced the native government of the island to include in its constitution a series of stipulations known as the Platt Amendment (named for Senator Orville Platt, a Republican from Connecticut). These included assurances of American political and economic domination. The U.S. Navy acquired possession of a major facility on the island, Guantánamo Naval Base. Washington also asserted the future right to intervene militarily in Cuba if U.S. interests were jeopardized. After granting the island nominal independence in 1902, the United States did indeed send an "army of pacification" to the island in 1906 for the purpose of repressing anti-American groups. The United States practiced a combination of informal and formal imperialism in Cuba.

In the case of the Philippines, the United States initially went to war with Spain in 1898 for the purpose of acquiring an informal naval coaling station. Native resistance to U.S. interests and a growing recognition in Washington that the archipelago would serve as an ideal point of embarkation for trade with the Chinese mainland led President William McKinley to declare the Philippines a permanent U.S. colony on 21 December 1898. America fought a bloody forty-one-month war to secure possession of the entire archipelago. During this Philippine Insurrection, the United States created an occupation army that waged total war on local resistance. Forty-two hundred Americans died in battle for possession of this colony. As many as twenty thousand Filipino insurgents also died. As never before, the United States had established direct control over a foreign society—seven thousand miles from North America—through brute force. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the evidence of American imperialism was unmistakable.

Liberal Imperialism

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was both an advocate of democracy and a practitioner of imperialism. The two are not necessarily contradictory. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both believed they had an obligation to spread American ideas and interests across the globe. As a new world power, the United States had an apparent opportunity to remake the international system in a way that would eliminate the old ravages of war and corrupt alliances. Roosevelt and Wilson sought to replace militaristic aristocracies with governments that promised economic development and, eventually, democracy. International change of this variety would, they assumed, best serve America's long-term interests.

In the short run, however, the "new diplomacy" of Roosevelt and Wilson required more extensive American imperialism. When societies refused to follow the alleged tide of "modern" economic development and democracy symbolized by the United States, Washington felt an urge to intervene. On a number of occasions, U.S. leaders went so far as to force societies to be "free" on American terms. This was the rationale behind a series of early twentieth-century U.S. interventions in the Western Hemisphere that included, among others, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. In each case, the United States asserted strategic and economic interests, and a long-term commitment to the betterment of the society under Washington's control. When U.S. military forces left their foreign areas of occupation, the threat of their redeployment served to intimidate those who wished to challenge U.S. influence.

In Europe and Asia, the United States pursued a consistent policy of informal imperialism during the first decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the image of American diplomatic isolation before and after World War I, U.S. businesses worked with Washington's explicit—though often "unofficial"—support to build new overseas markets during this period. Investment firms like J. P. Morgan and Company lent large sums to countries such as Great Britain and France, forcing them to allow more American influence in the daily workings of their economies. Industrial concerns like Standard Oil, Singer Sewing Company, and International Harvester became more active in controlling natural resources overseas and marketing their products to foreign consumers. Perhaps most significant of all, intellectual and charitable groups like the Carnegie Council and the Rockefeller Foundation began to advise leaders in Europe, Asia, and Latin America on how they could make their societies and economies look more like that of the United States. Their seemingly "objective" counsels encouraged private property concentration, natural resource extraction, and increased trade—all factors that served to increase the influence of American firms.

The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism restricted much of the international commerce and communication that had flourished in the first decades of the century. These conditions, however, only heightened the pressures for informal American imperialism. Fearful that economic and political forces—especially in Germany—were moving against trade, economic development, and democracy, the U.S. government continued to encourage the activities of American companies and advisory groups abroad.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in particular, sponsored the overseas marketing of Hollywood-produced films. Movies helped to proselytize the individual freedoms and personal prosperity that Americans believed were essential for a peaceful, liberal world. Hollywood helped nurture foreign consumers who would soon want to purchase the American-made automobiles and other products glorified on the silver screen. Most significant of all, policymakers like Roosevelt believed that movie exports would help inspire positive views of the United States in foreign societies. The president even thought this might work with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin—an avid consumer of American movies. Roosevelt hoped that Hollywood depictions of Soviet-American friend-ship would help solidify the two nations in their fight against Nazi fascism.

World War II and the Cold War

U.S. participation in World War II formalized America's liberal imperialism of the prior decades. As part of the Atlantic Charter—negotiated when Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in secret between 9 and 12 August 1941—the United States proclaimed that the war against fascism would end with a "permanent system of general security" that would embrace national self-determination, free trade, and disarmament. Citizens of foreign countries would benefit from "improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security" when they restructured their societies to look like the United States. The Atlantic Charter laid out an agenda for total war against the large standing armies, state-run economies, and dictatorial governments that characterized fascist regimes. This is what one scholar calls the "American way of war." Between 1941 and 1945, the United States deployed unprecedented military force—including two atomic bombs—to annihilate its most direct challengers in Asia and Europe. American commitments to free trade, economic development, and democracy required the unconditional surrender of Japanese, German, and Italian fascists. U.S. leaders and citizens not only asserted that their nation was the necessary "arsenal of democracy," they also proclaimed that they would remake the world after the horrors of war and genocide. The defeat of fascism would christen the "American Century," when the United States would play the unabashed role of liberal imperialist, planting the seeds of American-style economic growth and democracy across the globe.

The United States undertook this task with extraordinary resolve as soon as World War II came to a close in 1945. In the western half of Germany and the European continent, American policymakers rebuilt wardevastated societies. The Economic Recovery Program of 1947 (also known as the Marshall Plan, after Secretary of State George Marshall) provided a staggering $13 billion of U.S. aid to feed starving people, reorganize industry, and jump-start economic production. Instead of the reparations and loans that weighed down European economies after World War I, the United States used the Marshall Plan to foster postwar stability, prosperity, and integration in Europe. With their economies organized along liberal capitalist lines, the west European countries developed favorable markets for American exports only a few years after the end of World War II.

In Japan and the western half of Germany, America's liberal imperialism was formal and incredibly successful. In both societies, U.S. officials helped to write new constitutions. The Japanese national charter of 1946 prohibited militarism and state control over the economy. It gave Japanese women the right to vote for the first time, promoted noncommunist labor unions, encouraged free public expression, and created new opportunities for American-style schooling. The new German "Basic Law," promulgated in 1949, similarly outlawed fascism and ensured individual rights, personal property ownership, and free elections. In both societies, the United States worked with a series of local politicians to uproot authoritarian traditions and impose liberal democracy. American officials sought to prevent future war, improve the lives of foreign citizens, and ensure U.S. strategic and economic interests. These goals were not incompatible; in fact, they reflected a formalization of American assumptions dating back to 1865.

The Soviet Union objected to America's liberal imperialism for obvious reasons. Joseph Stalin and his successors recognized that U.S. expansion in Europe and Asia prohibited the spread of communist ideals. Instead of the worker rights and economic equality championed by the Soviet Union—in words, if not in practice—American influence privileged personal liberties and individual wealth accumulation. The conflict between America's liberal democratic vision and the Soviet Union's communist alternative created an environment of competing imperialisms, which contemporaries called the "Cold War."

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet criticisms of U.S. imperialism gained some popular support in Asian, African, and Latin American societies struggling for independence against inherited European and American domination. This was most evident in Indochina. Despite its anticolonial inclinations, U.S. leaders supported French colonialism in this region of Southeast Asia after World War II. In the eyes of U.S. policymakers, national independence for Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian citizens threatened to undermine the stability and security of the region. Nationalist governments would allegedly threaten trade and economic development. Most significantly, American leaders feared that newly independent governments would fall under the influence of Soviet and, after 1949, Chinese communism. Liberal imperialism appeared necessary to contain communist expansion and prepare "underdeveloped" societies for eventual independence.

When Vietnamese nationalists—aided, as Washington predicted, by China and the Soviet Union—forced the French out of Indochina in 1954, the United States took over as a formal imperialist in the region. By the end of 1965, U.S. soldiers were fighting an extensive ground, sea, and air war against Vietnamese nationalists. Before the last U.S. troops withdrew from the region in 1975, hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of peasants had died or suffered dislocation as a consequence of American military activities. In addition, 58,193 U.S. soldiers perished in this war.

The Vietnam War illustrated the extended brutality of American imperialism during the Cold War. Longstanding economic and political impulses had combined with militant anticommunism to devastate much of Southeast Asia. Observers in countries around the world—including the United States—condemned American foreign policy for undermining the liberal purposes that it claimed to serve. The global revolt witnessed in 1968 on city streets across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America was an international reaction against American imperialism.

After Vietnam and to the Twenty-First Century

American foreign policy was never the same after the Vietnam War. Aware of the resistance that the formal elements of American imperialism had inspired, policymakers returned to more informal mechanisms for asserting influence abroad. Economic globalization and human rights advocacy took center stage, along with continued anticommunism. The promise of American-style prosperity and individual rights—championed by politicians, businesspeople, and Hollywood writers—triumphed over the gray authoritarianism of communist regimes. By 1991, societies across the globe rushed to attract American investment and aid. Citizens sought out American cultural exports—including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Michael Jordan.

America's informal imperialism in the late twentieth century was remarkably effective. It did, however, inspire serious resistance. Instead of adopting communist slogans, as they had in the 1950s and 1960s, opponents of U.S. influence after 1991 turned largely to religion. Fundamentalisms of many varieties—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—arose to challenge the decadence and hypocrisy of American liberal democracy. They condemned the United States for undermining traditional sources of authority and morality in foreign societies. They recognized that the free trade, economic development, and popular elections advocated by the United States would destroy many local hierarchies.

International terrorism—symbolized most frighteningly by the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—emerged, in part, as a reaction to a long history of formal and informal American imperialism. This observation does not, in any way, justify the abhorrent terrorist activities. American imperialism has produced both positive and negative outcomes, as the contrast between post–World War II Japan and Vietnam makes clear. Nonetheless, the extraordinary overseas influence of the United States, dating back to 1865, has inspired violent resistance. Americans probably will not abandon their liberal imperialist assumptions in the twenty-first century, but they will surely develop new strategies for isolating and defeating foreign challengers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985. A superb comparative study that analyzes the politics and foreign policy of early twentieth-century America.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The best analysis of the sources and implications of America's anticommunist containment policy during the Cold War.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997. A provocative analysis of how American liberal imperialism contributed to the Vietnam War.

Hahn, Peter L., and Mary Ann Heiss, eds. Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. A useful survey of American imperialism in the "third world" during the Cold War.

Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A penetrating account of how the Marshall Plan reconstructed Western Europe on America's model.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. A stimulating account of how ideas about liberty, race, and revolution shaped American imperialism.

Iriye, Akira, ed. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A compelling discussion of Americanization in the first half of the twentieth century.

Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. An excellent account of Wilson's liberal approach to foreign policy.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. A classic history of American imperialism between the Civil War and the War of 1898.

Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. A rich account of how American values and fears of Soviet power drove foreign policy in the early Cold War.

McCormick, Thomas J. China Market: America's Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1990. A provocative account of American imperialism in Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.

Ninkovich, Frank. The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. A compelling account of Wilson's influence on American imperialism in the twentieth century.

Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. A thoughtful account of America's cultural and economic imperialism between the two world wars.

Smith, Tony. America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. A provocative analysis of American liberal imperialism.

Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. A compelling analysis of America's imperialistic approach to war.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Norton, 1988. Originally published in 1959 and one of the most important works on the history of American foreign relations—a penetrating discussion of economics, ideas, and imperialism.

JeremiSuri

See alsoAnti-Imperialists ; China, Relations with ; Cuba, Relations with ; Hawaii ; Intervention ; Japan, Relations with ; Philippines ; Spanish-American War ; Vietnam War ; andvol. 9:Anti-Imperialist League Platform .

Imperialism

IMPERIALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IMPERIALISM AND ITS CRITICS: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Imperialism as a distinct set of ideas can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth century; it refers primarily to a political system based on colonies governed from an imperial metropolitan center for direct or indirect economic benefit. Commonly associated with the policy of direct extension of sovereignty and dominion over noncontiguous and often distant overseas territories, it also denotes indirect political or economic control of powerful states over weaker peoples. Regarded also as a doctrine based on the use of deliberate force, imperialism has been subject to moral censure by its critics, and thus the term is frequently used in international propaganda as a pejorative for expansionist and aggressive foreign policy.

IMPERIALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Although the term empire (Latin: imperium ), inhering in the idea of supreme command or authority, is regarded as part of a universal human political experience since the rise of polities in antiquity, imperialism is more narrowly dated to the era of colonial empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this era the economic and military advantages of mercantile, industrialist, and capitalist countries were translated into a more or less systematic and formal policy of conquest, annexation, and administration of the world outside of Europe and the Americas. Between 1880 and 1914 much of this world was partitioned in territories under the direct rule of European countries, or subjected to their political influence. Led by Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States, and later followed by Russia and Japan, principal powers of the world divided Asia into informal zones of influence, and carved up the Pacific and Africa into new territorial, and mostly colonial, units. The expectation of asymmetrical and iniquitous distribution of political-economic gains was complemented by the roughly contemporaneous idea that the world was inhabited by advanced and backward races and nations, and that imperial expansion was also in part the preponderance of those who were fit and thus destined to rule. In the 1890s many contemporary observers associated imperial expansionism with a new phase in the development of international capitalism, one that succeeded the era of free competition and economic liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century. This particular use of the term imperialism has often been attributed to V. I. Lenin, the architect of the Russian Revolution. John A. Hobson (1858–1940) noted the heightened currency of the term in the late nineteenth century, both in political discussion and common speech. Whether they were influenced by Karl Marx’s theories or not, contemporaries were aware of the economic roots of this new version of imperial expansion, which they identified with the territorial division of the world among major European powers into formal or informal colonies and spheres of influence. Such claims among European military and economic rivals were nowhere more evident than at the Berlin Conference of 1884, hosted by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), who had come to the conclusion that an Africa divided along colonial lines by mutual agreement among the European empires would safeguard markets and raw materials. This move led to the proclamation of a number of protectorates and colonies, known as the “scramble for Africa,” and the eventual partition of the entire continent.

The ties between mercantile capital, empire-building, and colonial ventures had already been secured by the late eighteenth century. Capital invested in the triangular trade between England, Africa, and the Caribbean had a profound impact on New World Iberian colonies. The African slave trade, for example, provided the labor for Brazilian and Caribbean plantations that produced sugar for much of western Europe and North America. During the early nineteenth century, settler colonies were also becoming important, both commercially and politically, best articulated perhaps in the context of Upper and Lower Canada by John Lambton, Lord Durham (1792–1840) in his Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839). While drawing up the report he was ably assisted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) and Charles Buller (1806–1848), both of whom were well known for their progressive and radical views on social reform. The Durham Report, which effectively safeguarded British influence over a divided Canada, advocated responsible government through graduated constitutional change, while at the same time recognizing the value of commerce and investment. It also delineated imperial trade and foreign policy, and the regulation of colonial settlement through a careful distribution of public lands by the British government.

Already by the 1840s colonies had assumed heightened importance as welcome outlets, not only for criminals and outcasts, but also for increasingly large numbers of migrants who could not secure adequate employment and resources in the mother country. There were many theorists and advocates of settler colonialism, among them the radical Wakefield, who called for a “systematic colonization” of the Australian continent, arguing that a successful transference depended on the compatibility of capital and labor, and economic opportunity to create harmony between the different classes of settlers. The absorption of “redundant people” in the colonies, Wakefield pointed out in his View of the Art of Colonization (1849), would result in increased supply of food and raw materials for manufacture for the inhabitants of the empire at home. Wakefield clearly anticipated the importance of empire for the accumulation of capital and investment overseas.

It was Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), the German philosopher, historian, and theologian, and also onetime leader of the left-Hegelians, who advanced the idea of imperialism as a powerful and disruptive global political force. The entry of Russia as a world power, he predicted, would usher in a new era of transnational imperial rivalry. According to Bauer, this was the result of the contradictions that had arisen between the demands of modern mass society and the political absolutism of the state, a symptom of the crisis of the old European liberal order (Bauer 1882). Thus, for example, in Bismarck’s model of state-based socialism in Germany, economic production was subjected to close political control, driven by the need to rein in the unruly forces of capitalism. In Benjamin Disraeli’s England, in contrast, political leaders sought a mass mandate for imperial policies in order to shore up and bolster a paternalist monarchy whose institutional basis had been eroded by the force of economic change. Bauer’s verged on an apocalyptic vision, portending heightened imperial rivalry across the world, resulting in a war among the leading nations.

Imperialism and nationalism had long been regarded as kindred forces. At the turn of the century, among theorists who challenged this commonly accepted idea was the British liberal economist John A. Hobson, who argued in his influential Imperialism: A Study (1902) that the drive for imperialist expansion in Europe could not be fully explained by the rise of patriotic nationalism. From the vantage point of an entire nation and its people, the policy of imperial expansion did not result in long-term and tangible economic benefits; the costs of wars of expansion far outweighed the returns, and indeed, necessary social reforms that would have benefited the economically disadvantaged sections of the population were often set aside in favor of imperial adventurism. Such policies, however, served the financial interests of capitalists and their representative political groups, who were, according to Hobson, custodians of the “imperial engine.” Periodic congestion of capital in manufacturing, resulting from uneven distribution of income, falling demand, and excess goods and capital inside a given nation-state, urged the search for investment outlets overseas, thus driving the search for new markets and opportunities for investment in foreign markets, including distant colonies and dependencies. This process was further propelled through the practices of larger firms and financial groups operating in trusts and combines that sought restrictions on output in order to avert loss through overproduction. Hobson’s study, which focused on business cycles, behavior of financial groups, and patterns of overseas investment, directly influenced Marxist thinkers in their analysis of imperialism.

IMPERIALISM AND ITS CRITICS: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

During the early decades of the twentieth century there were many radical critics on the Left who saw the rise of imperialism as a historical force intimately tied to the worldwide expansion and consolidation of finance capital. As Lenin in his introduction to Nikolai Bukharin’s tract Imperialism and World Economy (1917 [1972]) noted succinctly: “The typical ruler of the world became finance capital, a power that is peculiarly mobile and flexible, particularly intertwined at home and internationally, peculiarly devoid of individuality and divorced from the immediate process of production, peculiarly easy to concentrate” (p. 11). Much of the debate centered on Marx’s prediction about the concentration of capital. Rudolf Hilferding in Finance Capital (1910 [1981]) and Otto Bauer in Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (The Nationalities Question and the Social Democracy, 1907), extending Marxian ideas of capital accumulation, argued that the sectors of banking and finance had increasingly started to exert pressure on industrial production, leading to the formation of monopolies and cartels, the quest for protection of markets, and ultimately to economic imperialism, international rivalry, and war. Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born German revolutionary and founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League (which later became the German Communist Party), forcefully argued in her 1913 tract Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital) that imperialism was the direct result of the dynamic and aggressive inroad of capitalism into the less economically advanced parts of the world.

Bukharin and Lenin, stalwarts of Bolshevism and veterans of the October Revolution, took these ideas further, advancing that imperialism was not a contest for world domination among rival races such as Slavs and Teutons, but the direct result of a particular form of capitalism marked by the changing structure of financial investment and relations of production. Colonial expansion and imperial wars were indeed signs of a developing global economy. Bukharin saw the global expansion of finance capital as a historic phenomenon tied to new national rivalries, fiscal competition, and imperial conquest.

Lenin penned a small tract, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1917 [1970]), which soon became one of the most influential of all Marxist studies on the subject. Lenin saw imperialism as closely tied to the normal functions of an advanced capitalism that had already undergone profound changes along with the development of modern European nation-states. More importantly, monopoly capitalism had already edged out an earlier form of competitive capitalism marked by the free entry and exit of small and large-scale industries and businesses. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, an advanced stage of capital was already in progress where open economic competition and production of commodities were replaced by predatory monopolies and cartels. For Lenin, a good example of this process was the changed role of banks as financial intermediaries to monopolistic interest groups, merging readily with industry and leading to the domination of finance capital and the unprecedented concentration of production. As a result, a fundamental and historic feature of capitalism had been altered: What was once characterized by the separation of ownership of capital from the process of production was now marked by a separation of finance capital from industrial capital. Lenin held that new finance capital had outpaced commodities in reaching far corners of the world, heightening actual divisions and rivalry between trading groups and nations. New segments of the world market were thus being appropriated by monopoly capital, with the merging of corporations—such as conglomerates in the oil industry—to weed out competition.

Lenin saw the division of the world among colonial and imperial powers as closely associated with the transformative power of finance capital. Thus the scramble among powerful nations for colonial expansion was largely fueled by the drive for raw materials and markets. Lenin famously proclaimed imperialism as the “highest stage” in the development of capitalism. As monopoly interest groups sought to divide the world into arenas of economic exploitation, they unleashed new rivalries over markets and raw materials among both advanced and less advanced capitalist nations. The uneven economic development of nations, including imperial and colonial powers, further intensified economic competition and political conflict.

Lenin was vehement in his opposition to other theorists of imperialism, especially his contemporary Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), one of the most influential voices among German Social Democrats before World War I. Kautsky in “Die Internationalität und der Krieg” (Imperialism and the War, 1914) argued that imperialism was indeed the logical outcome of capitalism, but was beset by its own fatal contradictions. Kautsky predicted that World War II would lead to the demise of imperialism as an international policy along with its global-industrial order, and rather than a worldwide communist revolution, it would create a new and peaceful consortium among advanced nations along with a cosmopolitan global economy free of imperialistic militarism.

This theory—that political, military, and ideological aspects of imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were essentially manifestations of deep-seated economic causes, especially the rise of monopolistic finance capital fueling the drive for overseas colonies and global markets—is often referred to as the “Lenin-Hobson thesis.” Although some of the basic premises of the thesis have been questioned in light of subsequent history—for instance, the relationship between militarism and economic gain and also between colonialism and the expansion of finance capital—aspects of it continue to be influential. Critics of Lenin and Hobson, and of Marxist theories of imperialism in general, question the assertion that wars of colonial expansion or imperial rivalry were fought for solely economic reasons and that capitalism was the primary engine of colonial and imperial expansion. Some have argued that imperialism was an ideology inherently antithetical to the logic of capitalism and market economy, and as such, a relic of the past; others have sought its origins in the rise of mass politics and fascism (Arendt [1951] (1973)).

More recently, historians following Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (1961) have questioned the very premise that the high tide of imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century was a new or unprecedented phenomenon, arguing instead for an extended period of free-trade imperialism bridging the era of mercantilist empires that developed during the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the nineteenth-century wars of imperial annexation. In this intermediate stage, European political and commercial interests were extended through indirect means, without the administrative responsibility of direct colonial rule. Relying largely on the history of the British Empire in Asia and Africa and the expansion of British financial interests in Latin America, such critics view imperialism as a long-unfolding process in which imperial occupation and commercial exploitation are the results of long-term, informal economic relationships between European commercial agents and local regimes, which in themselves were active participants in the process of empire building. Such formulations underscore the role of political regimes that eventually succumbed to European empires, and their subjects who resisted or became unequal partners in colonial economic expansion. They also emphasize the vital role played by newly independent Latin American countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile as substantial markets, and as part of an extended informal empire (Hopkins 1994). These markets were crucial to British industrial production and finance capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more generally to the global economy dominated by the United States and western Europe, without directly being part of the colonial system.

Despite such revisions, critics of imperialism still ascribe it to the direct or indirect manifestation of the march of global capitalism from the nineteenth century to the present. Sociologists such as Immanuel Wallerstein (1979, 1988) and economists such as Andre Gunder Frank (1966, 1967) consider European imperial expansion as part of a much larger history of the expansion of capitalism as a world-system, in which shifting economic cores and peripheries are mutually constituted through abiding asymmetric economic and political relationships. Others emphasize imperialism not so much as an economic but as a cultural and ideological force associated with European hegemony. In this wider and more general sense, imperialism has been related to post-Darwinian biological theories of race, theories of western industrial and technological superiority, militant nationalism, orientalism, and also modern-day environmentalism. Subject to such wide-ranging usage, imperialism is harder to define in the present context as a specific set of ideas. Rather, it is more accurately described as an all-purposive political orientation, no longer focused on the extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their internationally recognized boundaries, but much more on the political condition of a collective present (Hardt and Negri 2000) marked by a post-European global hegemony of displaced and multilocal capitalism.

SEE ALSO Capital; Capitalism; Colonialism; Decolonization; Determinism, Biological; Empire; Frank, Andre Gunder; Hegelians; Hilferding, Rudolf; Jingoism; Lenin, Vladimir Ilitch; Luxemburg, Rosa; Marx, Karl; Nationalism and Nationality; Neocolonialism; Neoimperialism; Racism; Underconsumption; Wallerstein, Immanuel; World-System

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adas, Michael. 1990. Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Arendt, Hannah. [1951] 1973. Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harvest Books.

Bauer, Bruno. 1882. Disraelis Romantischer und Bismarcks Sozialistischer Imperialismus (Disraeli’s Romantic and Bismarck’s Socialist Imperialism). Chemnitz, Germany: E. Schmeitzer.

Bauer, Otto. 1907. Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (The Nationalities Question and the Social Democracy). Vienna: Verlag der Wiener.

Bukharin, Nikolai. [1917] 1972. Imperialism and World Economy. London: Merlin.

Durham, John George Lambton, Earl. 1839. Report on the Affairs of British North America. London: Ridgways.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1966. The Development of Underdevelopment. Boston, MA: New England Free Press.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America; Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Grove, Richard. 1996. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hilferding, Rudolf. [1910] 1981. Finance Capital, ed. and trans. Tom Bottomore. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hobson, John A. 1902. Imperialism: A Study. New York: James Pott.

Hopkins, A. G. 1994. Informal Empire in Argentina: An Alternative View. Journal of Latin American Studies 26: 469–484.

Kautsky, Karl. 1914. Die Internationalität und der Krieg (Imperialism and the War). Trans. William E. Bohn. International Socialist Review (November).

Lenin, Vladimir I. [1917] 1970. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin Selected Works, Vol. 1, 667–766. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1913. Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital ). Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer.

Robinson, Ronald, and John Gallagher. 1961. Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. London: Macmillan.

Shumpeter, Joseph. 1951. Imperialism and Social Classes. Trans. Heinz Norden; ed. and intro., Paul M. Sweezy. New York: Kelley.

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. 1849. View of the Art of Colonization. London: John W. Parker.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. The Modern World System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s. New York: Academic Press.

Weaver, Frederick Stirton. 2000. Latin America in the World Economy: Mercantile Colonialism to Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Sudipta Sen

Expansionism. Expansionism—the desire of nations and empires to annex lands, peoples, or resources belonging to others—is a peculiar characteristic of a world order where boundaries are subject to the ambitions of those with the power and will to challenge them.War, as the instrument of coercion in the transfer of territory, dominated the history of the ancient world as successive conquering armies changed imperial configurations in accordance with their power and political designs. In Europe, the centuries of mass migrations and the slow emergence of the modern state system established myriad political boundaries without satisfying the needs and interests of the peoples affected. Conflicting expansionist interests and the resulting instability in international life were shaped by the interactions of three great historical realities: the economic universe of agriculture and trade, with its focus on rivers, harbors, and waterways; the cultural universe of ethnicity, language, and religion, which seldom conformed to national boundaries; and the political world of nations, more artificial and malleable than the others, with boundaries arising from natural lines of demarcation or war.

America's expansionism in the nineteenth century conformed to the European pattern of territorial change. It focused on bordering regions whose acquisition would enhance the nation's security and add valuable lands, resources, or waterways. Expansionism was usually justified by precepts of Manifest Destiny, and throughout its expansionist career, the U.S. government never faced an invincible coalition committed to maintaining the status quo. Moreover, on every territorial issue the United States possessed the overwhelming strategic advantage. In its conflicts with such dominant European powers as Spain, England, and France, it always benefited from European rivalries and the weakening effects of distance. In conflicts with Indian nations, it benefited from tribal divisions, better armaments, and the sweep of European diseases that had decimated Native peoples over the preceding two centuries. The United States achieved its continental empire in North America through the combination of diplomacy with Europe and wars against Indian nations and Mexico.

Continental Expansion

. After the Revolutionary War, U.S. continental expansion began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which at one stroke and with a cost of $15 million added 828,000 square miles to the national domain, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains.

Thomas Jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana raised the issue of Florida's future. In 1764, Britain, then in possession of all Florida, divided the region at the Apalachicola River east of the Perdido, the historic line between French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. This created East and West Floridas. All Florida reverted to Spain in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Spain resisted U.S. efforts to acquire both Floridas, but in 1810, Spaniards in West Florida revolted against Spanish rule, took possession of Baton Rouge, declared their independence, and requested U.S. recognition. President James Madison denied them recognition as American forces entered West Florida with orders to advance to the Perdido River. With Spanish garrisons defending Mobile and Pensacola, the Americans halted at the Pearl. When Britain protested the American occupation, Congress on 15 January 1811 passed a resolution declaring that the United States could not, “without serious inquietude, see any part of the said territory pass into the hands of a foreign power.” While the United States continued to strengthen its position in West Florida, Congress early in 1812 annexed West Florida west of the Pearl River to Louisiana and added West Florida east of the Pearl to Mississippi Territory.

East Florida's disposition awaited the continuing decline of Spanish power in North America and the shrewd diplomacy of John Quincy Adams. By 1817 Spain was too plagued with political and military disorders to maintain its authority in Florida. President James Monroe in 1818 dispatched General Andrew Jackson to fight against the Florida Indians. When Jackson captured and executed two British agents as well as two Indian chiefs, all members of the cabinet except Secretary of State Adams argued that Jackson had exceeded his instructions and committed an act of war against Spain, which required an official disavowal. Adams retorted that Jackson had discretionary powers to terminate the Indian depredations; to disavow his actions was unthinkable. Adams carried the argument. On 23 July 1818, Adams reminded the Spanish minister, Don Luis de Onís, that Spain had an obligation to maintain order in Florida. Spain, recognizing its weakness, agreed to cede East Florida to the United States if the United States would assume the claims of U.S. citizens against Spain, estimated at five million dollars. Onís then raised the issue of the still‐undefined southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Convinced of his diplomatic advantage, Adams determined to push the boundary as far to the south and west as possible. Finally, on 20 February 1819, Onís capitulated. Spain ceded Florida and accepted a boundary from Louisiana to the Pacific coast highly favorable to the United States. Two days later, the two negotiators signed the Adams‐Onís Treaty.

Meanwhile, the boundary between the United States and Canada remained unsettled. In the Convention of 1818, Adams negotiated a boundary line from the Lake of the Woods westward along the 49th parallel to the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies, British fur trading interests centered largely in the Columbia River valley. Britain, therefore, demanded the Columbia River as the boundary between the mountains and the Pacific. Adams, however, seeking control of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, one of the world's finest internal waterways, demanded the extension of the 49th parallel to the Pacific. When British negotiators proved intractable, Adams accepted a ten‐year joint occupancy of the Oregon country.

Adams had delayed the final Oregon settlement until the United States could gain the diplomatic advantage. That came in the 1840s when American settlers began to occupy Oregon south of the Columbia. By late 1844, London was prepared to settle the Oregon question at the 49th parallel. This provided, in its estimation, an equitable distribution of waterways, with the United States acquiring Puget Sound and the British the magnificent harbor of Vancouver. This concession was a triumph for the congressional moderates, who favored a peaceful settlement at the 49th parallel, in contrast to the Democratic expansionists who demanded a line at 54°40′. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 established the boundary line of the 49th parallel between the Rockies and the continental shore. The line then continued to the Pacific through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Meanwhile, in 1842, the United States and Britain reached a settlement of the disputed Maine boundary. The Alaska Purchase of 1867, encompassing a region no longer desired by Russia, was, like Louisiana, largely a windfall.

Mexico's reluctance to part with its possessions in the American Southwest meant that their acquisition by the United States would require threatened or actual force. The Republic of Texas, having established its independence in 1836 with the aid of American frontiersmen, entered the Union in December 1845, its boundary with an embittered Mexico still undefined. Following Texas's annexation, the James Knox Polk administration pursued Texas's border claims to the Rio Grande. Early in 1846 Polk sent General Zachary Taylor's army into the disputed region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande to underscore those claims. In May, the predictable clash of arms led to the U.S. declaration of war against Mexico. From the outset, Polk and Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft were determined to secure Mexico's California territory as well, from San Francisco and Monterey in the north to the magnificent bay of San Diego in the south.

American victories in Mexico and California during 1847, ending with the occupation of Mexico City in September, provided the U.S. negotiator, Nicholas P. Trist, sufficient leverage to achieve the desired territorial settlement. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the United States acquired a boundary from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific that terminated just south of San Diego Bay. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853, which added a strip of land in Arizona and New Mexico south of the original Gila River boundary, permanently fixed the borders of the United States on the North American continent.

Expansion in the Pacific and Caribbean

. In the late nineteenth century, American expansionist impulses turned to the vast Pacific region, with its seemingly limitless opportunities for profit and adventure. Rendering the Pacific region especially inviting was the presumption that the civilizations of this area could not resist the power, technology, and organizational skills of the West, especially the United States.

America's advance into the Pacific came in incremental stages. Prodded by Anson Burlingame, the first U.S. minister to China (1861–1867), the United States developed a paternalistic attitude toward that amorphous empire, eventually making its defense the keystone of U.S. policy in the Pacific. At the same time, the United States contributed much to Japan's nineteenth‐century modernization and entertained some feelings of paternalism toward that country as well. Meanwhile, in 1867, the United States claimed the Midway Islands in the north‐central Pacific. In subsequent years, Washington demonstrated a growing interest in Hawai'i, Korea, and Samoa, where it faced powerful German and Japanese competition. Despite the potential dangers, two forces accelerated America's Pacific encroachments. One was the missionary zeal to bring Christianity, order, and progress to the world's “backward” regions. To expansionist Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister, Christianity and civil liberty, as keys to western civilization, had contributed most to the elevation of the human race. “The Anglo‐Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas,” Strong wrote in Our Country (1885), “is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother's keeper. Add to this the fact of his rapidly increasing strength in modern times, and we have well nigh a demonstration of his destiny.” The more tangible incentive to American expansion in the Pacific lay in the quest for markets that accompanied the rapid post–Civil War growth of American industrial and agricultural production. Alfred Thayer Mahan's influential book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), advocated the acquisition of island outposts to protect and service the country's shipping.

Except for Midway, the foundations of America's empire in the Pacific were laid during the administration of President Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893). In August 1891, Secretary of State James G. Blaine wrote to Harrison: “There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others Cuba and Porto Rico. Hawaii may come up for decision at any unexpected hour.” In February 1893, the Harrison administration negotiated an annexation treaty with Hawaiian commissioners, only to have the incoming Grover Cleveland administration reject it and condemn the Harrison administration's involvement in a tripartite protectorate over Samoa (1889) as well. Anti‐imperialists warned the nation against assuming commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Colonial acquisitions, declared Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, would be burdens, not assets. The anti‐imperialists demonstrated their strength by defeating a second Hawaiian annexation treaty in 1897.

It required the Spanish‐American War of 1898, the result of journalistic jingoism and Americans’ concern over conditions in Cuba, to stay the power of anti‐imperialism and project the United States onto the world stage. Shortly after the outbreak of war, fought ostensibly to free Cuba from Spanish control, Commodore George Dewey's Pacific Squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. This display of naval power in the Philippines, and the possibilities it opened for empire building, was welcomed by well‐placed expansionists in Washington. In June 1898, against little opposition, Congress annexed Hawai'i by joint resolution. Meanwhile, President William McKinley dispatched an army to occupy Manila, which Spanish officials surrendered to American forces on 13 August 1898. Having liberated the Philippines, the United States had either to restore them to Spain, free them, transfer them to another power, or retain them. As expansionists clamored for their retention, McKinley on 16 September instructed his peace commissioners to demand cession of the Philippines on the grounds that U.S. forces, with no thought of acquisition, had imposed upon the United States unavoidable obligations to the Filipino people. In the peace treaty signed that December in Paris, Spain conveyed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States in exchange for twenty million dollars. Critics warned the administration that it was assuming territorial commitments that the country could not defend. After a long and sometimes prophetic debate, the Senate, in February 1899, approved the treaty by a vote of fifty‐seven to twenty‐seven, one more than the necessary two‐thirds. Philippine annexation triggered a costly war with Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino insurgents for possession of the islands. The U.S. antiguerrilla campaign soon degenerated into a no‐quarter struggle of burned villages, the torture of prisoners, and the deaths of many innocent men, women, and children. A special senate committee in 1902 heard harrowing testimony about this war, which cost the lives of some four thousand Americans and as many as twenty thousand Filipino independence fighters.

In the aftermath of the acquisition of the Philippines, anti‐imperialist opposition grew so strong that the United States embarked on no more territorial acquisition. In 1903 Cuba and Panama became protectorates, and the United States came to exert administrative control over the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Liberia, and Nicaragua during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. But, generally, twentieth‐century American expansion emphasized economic and cultural connections rather than territorial acquisition.

Thus, at the turn of the century, the United States made efforts to prevent China's dismemberment by Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, having Secretary of State John Hay send his Open Door notes of 1899 and 1900. These countries, in principle, accepted China's economic, political, and administrative integrity and agreed to support equal access to China's trade. With U.S. policy objectives, in China and elsewhere, now anchored to the territorial status quo and supporting an “open door” trading system, the United States was prepared to oppose, at least in principle, any territorial expansion based on coercion or any spheres of special interest. In doing so during the 1930s, it confronted new expansionist powers—Japan and Germany—and a future threatened by global war.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Anti‐Imperialist League; Business; Capitalism; Economic Development; Foreign Relations; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars; Industrialization; Insular Cases; Mexican War; Missionary Movement; Multinational Enterprises; “Open Door” Policy; Protectorates and Dependencies; Spanish Settlements in North America; Texas Republic and Annexation.

Bibliography

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Arthur P. Whitaker , The Mississippi Question, 1795–1803, 1934.
Albert K. Weinberg , Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History, 1935.
Ernest R. May , Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power, 1961.
Frederick Merk , Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, 1963.
H. Wayne Morgan , America's Road to Empire: The War with Spain and Overseas Expansion, 1965.
Norman A. Graebner , Manifest Destiny, 1968.
Richard E. Welch , Imperialists and Anti‐Imperialists: The Debate over Expansionism in the 1890s, 1972.
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Norman A. Graebner

imperialism broadly, the extension of rule or influence by one government, nation, or society over another.

Early Empires

Evidence of the existence of empires dates back to the dawn of written history in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, where local rulers extended their realms by conquering other states and holding them, when possible, in a state of subjection or semisubjection. An early, highly organized empire was that of Assyria, which was succeeded by the even more integrated Persian Empire. Ancient imperialism reached its climax under the long-enduring Roman Empire, the eastern part of which lasted until late into the Middle Ages as the Byzantine Empire. In Western Europe no true empire arose to replace Rome; the Holy Roman Empire, despite the aspirations of its rulers, was little more than a confederation of princely states. However, imperialism remained an important historical force elsewhere. In the Middle East and North Africa the Arabs and later the Turks built large empires. Farther east, besides the huge, if unstable, empires of the nomadic Mongols and others arising out of Central Asia, there were long-lasting and complex imperial organizations exemplified by various Chinese dynasties.

Classic Imperialism

Imperialism was reborn in the West with the emergence of the modern nation-state and the age of exploration and discovery. It is to this modern type of empire building that the term imperialism is quite often restricted. Colonies were established not only in more or less sparsely inhabited places where there were few or no highly integrated native states (e.g., North America and Africa) but also in lands where ancient civilizations and states existed (e.g., India, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Inca lands of South America). The emigration of European settlers to people the Western Hemisphere and Africa, known as colonization , was marked by the same attitude of assumed superiority on the part of the newcomers toward the native populations that prevailed where the Europeans merely took over control without large-scale settlements.

From the 15th to the 17th cent. the Portuguese and the Dutch built "trading empires" in Africa and the East for the exploitation of the resources and commerce with lands already developed. The Spanish and Portuguese established important colonies in the New World in the 16th and 17th cents., hoping to exploit the mineral wealth of the lands they conquered. The British and French imperialists became the foremost exemplars of colonial settlement in Africa and the East. Acting on mercantilist principles (see mercantilism ), the European nations in the 18th cent. attempted to regulate the trade of their colonies in the interests of the mother country. Later, the increase of manufactures in the Industrial Revolution introduced a new form of imperialism, as industrial nations scrambled both for markets and for raw materials.

The eastward spread of Russia after the 16th cent. and the westward spread of the United States may also be termed imperialistic, although the United States did not actually acquire colonial possessions until the Spanish-American War. In the late 19th cent. Italy, Germany, and Japan also developed imperial ambitions; these nations, like the older colonial powers, were moved by a variety of aims, including commercial penetration, military glory, and diplomatic advantage.

At its best, European imperialism brought economic expansion and new standards of official administration and public health to subject countries; at its worst, it meant brutal exploitation and dehumanization. In every instance, however, the pressure of an alien culture, with its different values and religious beliefs, and the imposition of new forms of social organization meant the breakdown of traditional forms of life and the disruption of native civilization.

At the end of the 19th cent. there was a strong reaction against the most inhumane forms of imperialist exploitation. Efforts were made to improve the standards of colonial administration; and a new justification of the rule of non-Europeans by the European powers was found in the idea of "the white man's burden," which advanced the notion that the developed nations of Europe had a duty to rule Asians and Africans in order to lead them to a higher level of civilization and culture. Among the leading critics of imperialism at that time were the Marxists, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism and made much of the connection between imperialist rivalries and war.

After World War I, anti-imperialist feeling grew rapidly throughout the world, sparked by the development of movements for national liberation within subject countries. Nevertheless the major colonialist powers, Great Britain, France, and others, held on to their colonies, while Fascist governments in Italy and Germany, as well as militarist opinion in Japan, fostered even more extreme imperialist aims.

In the years since World War II, most of the countries once subject to Western control have achieved independence. Much of the contemporary debate centers on the issue of neo-imperialism. Many of the less developed countries contend that their economic development is largely controlled and seriously retarded by the developed countries, both through unfair trading practices and by a lack of controls over international business corporations.

Bibliography

See R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (1961, repr. 1965); G. Lichtheim, Imperialism (1970); K. E. Boulding and T. Mukerjee, ed., Economic Imperialism (1972); L. S. Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-Imperialistic Mind (1989); J. N. Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation (1989).

IMPERIALISM A term relating to empires and their institutions and trappings. Imperialism and imperialist can be used neutrally, to refer to any empire or imperial institution. In the 19c, they were often used positively, with regard especially to the achievements and interests of the European mercantile empires. Currently, the terms are generally perceived as negative, under the influence primarily of Marxist critics of empire, bourgeoisie, and capitalism, and have been used to refer not only to overt empires such as that of Britain, but also to countries seen as more covertly (but equally nefariously) imperial, such as the US.

Imperial English

The domination and exploitation that are inherent in any empire often come to be associated with the imperial language, as with Latin in the Roman and English in the British Empire. Because of the complex social and emotional relationships within an empire, there is often a love/hate relationship between subject peoples and the élite that rules them and therefore also between those peoples and the language of their servitude. This is especially so where some local people receive preference because of their usefulness and loyalty, are privileged by visits to the ‘mother country’, and provide their children with education in schools whose medium is the imperial language. As a result, even after the immediate pressures of empire have gone, post-colonial societies find that they can live neither with nor without the imperial language.

Post-imperial English

In India, the Philippines, and many other countries, decades after independence English continues to dominate politics, EDUCATION, technology, law, and business, evokes memories of colonialism, and imposes various strains on societies often divided on ethnic grounds as well as between a majority and an élite that has inherited many of the attributes and trappings of the erstwhile imperialists. Some Indians accuse Britain of ensuring that nearly 50 years after independence Indians must use English rather than an indigenous language to talk to other Indians. Philippine historians often accuse turn-of-the-century American military authorities of imposing English in order to keep Filipinos from communicating effectively in their own languages. Resentment against English-speaking political and economic élites easily translates into resentment against the language of post-imperial power. Intellectuals in post-colonial societies often see ex-imperial languages as preventing the intellectualization of VERNACULARS, much as NORMAN FRENCH in England first stunted then altered English. In a replay of the struggle of English to become a language of scholarship in a LATIN-dominated world, national languages such as Malay and Filipino are deliberately being intellectualized by nationalist linguists and writers through expansions in words, styles, and domains (often drawing on the resources of English for this purpose, as English drew on Latin). In this struggle, the major field of combat is the school: for example, in the Philippines, the medium of instruction was predominantly English until 1974, when a Bilingual Education Policy (slightly revised in 1987) mandated the use of Filipino for some subjects, as well as local vernaculars at lower levels. By the late 1980s, leading universities were successfully expanding the number of subjects taught in Filipino.

Competitors with English

In some countries, English offers an escape route from ethnic conflicts: as a ‘neutral’ language in such countries as India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, it is said to be more widely acceptable than local alternatives. Nationalists argue, however, that there are often local languages that unify populations at least as well, and often in less psychologically damaging ways. An example is Filipino (Tagalog), despite resistance from northern Ilocanos and southern Cebuanos; it is now more widely spoken than English, Ilocano, or Cebuano. The success of the national varieties of Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia is also a case in point.

Cultural hegemony

It takes time for patterns of dominance to change, and it is not easy to assess the extent of the intellectual, social, and cultural hegemony exerted by a language like English. Some non-native users of English advocate linguistic détente: watchful collaboration with a language only lately weaned, if weaned at all, from imperialism. They see the benefits of such collaboration in terms of a great good that is emerging from great ill, as English becomes the world's primary language. Other post-colonial observers, however, recall that to sup with the Devil one needs a long spoon. The Kikuyu writer NGUGI WA THIONG'O has described the predicament as follows:
The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people's languages rather than their own (Decolonising the Mind, 1986).

See CELTIC LANGUAGES, CLASSICAL LANGUAGE, COMMONWEALTH, CREOLE, ENGLISH.

imperialism was not used in its modern sense until the later 19th cent. Before then it usually referred to the aggression of Napoleon Bonaparte. That does not mean of course that it cannot be used retrospectively, to describe the origins and growth of the British empire in Stuart and Hanoverian times, for example; but the convention is to call these ‘colonization’, and to restrict the word ‘imperialism’ to the later period. It has also taken on a wider meaning. It usually refers to territorial acquisitions, but can also cover extensions of power or influence which fell short of that. ‘Economic imperialism’, for example, means the process by which an economy extends its financial control over others. missionary endeavours have been labelled ‘cultural imperialism’. Sometimes all these different kinds of British expansion in the world are lumped together as ‘informal imperialism’.

It has been explained in various ways. Missionaries used to attribute Britain's imperial successes to the will of God. ‘Social Darwinists’ thought they proved the British race was ‘fittest’ to survive. An Austrian sociologist called Joseph Schumpeter saw imperialists as a throwback to feudal times. Dr Ronald Hyam argued that the male sex drive had a lot to do with it (Empire and Sexuality, 1991). The favourite theories, however, are economic. At the root of imperialism lay Britain's phenomenal commercial expansion following her industrial revolution. That gave her world-wide material interests, which needed to be secured. Later, according to J. A. Hobson, the Marxists, and some capitalists (like Rhodes), that need grew desperate, as capitalism began ‘over-producing’, and the industrialized countries began competing with each other for outlets. That, however, is controversial.

At its height, around 1900, imperialism also took on a domestic character. Britons forgot the old Napoleonic connotations, and took pride in their imperialism. At its crudest, this pride manifested itself in jingoism; but it also had a more responsible side. All the main political parties—even Labour—sprouted imperialist wings. Keeping up the empire, they insisted, had implications nearer home. It could not be done with a weak, stunted, fickle population, especially in the competitive world of that time. That led some of them to advocate state intervention in order to strengthen people's bodies and loyalties, known as ‘social imperialism’. That had an impact on the Liberal government's reforms of 1906–14. Later it created an unlikely bond between Tory imperialists and more conventional kinds of socialists, which kept free marketism at bay in Britain for many years.

By 1902 it was clear that the empire was stretched about as tight as it could be without bursting, and imperialists turned away from expansion to consolidation. An imperialist became someone who wished to federate the empire: economically (through imperial preference), militarily, and even politically. Many of these imperialists were highly idealistic, and even liberal in their vision of a great multiracial empire, which would bring peace and civilization to the world. Some of them hoped that the post-Second World War Commonwealth might achieve all this, only to be disappointed in the longer run.

decolonization did not bring an end to imperialism, especially in the more ‘informal’ sense of the word. British capitalism still lords it over other economies. Conversely, Britain could be said to be an economic colony of her own creditors. The 1982 Falklands War was widely taken to represent a reversion to an imperialism of a more traditional kind. For many foreigners, especially, it proved that Britain was still infected by the virus. That may have been unfair.

Bernard Porter

imperialism was not used in its modern sense until the later 19th cent. Before then it usually referred to the aggression of Napoleon Bonaparte. That does not mean of course that it cannot be used retrospectively, to describe the origins and growth of the British empire in Stuart and Hanoverian times, for example; but the convention is to call these ‘colonization’. It has also taken on a wider meaning. It usually refers to territorial acquisitions, but can also cover extensions of power or influence which fell short of that. ‘Economic imperialism’, for example, means the process by which an economy extends its financial control over others.

It has been explained in various ways. Missionaries used to attribute Britain's imperial successes to the will of God. ‘Social Darwinists’ thought they proved the British race was ‘fittest’ to survive. The favourite theories, however, are economic. At the root of imperialism lay Britain's phenomenal commercial expansion following her industrial revolution. That gave her world‐wide material interests, which needed to be secured. Later, according to J. A. Hobson, the Marxists, and some capitalists (like Rhodes), that need grew desperate, as capitalism began ‘over‐producing’, and the industrialized countries began competing with each other for outlets. That, however, is controversial.

At its height, around 1900, imperialism also took on a domestic character. Britons forgot the old Napoleonic connotations, and took pride in their imperialism. At its crudest, this pride manifested itself in jingoism; but it also had a more responsible side. All the main political parties—even Labour—sprouted imperialist wings.

By 1902 it was clear that the empire was stretched about as tight as it could be without bursting, and imperialists turned away from expansion to consolidation. An imperialist became someone who wished to federate the empire: economically (through imperial preference), militarily, and even politically. Many of these imperialists were highly idealistic, and even liberal in their vision of a great multiracial empire, which would bring peace and civilization to the world. Some of them hoped that the post‐Second World War Commonwealth might achieve all this, only to be disappointed in the longer run.

imperialism Literally ‘empire-ism’, a term originally used in the 1860s to denote the political and military aspirations of Napoleon III in France, and later applied to Great Power rivalry in general, involving military competition and the acquisition of colonial territories in Africa and Asia. More recently, it has been used increasingly (now almost exclusively) to refer to the domination of colonial by more developed countries, and hence as a synonym for colonialism.

Theories of imperialism seek to provide explanations for the expansion of European control after 1870. They fall into three broad categories. The sociological theory of Joseph Schumpeter, drawing on a tradition of liberal thought, sees imperial policies as unnecessary and counter-productive. It analyses imperialism as a reflection of the existence of a pre-industrial and precapitalist social stratum within the imperial countries, a landed and military aristocracy, whose atavistic ideals and social position impel them towards something that is not in the interests of modern capitalist society. Marxist and more broadly economic theories see imperialism as a necessary product of capitalist industrialization and the limits which this has reached in the more developed countries. Here, imperialism represents either the search for markets, for pre-capitalist societies to subjugate, or for low wages or higher investment returns. For Lenin, imperialism (in the sense of colonialism) was the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism, and its abolition would spell the end of capitalism as a whole. Finally, strategic or political theories of imperialism see the expansion of the 1870s as but one of many such historical phenomena, in which more powerful states, for a variety of reasons (many of them non-economic) and through different mechanisms, seek to subject weaker states to their control; that is, there is nothing specifically economic or capitalist about the phenomenon. In this sense the term would cover such ancient empires as the Persian and Roman, as well as the Soviet bloc up to 1990, and informal empires such as those constituted by the economic influence of the United States in Latin America. See also NEO-COLONIALISM.

imperialism The policy of extending a country's influence over less powerful states. Historically imperialism has existed in all periods: Greece, Rome, Ottoman Turkey, Spain, and Britain have all extended their respective domains by imperial rule. The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION introduced a new form of imperialism as European countries competed throughout the world both for raw materials and for markets. In the late 19th century imperial ambitions were motivated in part by the need for commercial expansion, the desire for military glory, and diplomatic advantage. Imperialism generally assumed a racial, intellectual, and spiritual superiority on the part of the newcomers. The effects of imperialism, while in some measure beneficial to the subjected population, often meant the breakdown of traditional forms of life, the disruption of indigenous civilization, and the imposition of new religious beliefs and social values. The dreams of imperialism faded in the 1920s as anti-imperialist movements developed, and from the 1940s many colonies gained their independence.

imperialism Domination of one people or state by another. Imperialism can be economic, cultural, political or religious. With the age of exploration came the setting up, from the 16th century, of trading empires by major European powers such as the British, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. They penetrated Africa, Asia and North America, their colonies serving as a source of raw materials and providing a market for manufactured goods. With few exceptions, imperialism imposed alien cultures on native societies. In the 20th century, most former colonies gained independence. See also colonialism

im·pe·ri·al·ism / imˈpi(ə)rēəˌlizəm/ • n. a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force: the struggle against imperialism | fig. French ministers protested at U.S. cultural imperialism. ∎ chiefly hist. rule by an emperor. DERIVATIVES: im·pe·ri·al·is·tic / -ˌpi(ə)rēəˈlistik/ adj. im·pe·ri·al·is·ti·cal·ly adv.

imperialism n.a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force: the struggle against Western imperialism.
imperialistic adj. imperialistically adv.

353. Imperialism

1. White Man’s Burden imperialist’s duty to educate the uncivilized. [Br. Hist.: Brewer’s Dictionary, 1152]

Imperialism. See Expansionism.