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

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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.

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

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

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

Sudipta Sen