Imperialism has acquired so many meanings that the word ought to be dropped by social scientists, complained Professor Hancock in 1950. ‘Muddle-headed historians in Great Britain and America use this word with heaven-knows how many shades of meaning, while Soviet writers are using it to summarize a theory and wage a war.’ Alas, these errors continue. Autocratic rule over a diversity of otherwise roughly equal peoples goes back in time at least as far as the Indo-European Empire of Alexander the Great, but nowadays imperialism also means to Marxists the triumph of (mostly western European) monopoly finance capital over a still larger array of non-European peoples at the end of the nineteenth century, a very different kind of empire indeed. For some underdevelopment theorists, the term is simply synonymous with capitalism in general, not just its monopolistic stage. Demythologizing imperialism is therefore a rather slippery task.
Marxist theories of imperialism were first fleshed out during the 1900s and 1910s principally to explain why the expected final collapse of capitalism was taking so long to happen. Later the outbreak of the First World War, and the promptness with which European working peoples attacked one another rather than their bosses, added fresh urgency to thought. Nationalism, in retrospect, seems to have had something to do with this, as well as the autonomy of political choice at the time of outbreak of war from anything approaching economic rationality. But Marxist writers mostly looked elsewhere for explanations and for ammunition with which to pursue more sectarian concerns. Just before the war, Rosa Luxemburg provided in Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (1913) an analysis of imperialism which is still read respectfully today because of its pioneer probing of articulations between expanding capitalism and pre-capitalist social formations outside Europe. But during and after the First World War it was her advocacy of the mass revolutionary strike in order to speed up the final collapse of capitalism, otherwise given a new lease of life by imperialist expansion, that excited more immediate attention.
Marx himself had seen the expansion of capitalism outside its original heartlands as both a less important phenomenon and a more benign one than Luxemburg: it was a marginal matter, in at least two senses. Luxemburg, however, considered that capitalism could survive only if it continually expanded its territory. One problem with this view, as Mommsen (1981) pointed out, is that ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s basic adherence to Marx’s complicated and controversial theory of surplus value, which by definition accrued to capitalism alone, prevented her from considering whether, if the consumer capacity of the masses were increased, internal markets might not afford suitable opportunities for the profitable investment of “unconsumed” i.e. reinvestable, surplus value.’ Another defect was that Luxemburg undoubtedly misunderstood the significance of the enormous rise in overseas investment at the start of the twentieth century. Along with Hobson before and Lenin subsequently, she assumed that it was closely associated with colonial annexations. In fact, as Robinson and Gallagher (1961) pointed out, it diverged widely from it. Hilferding had taken a slightly different view. In Das Finanzkapital (1910), he was more concerned to explain why capitalist crises had become less frequent (there had not been one since 1896), and he argued that free trade had been replaced by finance capital, whose dominance and ability to intervene with state help anywhere in the world had temporarily delayed the final catastrophe. But it was the British journalist and free-trader Hobson, with his wide array of attacks upon overseas investment and colonial annexations in Imperialism (1902), whom Lenin used most extensively in his own famous study of Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). This was written in order not only to explain the First World War but also to attack the reformism of Karl Kautsky, who had suggested that the coming final collapse of capitalism might be still further delayed by the emergence of an ‘ultra-imperialism’ stopping for the time being further intra-imperialist wars. In retrospect, Lenin’s work on imperialism reads more like a tract than a treatise, but its subsequent importance was of course vastly increased by the success of Lenin’s faction in seizing power in Russia in 1917; for many years afterwards it retained unquestionable status as unholy writ.
Shortly after the Russian Revolution, Lenin also latched on to one of the greatest uses of imperialism as political ideology, namely as a weapon against non-communist empires. This tendency was continued by Stalin, who told the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1923: ‘Either we succeed in stirring up, in revolutionizing, the remote rear of imperialism—the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the East—and thereby hasten the fall of imperialism; or we fail to do so and thereby strengthen imperialism and weaken the force of our movement.’ Such statements reversed Marx’s original view that imperialism was good for capitalism but only of marginal importance in its development, and substituted a new conventional wisdom that, first, imperialism was bad news for all backward areas of the world, and, second, imperialism was of utterly central importance to the development of capitalism itself.
The first view was then widely popularized by the underdevelopment school associated with André Gundar Frank, and attacked later from both right and left. The second view led to an oddly focused debate among historians over the colonial partition of Africa at the close of the nineteenth century, the ‘theory of economic imperialism’ being something of a straw man in this debate, as imperialism (on most Marxist views) did not arise until after the Scramble for Africa had taken place; even after this date Lenin was clearly wrong about the direction of most overseas investment, let alone its political significance. Only in the case of South Africa (and possibly Cuba) is there even a plausible case for economic imperialism being identical with colonial annexation: the South African War indeed was popularly called ‘les Boers contre la Bourse’ in continental Europe at the time.
Other difficulties with Marxist views of imperialism derive from Lenin’s use of Hobson’s Imperialism (1902). Hobson was a very bitter critic of British overseas investment, but for very un-Marxist reasons. He was a free-trade liberal who saw colonial annexations and wars as a hugely expensive way of propping up the power and profits of a very small class of rentier capitalists, who pursued profit abroad to the detriment of investment at home. Only by manipulating the masses by appealing to their patriotism did this small class of capitalists get away with this (in his view) huge confidence trick and, ideally, social reform should increase the purchasing powers of the masses and thereby render imperialism powerless. Lenin ignored Hobson’s theories and simply used his facts. In retrospect, the facts about the coincidence of overseas investment with colonial annexation appear very wrong-headed, his theories much less so. Hobson’s views on under-consumption were later taken up and given some seminal twists by John Maynard Keynes, while his intuitions about connections between overseas annexations and metropolitan social structures were later taken up by Joseph Schumpeter and Hannah Arendt (for her analysis of the origins of Fascism).
Schumpeter wrote his essay Zur Soziologie der Imperialismen (1919) as an explicit attack upon Marxist theories of imperialism. Capitalism itself he considered to be essentially anti-imperialist in nature, and such monopolistic and expansionist tendencies characterizing pre-1914 capitalism he put down to the malevolent influence of an anachronistic militarism surviving from the European feudal past. Schumpeter defined imperialism as ‘the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion’ (Schumpeter 1951 [1919]). The basic trouble with this particular formulation is that while the European colonial annexations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were certainly sometimes this, they were not always so. Similarly, while much European overseas investment in the late nineteenth century did not go to areas of European colonial annexation, sometimes it did. Furthermore, while the theory of economic imperialism may well be a straw man as far as the debate about the causes of the Scramble for Africa is concerned, it would be absurd to suggest that the partitioners did not believe that there was something economically useful about Black Africa. Imperialism needs to be demythologized, not simply wished away.
Probably imperialism is best defined in some median manner. As the etymology of the word itself denotes, imperialism is closely concerned with empires and colonialism, but this is not necessarily always the case. In the Americas the Monroe Doctrine (1823) vetoed new formal empires by European countries—but not subsequent ‘dollar diplomacy’ by the USA, sometimes supported by the overt use of force, sometimes with mere threats and unequal financial practices. Capitalism, too, is not necessarily linked with territorial imperialism, but sometimes has been, especially in the many African and Asian colonial dependencies established during the second half of the nineteenth century. In these circumstances, imperialism is probably best separated analytically from both capitalism and colonialism and treated principally as the pursuit of intrusive and unequal economic policy in other countries supported by significant degrees of coercion.
Thus defined, imperialism as formal empire (or ‘colonialism’) may well be largely a thing of the past, except for strategic colonies (colonies de position). But imperialism as informal empire (or ‘neo-colonialism’, to employ Nkrumah’s terminology) probably has an assured future ahead of it—in what remains of both the non-communist and the communist-dominated worlds in the post-Cold War era.
Michael Twaddle
University of London
References
Hancock, W.K. (1950) Wealth of Colonies, Cambridge, UK.
Mommsen, W.J. (1981) Theories of Imperialism, New York.
Porter, A. (1994) European Imperalism: 1860–1914, Basingstoke.
Robinson, R. and Gallagher, J. (1961) Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, London.
Schumpeter, J.A. (1951 [1919]) Imperialism and Social Classes, Oxford. (Includes translation of Zur Soziologie der Imperialismen)
