New Imperialism

10 Key excerpts on "New Imperialism"

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  eBook - ePub

  Colonialism

  • Norrie Macqueen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  The ‘New Imperialism’: colonialism to the First World War

  WHAT WAS NEW about the ‘New Imperialism’ of the nineteenth century? In many ways, it could be argued, not all that much. Yes, industrialization altered the economic nature of colonialism. It also changed the social setting in which it was pursued. By opening a technological gap between colonizer and colonized, both the processes and the social relations of colonialism had changed. But it is possible to see these as incremental rather than fundamental transformations. Mercantilism, after all, had given way to free-trade imperialism without bringing a basic change in how European power was exercised overseas. Colonial powers had gained and lost dominance over the previous four centuries, and the geographical focus of colonization had changed frequently without altering the general tempo of the enterprise. However, the striking feature of the New Imperialism was the extent and rapidity of change across all aspects of the colonial venture.

  The sheer pace and range of expansion was breathtaking. In the thirty years before the First World War, an average of around 600,000 square kilometres of the global South was colonized annually by the global North. At the end of this period Europe controlled the major part of the earth's surface. Much of this was acquired through the so-called scramble for Africa. This added the huge landmass of the continent below the Sahara to a colonial swag-bag already loaded with the Asian and American possessions taken in earlier centuries. In addition, the New Imperialism saw the geographical reach of the colonizers extend much further than previously into the Asia-Pacific region. By 1900 colonial rule had already been imposed on 90 per cent of Africa, more than half of Asia and almost the totality of the South Pacific. More than a quarter of the Americas remained under colonial rule despite the disintegration of Spanish and Portuguese power there over the previous century.

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  Empire, Colony, Postcolony

  • Robert J. C. Young(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  5 Colonialism and Imperialism

  We have seen that from the earliest days colonies, settlements, or trading posts abroad were established for a number of reasons: freedom of religion, need for land for surplus population, or desire to accumulate wealth through trade or the establishment of plantations. They tended to be created, as a result, on a relatively haphazard, pragmatic basis, driven by the needs of individuals, small groups, or licensed trading companies. Though they became components of particular empires, colonies were not generally planned from the outset as part of an imperial project, and there was often a degree of power struggle between a local desire for autonomy and control by the Crown to which they retained their nominal allegiance, as in the case of Britain’s or Spain’s American colonies.

  Later colonies, especially in the nineteenth century, tended to be established as part of an imperial design. Empire involves universal rule by a sovereign power from the imperial center. Unless the empire is organized through indirect rule as separate fiefdoms, in some degree this requires a bureaucracy of sorts, loyal to the emperor, that will drive its priorities and require its laws to be obeyed throughout the empire. The rationale of empire is regional or global power, internal and external, and, as part of this, the accumulation of wealth. Nineteenth- or twentieth-century European empires did not essentially differ from this model. The word that came to be given to the imperial project as an idea driven from the metropolitan center at the highest level of the state itself was “imperialism.” Imperialism was an overarching concept or ideology that openly advocated and practiced domination over the territories of other peoples of a different race. While colonization was the practice of actual settlement or occupation, the term “colonialism” is used to describe the colonial system that was put into operation in the colony itself, whereby non-Europeans, considered “backward” on racial grounds, were ruled and exploited by European (or Russian or Japanese) rulers or settlers. Colonies were the separate parts of empire, empire was the totality, the complete picture, seen as the product and possession of the imperial state and from its centered perspective. By the late nineteenth century, imperialism also came to be used to describe the development or maintenance of power (“hegemony”) of one country over another through economic, diplomatic, and cultural domination even in the absence of direct colonial occupation.

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  The Origins of Economic Inequality Between Nations

  A Critique of Western Theories on Development and Underdevelopment

  • Carlos Ramirez-Faria(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The anti-imperialist reaction and the Marxist pre-emption of economic-imperialism theory

  Colonialism and social imperialism

  The history of nineteenth-century European economic and military expansion and conquest has an in crescendo quality that is not easy to reconcile with Little-England and other theories about respites in the advance of colonialism. It is this observable fact that makes Lenin's claim concerning Marx's and Engels’ relative ignorance of imperialism seem rather feeble, apart, of course, from the overwhelming textual evidence that, far from not being aware of European expansionism, they used this tendency as a recurrent motif in their writings on politics and on history. It was in fact inescapable even in Marx's cold sober economic analyses, such as those in Capital, a work in which colonial issues from the start of colonialism and onwards come up time and again to illustrate technical arguments.

  It is, however, true that after 1880 there was an indisputable intensification of colonialism coincident with a growth of nationalist tendencies in the major European powers. Ideologically, it is not easy to find a lack of continuity in the history of European nineteenth-century colonialism. For example, the altruistic ‘white man's burden’ motif had never been absent from the literature of colonialism. In one way or another, before and after 1880, the violence of colonialist conquest always submitted to the gloss of world unification or of human progress or of some such fragile idealization. However, the scramble for colonies in the late decades of the nineteenth century had produced incidents and confrontations between powers, and this presaged war, which ill fitted anyone's definition of idealism even if it was itself a social Darwinist paradigm. The idea of the inevitability of international rivalry and struggle led to the doctrine that has been dubbed social imperialism, a phrase first used by the Marxist K. Renner in 1919, although it applies to positions and ideas that were very much in vogue in Western Europe from the 1880s onwards. Social imperialism, which did away with the idealistic and humanitarian jargon of colonialism and colonialist imperialism, had as its manifest immediate objective the harnessing of mass support in the advanced capitalist powers to the cause of colonialist expansion and inter-imperialist contentiousness.

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  Global Political Economy

  A Critique of Contemporary Capitalism

  • V. Upadhyay, Paramjit Singh, V. Upadhyay, Paramjit Singh(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• Even the common thread that they discover is not continuous. It has a break of 3-4 decades in the years immediately after the Second World War.
• Why focus on continuities rooted in the nature of capital? Rather, look at aspects that are beyond the nature of capital, i.e. on gratis. And, here we need to analyse the powerful manifestations, forms or expressions of the phenomenon. And, if forms change, then that change should be analysed. Therefore, we need to redefine ‘imperialism’ for the present context.

Imperialism Today

Imperialism is not dead: It has yet not been dislodged from the position of captain of the earth ship. Although it is true that Western imperialism faces new unprecedented challenges in the form of emerging multipolarity in world affairs, it however still remains a threat to world peace as ever. The fears posed by Western powers are the reason why the vast majority of global population is unable to choose paths of living of their own choice.

A new definition of imperialism is required in today’s context. Most importantly, imperialism needs to be delinked from capitalism. Imperialism today needs to be conceptualised in terms of gratis plus the threats that Western countries pose to the rest of the world or even to the planet itself. The dimensions in which imperialism today manifests itself are: colonial, climate change, dangerous technologies, and economic.

Colonial

After the Second World War, most of the colonies gained independence from direct Western occupation. In South East Asia, colonial occupation, however, continued till the mid-1970s; and in case of Africa, till the mid-1980s. With the dissolution of the Soviet bloc around 1990, the phase of Western hegemony (unipolarity) started with the US becoming the ‘sole’ superpower. During the early phase of unipolarity, the Western imperialist powers (particularly the USA) generally refrained from pursuing colonial conquests in the Third World countries.

At the beginning of the 21st