Old Imperialism

10 Key excerpts on "Old Imperialism"

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  Multinationals on Trial

  Foreign Investment Matters

  • James Petras, Henry Veltmeyer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6. a period of neoliberal globalization and free market ‘reforms’ – and ‘neoimperialism’ (1980−2007).

  The term ‘imperialism’, in this historic context, defines the dynamics of a long-term process of social change and transformation, together with associated class struggles. Imperialism in this historic context has taken diverse forms, old and new. These transformations provide changing contexts for understanding the dynamics of capital accumulation, foreign investment and anti-imperialist movements. It also provides the framework for our analysis of these dynamics.

  Old and New Imperialisms

  The ‘Old Imperialism’ emerged in the late nineteenth century as direct consequence of industrial capitalism and engaged Europe, the US and Japan and in a competitive struggle for markets and territorial control, carving up much of Africa and Asia among them. Imperialism was based on an ‘international division of labour’ in which the imperial states produced and exported manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials, minerals and other industrial inputs or consumer commodities from their colonies or semi-colonies. The imperial system was set up in the nineteenth century but continued well into the twentieth century even in the context of two devastating world wars that brought on a decolonization and national liberation movement. It found support in the ideas advanced by proponents of a neoclassical theory of economic growth – a theory that saw the world market as the fundamental agent of economic growth and the existing international division of u as a system that would provide ‘mutual benefits’ to countries both North and South.

  The actual workings of this system, adumbrated by orthodox economists in terms of the law of comparative advantages, also gave rise to a very different school of thought, one much less sanguine about the anticipated outcomes of this economic system. In fact, most theorists at the time were generally critical, arguing that rather than providing mutual benefits to countries that were well along the path towards development and those seeking to enter this path, the economic structure of the system (world capitalism) did not provide ‘mutual benefits’ but worked to the advantage of the countries at the centre.

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  Managing the Business of Empire

  Essays in Honour of David Fieldhouse

  • Peter Burroughs, A.J. Stockwell(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The First Age of Global Imperialism, c.1760–1830 C.A. BAYLY

  Imperialism can be broadly defined as the complex of intentions and material forces which predispose states to an incursion, or attempted incursions, into the sovereignty of other states.1 General historical works about empires are etiolated and bloodless without the concept of imperialism. They risk becoming little more than a litany of special cases or an elegy of exceptions. Nor does the passive, naturalistic term ‘expansion’ fill the bill; the word gives no hint of the ruthless drive for dominance in the overseas world which periodically seized metropolitan statesmen, missionaries, soldiers, and sailors.

  By that standard, there have been three critical periods of particularly active imperialism in modern European history. One was marked by the Iberian and Dutch conquests in the New World and Asia between 1520 and 1620. These invasions brutally jerked global demography and the international flow of specie in Europe’s favour. The second great imperial epoch occurred between about 1760 and 1830 when European empires first seized substantial territory in south and south-east Asia, raced ahead in north America and Australasia, marked out the near east and southern Africa as spheres of dominance, and brought the Atlantic slave system to its peak. The third period culminated with the Partition of Africa after 1878, the Russian conquest of central Asia and the battle for concessions in China.

  If we consider the percentage of the world’s resources and population seized and redistributed by European powers, the first two imperial epochs were arguably more important, relatively speaking, than the last. The value of the territorial spoils of what is usually considered the age of ‘high imperialism’ in Africa, the Far East, and the Pacific Ocean after 1878 were relatively small compared with those appropriated during the earlier imperial deluges. Yet, paradoxically, the imperialism of the later nineteenth century has absorbed most of the energies of historians and social theorists. This owes more to recent political controversies than to its overwhelming significance. The age of ‘high imperialism’ achieved its elevated profile mainly because of its canonical importance in Marxist analysis and because the word ‘imperialism’ passed into liberal and leftist discourse in British politics. But, as Eric Stokes pointed out in 1969.2 imperialism was a crucial phase for Marxists because of Lenin’s concern with the redistribution of economic resources by capitalist combines within

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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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  Imperialism

  A Study

  • J.A. Hobson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART I THE ECONOMICS OF IMPERIALISM Passage contains an image CHAPTER I THE MEASURE OF IMPERIALISM

  Q UIBBLES about the modern meaning of the term Imperialism are best resolved by reference to concrete facts in the history of the last sixty years. During that period a number of European nations, Great Britain being first and foremost, annexed or otherwise asserted political sway over vast portions of Africa and Asia, and over numerous islands in the Pacific and elsewhere. The extent to which this policy of expansion was carried on, and in particular the enormous size and the peculiar character of the British acquisitions, were not adequately realized even by those who pay some attention to Imperial politics.

  The following lists, giving the area and, where possible, the population of the new acquisitions, are designed to give definiteness to the term Imperialism. Though derived from official sources, they do not, however, profess strict accuracy. The sliding scale of political terminology along which no-man’s land, or hinterland, passes into some kind of definite protectorate is often applied so as to conceal the process; “rectification” of a fluid frontier is continually taking place; paper “partitions” of spheres of influence or protection in Africa and Asia are often obscure, and in some cases the area and the population are highly speculative.

  In a few instances it is possible that portions of territory put down as acquired after 1870 may have been ear-marked by a European Power at some earlier date. But care is taken to include only such territories as have come within this period under the definite political control of the Power to which they are assigned. The figures in the case of Great Britain are so startling as to call for a little further interpretation. I have thought it right to add to the recognized list of colonies and protectorates1

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  Understanding the Victorians

  Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain

  • Susie L. Steinbach(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  All of these new trends came together to create “the new imperial history.” The new imperial history turns away from political, military, and economic history to focus on cultural, social, and intellectual history. It is particularly concerned with race, gender, and sexuality, along with science, technology, consumption, and the environment. It eschews Robinson and Gallagher's top-down approach, preferring a bottom-up perspective. It pays close attention to the creation and exchange of material goods, but also of knowledge and information. The new imperial history emphasizes networks and exchanges, and the fact that influence traveled from colony to metropole as well as vice-versa. It holds that empire constituted not only the identities and cultures of the colonized, but those of the colonizers as well. Furthermore, recent new imperial historical work has emphasized that influence could also travel around the periphery, with colonies influencing one another. Where ‘old’ imperial history might study leading administrators of British India and the policies they implemented, new imperial history might trace the rise of white domesticity in British India, the move from a society in which white men in India routinely had non-marital sexual relationships with Indian women to one in which white men were expected to marry white women and bring them to India (and how that shift was repeated in other imperial sites). Where ‘old’ imperial history would look at the tactics and strategies employed during the Second South African War, new imperial history might concern itself with representations of concentration camps in the international press during the same war.

  The new imperial history has reframed the questions that historians ask. Some practitioners of new imperial history have sought to de-center empire, to see it as a network that had no single center, of geography or of power. Others have engaged in comparative work, comparing pre-colonial to colonial societies, or the British empire to other empires. Such works have created connections between imperial history and world history—as well as disagreements over how central the British empire was to global historical change. In recent years some historians—not all of them aligned with the new imperial history—have nominated other terms or categories that might be more helpful than ‘British empire’, such as the ‘British world’ or ‘British world system’. John Darwin uses ‘empire project’ and ‘unfinished empire’ to stress the fact that empire-building was always in progress and never completed. James Belich argues that migration and settlement were the key forces that transformed the globe and that we should think about an ‘Anglo-World’ that includes the United States. Public intellectual and political conservative Niall Ferguson, author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

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  Colonialism

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

    (Publisher)

  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.

  The other feature of the time was the dramatic growth in the list of would-be colonizers. The narrative from the fifteenth century had been one of relatively few European colonial powers succeeding each other at the top of an imperial hierarchy. Spain and Portugal gave way to the Netherlands, which in turn gave way to Britain, which managed to fight off challenges from France. But by the end of the nineteenth century the stage had become more crowded. Moreover, dangerously, there was no clear hierarchy among the actors. While Britain remained the largest colonial power in terms of the area of its possessions and the size of its imperial population, rivals milled around, challenging both British dominance and each other. The ambitions of the old colonial powers were reinvigorated in the second half of the nineteenth century. To varying degrees France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal all rediscovered their imperial vocations. Portugal in particular inaugurated its Third Empire on the basis of its notionally huge (though barely occupied) African territories. But in addition wholly new players arrived on the scene as well. Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan and the United States all acquired tropical possessions in the years around the turn of the twentieth century.

  Region	Percentage under Colonial Rule
  Africa	90.4
  Asia	56.5
  Pacific	98.9
  Americas	27.2

  The colonial world in 1900

  Source : After Alexander Supan, Die Territoriale Entwicklung der

  Europäischen Kolonien

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  In the Twilight of Revolution

  The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral

  • Jock McCulloch(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 The domination of the economies of the capitalist states by a small number of giant monopolies was the factor which led these countries into imperialist expansion. The need for new markets and raw materials was the principal motive for the articulation of capital on a world scale and the Conference of Berlin of 1885 was convened in order to satisfy the needs of these monopolies. Cabral argues that the Conference also served the purpose of making public the fact that the colonialist countries had now become imperialist. Imperialism is domination by capitalism for the purpose of capital. This is the reality behind the idea of imperialism as a civilising mission which was used to justify the exploitation of the peoples of Asia and Africa in the name of a higher order. Imperialism has various guises, and its appearance can take the forms of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and even semi-colonialism, as was the case in Cuba and in pre-revolutionary China.

  The fact that Portugal was not itself an imperialist state but rather an intermediary in the imperialist exploitation of Africa made Cabral sensitive to the distinction between economic and political power. But Cabral’s major complaint against the Portuguese was that, unlike the other colonial powers, Portugal failed completely to bring about constructive change in its colonies. There were few schools, few roads, and only the most elementary kinds of light industry. In short, Portugal faithfully transposed the condition of backwardness from the metropolitan setting to Black Africa.

  These then are the immediate themes of a theory of imperialism. But, within this set of relationships, Cabral discovers a grander design created by the changing processes of material production and human purpose. In this sense imperialism is an historical necessity. It is a consequence of the impetus given to the ambitious nations by the expansion of their productive forces and by the transformation of the means of production under the sway of capitalism working as a world order. The historical significance or purpose of this expansion is found in the acceleration of the process of development. Imperialism must increase the complexity of the means of production and of man’s mastery over nature. It will inevitably increase the difference between various social strata, thereby creating the conditions for the emergence of a bourgeoisie. In the rich countries imperialist capital has heightened the creative capacity of man through progress in the domains of science and technology. Imperialism should be capable of achieving creative change in the two contexts in which it operates; that is, in the countries of accumulation and in the colonies themselves.

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  Re-Envisioning Global Development

  A Horizontal Perspective

  • Sandra Halperin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Key elements of ‘dependency’, and aspects of societies that are characterized as ‘colonial legacies’, pre-date European influence and colonialism. European imperialism did not create global inequality: the world market into which European countries became integrated, ‘was already characterized by considerable development differentials’ (Senghaas 1985: 9). ‘Political discrimination on matters of race had local origins’ in the societies of Asia, the Caribbean, and southern Africa (Bayly 1989: 149–150). Except in regions of European settlement where whole indigenous populations were incarcerated and all but physically eliminated, colonial rule was embedded as much in pre-colonial structures as in ones imposed by Europeans.

  Capitalist expansion, everywhere, involved the same changes: the breaking down of communal organization; tariff policies that favoured foreign imports and destroyed indigenous handicrafts; immigration policies favouring the export sector; and the promotion of staple-export expansion with a dualistic rather than a wider distribution of benefits. Historically, it has made no difference if these changes were directed by indigenous elites, or by indigenous elites allied with foreigners.

  The historiography of contemporary third-world countries emphasizes the role of imperial trade in sweeping away existing industries (artisanal handicrafts) and preventing modern ones from emerging.21 But as Chapter 3 showed, Europeans were doing the same at home. European governments restricted manufacturing in their imperial holdings; and education, especially secondary and higher education, was undersupported. Chapter 3 also showed that the dualism that is thought to be a legacy of European empire was a core feature of European economies before World War II. Dualism was also a characteristic feature of development in Japan, a country that was never colonized. After the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese elites introduced a ‘particularly rapacious form of capitalism’ that was ‘based on a hierarchical social structure and relations of production directly inherited from feudalism’ (Sachs 1976: 62–63). Japanese elites imported European technology and, in particular, rapidly Europeanized their weapons technology, while simultaneously reinforcing the system of local political and cultural values. Foreign experts were employed to assist, and Japanese students were sent abroad for technical training; but its agriculture was characterized by ‘gross poverty, overcrowding of the land, and debt’ (Hubbard 1935: 164). Economic power was concentrated in the hands of landlords; and Japan’s industrial expansion and, in particular the expansion of its heavy industries, by the 1930s was fuelled by railroad building in Manchuria and the expansion of military production. In 1880, raw silk and tea made up two-thirds of Japanese exports. The collapse of American demand for silk during the Great Depression had a big impact on Japan. Japan’s exports to her most important market, China (Japan supplied roughly 70 per cent of China’s imports of cotton piece-goods; Hubbard 1935: 11), also declined precipitously during the Depression. Japan attempted to turn Taiwan into a source of rice for Japanese domestic consumption. Japan formally took over Korea in 1910 and, as in the earlier case of Taiwan, set about to develop the country as an auxiliary to the Japanese economy. An article written in the 1940s observed that there were ‘two Japans’ living side by side and ‘drifting more and more apart’, and that this ‘dualism’ arose from ‘the co-existence of large-scale modern industry with primitive handicraft and trade conducted along traditional lines’.22

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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