Historian’s Debate on Origins and Aims of Imperialism

British View 1886 “Freedom, fraternity, federation”

German View 1904 “Go follow the Englishman”

Historian’s Debate on Origins and Aims of Imperialism

• Economic versus strategic• Accidental versus planned• Civilising mission versus brutal self-

interest

What is Imperialism?

British imperialism can thus be defined as the exercise of power over the domains Britain controlled, but any definition must take account of the degree of influence it had beyond the imperial borders. The term ‘imperialism’ might describe political domination, economic exploitation and military subjugation. It might also include aggrandisement of a policy through the colonisation of a territory by settlers or invaders. The term can describe the process of how an empire grows; it might also refer to the method by which an empire maintained itself and the influence it exercised.

Johnston British Imperialism Chapter One

POWER, DOMINATION AND CONTROL

How do colonisation and imperialism differ?

“The practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Imperialism can exist without colonisation but colonisation can’t exist without imperialism. Is this correct?

Sir John Seeley: “England’s Historical Tendency” 1883

Imperialism developed in three stages: unification of UK, early colonisation, loss of US and expansion into Africa

• This involved the development of colonies

• Trade led to political control and supported by strategic/military concerns

• Expansion inherent in English due to Christian/superior culture

• Imperialism allowed GB to minimise its inevitable decline in the face of the rise of the US and USSR

Absent minded imperialists“There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind…We constantly betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our colonies as really belonging to us; thus if we are asked what the English population, is, it does not occur to us to reckon-in the population of Canada and Australia. This fixed way of thinking has influenced our historians. It causes them, I think, to miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitations about liberty, in all which matters the eighteenth century of England was but a pale reflexion of the seventeenth. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia.” John Seeley

Kipling, “The White Man's Burden” 1899

Take up the White Man's burden,

The savage wars of peace—Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,Watch sloth and heathen

Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

Rudyard Kipling

Hobson: Imperialism: A Study 1902

“Nationalism, the establishment of a political union on a basis of nationality” means that “colonisation is a natural overflow of nationality.”

“Earth hunger and the scramble for markets” are the driving force of nationalism manifesting as imperialism.

Industrialisation produced an excess of capital that required investment. National finance and industry was not able to accommodate this capital. This created the thirst for new markets and the competition between the industrialised nations, leading to imperialism

Lenin: Imperialism Highest Stage of Capitalism 1916

Centralisation of capital: (the rise of ‘robber barons”) E.g. 1983 50 corporations control global media networks by 2004 there is only 5. 100 years ago this created monopolies that reduced competition within the nation-state meaning corporation/government interests were one and the same. In other words, “state-capitalist trusts.”

Internationalisation of production: competition shifts to the international arena. Unified nation-state oligarchies compete for markets supported by their military: imperialism. The inevitable conclusion is war.

Aims: profit and also “creates the economic opportunity to corrupt the upper strata of the working class”

Robinson and Gallagher, “The Imperialism of Free Trade” 1953

1. “The urge to imperialism in Europe is one factor”

2. Non-European politics and economics play a bigger role

3. “Imperialism did not conform to chronological periods of policy and opinion,” e.g. it was driven by concerns in the periphery and European policy was varied between reaction, pragmatism, protection of trade and strategy.

4. “Trade followed the flag.”

5. Free Trade played an important role in the expansion of GB imperialism

Cain and Hopkins “Gentlemanly Capitalism”

1. The emergence of a “gentlemanly class, ” (see Elite Theory)

2. The influence of the gentlemen in the City (London’s financial centre) on GB foreign policy

3. Critics of Lenin/Marxism and also Robinson and Gallagher: trade was the critical factor not impersonal ‘productive forces’ hell-bent on imperialism

4. The importance of the Egyptian Crisis as the trigger

“It is now evident that there was a vocal and growing lobby of private and official interests pushing an expansionist policy in east Africa from the 1870s onwards…British imperialism, in both formal and informal guises…was the outgrowth of these expansionary impulses.”

Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1987

• development and globalisation of capitalism results in imperialism

• Economic in nature• Development of global economy/globalisation• Search for new markets by major European powers at the same

time• Critical of strategic, psychological, ideological and political

explanations (Cain and Hopkins)

“But the crux of the global economic situation was that a number of developed countries simultaneously felt the same need for new markets.”

“…and even those that appear strategic …must be analysed while bearing the economic dimension in mind.”

Niall Ferguson, Empire 2003

1. Economic in nature

2. Development of global economy/ globalisation

3. Driven by commerce and consumerism

“…the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants to the Caribbean. The demand for spices, tea and textiles drew them to Asia. But this was from the outset globalization with gunboats”

4. Late C19th ‘scramble for Africa’: role of global bond market, mass media and military-industrial complex

“Indeed, it is impossible to understand the Scramble for Africa without seeing that it had its antecedents in the perennial struggle between the great powers to maintain – or overthrow – the balance of power between them in Europe and the Near East.”

5. Cartography, telegraph, steam ship and maxim gun (methods)

Porter, The Absent Minded Imperialists 2004

1. Trade (economic in nature)2. Technology3. Reluctant imperialism“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe was more active than any other part of the world in overseas trade. She also became technologically superior, especially in the Weld of warfare. There may have been social or ideological factors contributing to that (the rise of Protestantism, for example), but none which had anything intrinsically to do with the outside world. This is why Europe colonized other continents, rather than the other way around. The First factor (trade) gave her the incentive, the Second (weapons and ships) the ability. So, four or five European nations started building up empires, roughly—looking at these

Porter (contd)

Two…Towards the end of the eighteenth century what is called the Industrial Revolution really took off, and—for reasons that cannot be gone into here, but which include the capital amassed from her Indian and Atlantic trades—in Britain ahead of the rest of Europe. That boosted the ‘incentive’ part of the equation in her particular case. Modern factory production increased the demand for materials to manufacture things out of (cotton, rubber, vegetable oils . . . ), and the amount of goods the factories then had to sell. Both domestic and foreign factors—limited markets at home, demand abroad—pushed many British manufactures into exports. So Britain became the leading commercial power in the world, by a factor of at least two over France, and many more over her other leading rivals. It was this that accounts for what looks to be the quite amazing expansion of British economic influence in the wider world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”