This is sample from the essay ‘Imperialism and American Empire in Global Perspective, Part 1’
by Dr Ian Christopher Fletcher and Dr Yaël Simpson Fletcher
Empire Online. © Adam Matthew Digital Ltd. 2008
‘Imperialism and American Empire in Global Perspective’
Ian Christopher Fletcher and Yaël Simpson Fletcher
It is not uncommon today for scholars, journalists, and even some policy advisors to describe the United States as an empire. For many, “empire” is interchangeable with “superpower,” the term favored during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and still in circulation with the qualifier “sole.” There is a difference, however. Empire means an uncontested sovereignty over people and territory, of the sort that was unimaginable when there was another superpower prepared to launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads against the U.S. and its allies. It was only in the 1990s, after almost fifty years of the Cold War, that it became possible once again to think of unchallenged American power and to dream of projecting this freedom of action for decades into the future.
There are limits to this candor, however. Only avowed critics of American policy, and not even all of them, would characterize the U.S. as imperialist. For a century or so, “imperialism,” “imperialist,” and even “imperial” have carried negative connotations of military intervention, political domination, and economic exploitation that no contemporary promoters of empire would willingly attach to their projects. Peace, stability, and development are the announced goals, even of the Special Forces. There is a long history to this rhetorical ambiguity, even when “imperialism” itself was not yet a bad word. During the “new imperialism” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work of empire was often described in terms of evangelizing the heathen, emancipating the slave, civilizing the savage, uplifting the native, and saving his downtrodden sister. The disintegration of colonized peoples or “primitive” cultures was sometimes lamented, but the direct and indirect forms of violence that accompanied this process usually went unremarked. In the American case, the military has accumulated enormous destructive power since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. While this capability has certainly received attention, such as the celebrated “smart” munitions of the 1991 and 2003 air wars against Iraq, its purposes and effects are disavowed in the rhetoric of “national security.” Moreover, the disaggregation of politics and economics into supposedly separate domains means that the indirect or structural violence of “opening” countries and integrating their markets into the world economy, chiefly the work of transnational corporations and specialized intergovernmental agencies (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization), goes largely unseen and unreported.
Nevertheless, it is possible and useful to discuss imperialism in theoretical terms and to analyze American empire as an historical formation. Our essay is divided into two parts. Part One provides a modest survey of the theory of imperialism. Rather than trying to construct an ironclad definition, we consider instead three moments in the development of the critique of imperialism. Part Two furnishes a brief narrative of American empire and examination of current controversies surrounding it. Once again, rather than attempting to arrive at a definitive assessment, we offer some ways of thinking about the historical continuities and discontinuities that have shaped U.S. imperialism now. We make no great claims to originality or comprehensiveness. Over the course of the essay, we highlight some of the relevant primary sources in the Empire Online database as well as suggest some of the key analytic and scholarly contributions to the burgeoning literature about imperialism and American empire. Thus we hope that our essay succeeds in opening up perspectives for readers, who will undoubtedly generate their own insights into empire and imperialism while examining the database sources.
PART ONE: IMPERIALISM IN THEORY AND CRITIQUE
Although we speak of ancient and modern imperialism, ranging from China and Rome in antiquity to the African, Andean, European, and Islamic empires of early modern times to the new imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, empires do not constitute a natural, perennial, or inevitable phenomenon. Certainly the recurrence of the phrase “new imperialism,” which has been transposed from the scramble for colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania more than a century ago to the recent American-led interventions in the Balkans, the Middle East, and elsewhere, should give us pause.
We can get a sense of the complexity of imperialism by considering the many forms of empire identified by scholars. Some empires expand into nearby hinterlands and borderlands, while others expand overseas to far-flung continents and islands. Territorial or colonial empires are often contrasted with trading or commercial empires. There are formal empires, characterized by extensive territory, and informal empires, facilitated by a variety of commercial, financial, and diplomatic levers of influence over ostensibly sovereign states. Needless to say, we can find many of these forms combined in “actually existing” empires. Underlining the point that no single form of imperialism is essential, scholars have written of the “imperialism of free trade” in the mid-nineteenth century and the “imperialism of decolonization” in the mid-twentieth century.[1] Likewise, critics of the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization speak of the “imperialism of neoliberal globalization.” Imperialism may be carried forward by a variety of actors, from mariners, explorers, and soldiers to merchants and missionaries, and it may meet with resistance or collaboration from those on the other side of the encounter. While military and naval forms of imperialism involve conquest and coercion, a phenomenon like missionary imperialism may unfold with little or no direct connection to an imperial or colonial state. Social imperialism – the use of overseas colonial ventures for domestic purposes, especially to mobilize popular patriotism and defuse class tensions – is often debated by scholars. Cultural imperialism – often linked to the development of communication technologies, the ideological power of film, television, advertising, and other forms of mass information and entertainment, and the culture and media industries of powerful states and regions of the world – is a hard case. It is sometimes very difficult to discern whether a cultural commodity or style is imposed or appropriated at the moment of cross-cultural consumption, particularly in these “postcolonial” times.
Colonialism, of course, is closely associated with imperialism. A colony may refer to a territory populated by significant numbers of settlers (colonists) from the metropolitan center of an imperial state, or simply to a territory largely inhabited by indigenous populations but under the more or less direct military and administrative control of an imperial state. In either case, the colonial situation is usually characterized by an exclusive social hierarchy and political regime that racially or culturally privileges the settlers and the rulers. Apart from colonies, there are various semicolonial situations: capitulations and concessions that grant privileged or even extraterritorial status to individuals or groups associated with an empire; protectorates; and the more amorphous “spheres of influence.” Colonialism is not necessarily a phenomenon “out there,” beyond the metropole. It can be “in here,” within the metropole. Internal colonialism may be the situation of an indigenous population overtaken and dispossessed by the dominant population of an expanding empire or of a subordinated minority population which originates in one colonial or semicolonial area and has been brought to either another colonial area or even the metropole itself. While some people from indigenous or diasporic populations are privileged, those who have been relocated by means of the slave trade or another form of labor trade often find themselves living and working as subjects rather than citizens.
As this perusal of the terminology suggests, imperialism can manifest many dimensions and variations. It bears repeating that imperialism is complex, uneven, historically specific and contingent. “Rise and fall” is not just a cliché of narrative history. If the most elementary or fundamental meaning of empire is uncontested sovereignty, then we should take note of the fact that empires at their centers can be autocracies (if not literally the rule of an emperor, then of aristocratic or bureaucratic elites) but they can also be democracies (at least of the sort that enfranchises metropolitan citizens and disfranchises all or most colonial subjects). Empire can be decentralized by a partnership between the metropolitan center and self-governing colonies (the dominions of the British empire and commonwealth) and extended beyond its territorial borders through blocs of allied and client states. Conversely, an empire can be constrained by changes in the “balance of power” with other states, and it can come apart just as it can come together. Here we can safely advance one provisional thesis about imperialism and empire. Whether one emphasizes the political, economic, or cultural aspects of imperialism – who rules, who prospers, who belongs – it is about power. We hasten to add, however, that imperial power is relational. In other words, power is not a capacity or instrument over which the agents of empire enjoy a monopoly. Subaltern “others” as well as “foreign” adversaries have power, too, and the ensuing internal and external interactions constitute the shifting power relations of empire.
The history of imperialism as a topic of modern political and economic discourse is largely the history of the critique of imperialism. With its suggestion of a systemic coherence underlying the historical experience of specific empires, imperialism is a conception of political, economic, and cultural dominance that does not accord with the rationales of empire, namely with notions of order, civilization, and progress. While problems of diplomacy and statecraft, military and naval affairs, colonial administration, and economic development have received an enormous amount of commentary and discussion, much of it based on assumptions about civilizational and racial difference, few advocates or governors of empire have been prepared to disclose and justify the sorts of violence on which empires depend or the low estimates of the human value of the others over whom empire rules. This reticence is shared widely among empire builders and rulers, past and present. Even among critics of empire from the eighteenth century onwards, the tendency to lament only the corrupting or destructive effects of empire on one’s own society or to imagine that the "good emperor" may yet repair the damage done by the local representatives of the imperial state has limited the global analysis necessary to take the real measure of imperialism.
We have identified three more or less successive moments of theoretical development and innovation in the critique of imperialism. The new imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prompted not just controversies over policy and diplomacy, but also theoretical treatments of the relationship between imperialism and capitalism. We characterize these critiques, which stemmed largely from classical Marxism, as anti-capitalist. For colonized and subaltern peoples, however, something more than, or other than, the class struggle was at stake. Thus the new imperialism engendered not only anti-colonialist and nationalist movements but also sophisticated analyses of the impact of colonialism and the dynamics of resistance in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. We call these critiques, which drew on both “Western” and “non-Western” ideas, anti-colonialist. In the second half of the twentieth century, the decolonization of the British, French, Portuguese, and other colonial empires fulfilled the immediate demand for national self-determination and political independence. The postcolonial situation turned out to be much more complicated, however, for the close of colonial rule did not mean the end of imperialism. New thinkers and movements have arisen to challenge neocolonialism, neoliberalism, the dominance of the global North, and the dangers of American hegemony. We have named these critiques anti-hegemonist.
While we treat these anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-hegemonist critiques separately for analytic purposes, it is important to recognize that these moments overlapped each other and that, generally speaking, each new moment built on and borrowed from rather than cancelled or invalidated the critique of its preceding moment.
The Anti-capitalist Critique
The theoretical challenge of conceptualizing and analyzing imperialism as a system was first addressed by Marxists around the turn of the twentieth century, as the ongoing scramble for empire in Africa, Asia, and Oceania threatened to boomerang back to the European metropole in the form of war between the great powers. We can characterize this early moment of critique as anti-capitalist, even if one of its first and still best-known prophets was a good British liberal. The political economist J.A. Hobson (1858-1940) became a leading opponent of the South African War of 1899-1902, a conflict between the British empire and the two Afrikaner republics in southern Africa. Hobson criticized not only the British Conservative government but also the vested commercial and financial interests that supported imperial expansion and Joseph Chamberlain’s subsequent Tariff Reform Campaign. Hobson’s Imperialism approached its topic on both the economic and the political plane. The “taproot” of imperialism was maldistribution of income among social classes and underconsumption in the national economy, leading to the export of capital and entanglements in colonies (Imperialism: Part 1, Chapter 6). In the antagonistic field of politics, the reactionary forces of imperialism constituted one pole and the progressive forces of political and social democracy the other pole (Imperialism: Part 2, Chapter 1). Hobson was extremely skeptical of the humanitarian claims of imperialists, but he did accept widely shared notions about “lower races” and was prepared to entertain ideas of international (and even “inter-imperial”) cooperation for the purpose of promoting peace and developing backward peoples and lands (Imperialism: Part 2, Chapter 4 and Imperialism: Part 2, Chapter 6, p351). He was much kinder in his estimate of Eastern civilization and, again like many of his contemporaries, recognized the historic and future significance of China (Imperialism: Part 2, Chapter 5). While Hobson believed that imperialism and protectionism could be replaced by freer international trade and increased home investment, he identified structural features of monopolistic or organized corporate capitalism also highlighted by Marxists.
As the colonial scrambles led to growing tensions among the European great powers, two major, explicitly anti-capitalist contributions came from Central European socialists. In 1910, the Austrian social democrat Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) published Finance Capital. His study emphasized the growing influence of the stock market, banking, and financial services over the capitalist economy. The financial sector, of course, was driven by the imperative of making money with money. Its focus on investment, credit, loans, and interest represented a rather different set of concerns than those of the manufacturing sector, in which industrial enterprises sought the profitable production of capital and consumer goods for the market, or even the old commercial sector, in which trading companies pursued the lucrative exchange of exported and imported commodities, from foodstuffs and raw materials to manufactured goods. The creation of cartels and monopolies, coordinated and facilitated by banks and shielded by protectionism, reduced domestic competition and thus encouraged overseas imperialism as an outlet for profit-seeking. Finance capital, not only the “latest” but also the “highest” stage of capitalism in Hilferding’s eyes, represented the concentration of bourgeois political as well as economic power and signaled the coming confrontation of capitalists and workers that would bring about socialism.[2] In 1913, the Polish and German socialist Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) published The Accumulation of Capital, which combined theoretical and historical analysis to explain the way in which capital expanded.[3] Recalling the origins of modern capitalism in the feudal surroundings of medieval Europe, she argued that the key to continued capitalist accumulation was the ongoing and deepening penetration of the non-capitalist world. This world offered fresh inputs of raw material and labor power, widening consumer demand for the goods of capitalist production, and potentially better returns on investments, but only if the “natural economy” of precapitalist and precolonial societies, such as India and Algeria before British and French rule, and later the “peasant economy” of transitional formations, such as homesteaders in the American West, could be integrated into and eventually transformed by the world capitalist economy. Drawing on the examples of Egypt and the Ottoman empire, Luxemburg showed furthermore how international loans were used to create demand and open markets in colonies and dependent countries. These destructive relationships reinforced the division between the capitalist and non-capitalist worlds to the extent that the former enjoyed wealth and power while the latter became vulnerable to increasing poverty and turbulence. But even the supposedly peaceful and stable capitalist world was the scene of proletarian misery induced by protectionist tariffs, consumption taxes, and the diversion of resources to the military. It was no accident, one might say, that Luxemburg’s book appeared on the eve of the First World War.
The outbreak of the war in 1914 drew the great European powers and their colonial empires into more than a military contest. The conflict required extensive and intensive mobilization of people and resources and put at risk the political and social stability of the warring states. The war also split the workers’ movement in Europe, with the majorities of many labor and socialist parties supporting the war effort of their own countries. Nevertheless, after being swamped by a wave of popular patriotism among working people as well as socialist parliamentarians, antiwar socialists re-appeared and re-organized. The war was the backdrop of two important Marxist texts – one almost forgotten, one very famous – which remain contentious to this day. In the first weeks of the war, the German socialist Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) published an essay, “Imperialism,” which had been drafted before the war and was amended slightly to take into account the new situation (Karl Kautsky, “Ultra-imperialism,” New Left Review I 59 (1970): 41-46). It traced the historical replacement of free trade by imperialism and went on to query whether another policy might follow in turn. Long interested in the relationship between capitalism and agrarian society, Kautsky defined imperialism as the effort of industrial states to dominate agrarian zones as colonies or spheres of influence, with a view to using them as a source of agricultural goods and as a destination for industrial goods and capital investments. Moreover, imperialism was a means to prevent agrarian states from industrializing and thus becoming competitors. Turning to the prospects of imperialism, he suggested that it faced two challenges. First, “the awakening of Eastern Asia and India as well as the Pan-Islamic movement in the Near East and North Africa” foretold the revival of the peoples of the agrarian zones (Karl Kautsky, “Ultra-imperialism,” New Left Review I 59 (1970): 45). Second, the military and naval arms races and the outbreak of a general European war promised fiscal ruin if the conflict persists or rivalries continue after the war. Kautsky imagined that some or all of the great powers might adopt a new policy of “ultra-imperialism” to reduce international conflict and insure European global domination. The subsequent creation of the League of Nations after the First World War makes his speculations about the metamorphoses of imperialism all the more intriguing.
One of Kautsky’s greatest critics was the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin (1870-1924). His 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, not only anticipates the end of imperialism and capitalism but also represents the culmination of the early anti-capitalist critique of imperialism. Lenin synthesized the criticisms of Hobson and Hilferding on the development of monopoly capitalism and the colonial division of the world, but gave an immediate and stark political significance to the whole phenomenon of imperialism. He applied their findings to the causes of the war and the failure of international socialism to prevent it. Famously, he accounted for the existence of pro-war socialists by arguing that the better-off strata of the working people of the imperial metropole had benefited from the profits of empire and that a corresponding portion of the labor and socialist movement had become complicit with the political machinery of the imperial states and seduced by the ideological appeal of patriotism and great-power chauvinism. “Imperialist ideology also penetrates the working class. No Chinese Wall separates it from the other classes.”[4] Thus he had no time for Kautsky’s suggestion that imperialism and “ultra-imperialism” were policies or that the capitalist system could correct its excesses and change course before confronting the wrath of the world proletariat and the oppressed peoples of the colonies and semicolonies. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong in his own assessments, Lenin remains an especially fascinating figure in the elaboration of critiques of imperialism because he brought a perspective from Russia that overlapped the imperial and the colonial. While Britain and Germany possessed overseas colonies, and Austria was confined to the European subcontinent, Russia straddled Eurasia and its heterogeneous population included Muslims in Central Asia and native peoples in Siberia. Lenin understood that imperialism was a matter not only of class inequality and struggle in the industrial world but also of national oppression and liberation across the colonial world. While European socialists could appreciate if not fully accommodate the problem of nationalities within their Marxism, socialists in the Russian empire were perhaps much more aware of the colonialist and Orientalist nature of the new imperialism.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------END OF SAMPLE----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Ian and Dr Yaël Fletcher’s essay can be read in full by all registered users of Empire Online. For further information on free, four-week trials or purchases of this resource, please contact us at info@amdigital.co.uk
Endnotes:
1. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, 1 (1953): 1-15; William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,”Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, 3 (1994): 462-511.
2. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, ed. Tom Bottomore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 [1910]), p. 370.
3. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003 [1913]), esp. chs. 27-32.
4. V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975 [1916]), 1: 716.