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In a strict sense, imperialism is the process of creating an empire. An empire is a complex political unit comprising diverse social units, each with distinct cultural identities, hierarchically organized under the domination of one of its parts. An empire is thus distinct from a national state, which is relatively homogeneous in its sociocultural features, and a multinational state based on a free federation of its component parts.

Historically, empires generally developed from the expansion of a relatively compact and homogeneous core state extending the territorial range of its domination. Imperial expansion in its early forms was thus largely geographically contiguous, involving a process of progressive movement outward from an original core territory. Various forms of imperial political administration were established, but all involved a substantial devolution of political authority to local officials or agents, creating a recurring problem of fragmentation as local actors chose to prioritize their own interests over those of the imperial center. This produced a typical cycle of imperial expansion followed by a phase of decay induced by overexpansion and the emergence of dissident forces in the periphery that threatened imperial power.

Nevertheless, imperial development often took place on top of a parallel process of cultural enlargement of the center that contributed to historical nation-building. Thus, the Roman city-state left a legacy that contributed to the formation of the Italian nation long after its imperial dominion had disintegrated, and the Chinese and Russian empires both contributed to the formation of modern national identities and nation-states.

Imperialism And The Modern World

The emergence of economies and societies with a strong commercial orientation coupled with modern technologies of warfare and transport in western Europe led to a new form of imperialism from the sixteenth century onward, as European powers, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese, sought to establish imperial dominion over geographically distant overseas territories. Their motivations were different from those of ancient imperialism in that they were concerned less with the construction of enlarged imperial states than with the strengthening of the political-military apparatus of the core states in the European arena.

A combination of ambitions and tensions in the home states fuelled a subsequent development of settler colonies, and in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European powers developed colonial plantation economies in South America and the Caribbean, worked by slaves imported from Africa, to grow products for the European market.

These processes gave rise to an internationalization of the European economies and contributed significantly to the transformation of European societies into partially or fully capitalist formations, in which commercial interests and social groups predominated. Overseas expansion now became intimately tied up with the desire to secure both overseas markets and sources of raw material for the expanding capitalist industries of Europe, and the central imperial role shifted to the pioneer of capitalist industrialization, Britain.

British imperialism experienced a major political shock in the 1770s with the secession of the United States, an event that was reminiscent of the revolt of the periphery of ancient imperialism. However, the imperial system was preserved through a combination of more sensitive management of relations with colonial peripheral communities (exemplified by the eventual granting of self-government to settlers) and a more intense focus on the extension of imperial interests through trade and economic ties rather than territorial expansion. The latter has been aptly referred to as the “imperialism of free trade.”

Imperialism And Colonial Rule

However, it was never possible to separate economics from politics, as the British experience in India demonstrated. From the seventeenth century onward, the East India Company—an ostensibly commercial structure intended to advance British economic interests while avoiding the responsibilities of formal colonization—was compelled to become more and more involved in the power dynamics of the subcontinent, leading to company rule of the subcontinent. This eventually produced a major reaction by indigenous political forces in 1857, referred to by the British as “the Indian Mutiny” and by Indian historians as “the first war of national liberation.” This forced the British state to take direct responsibility for the administration of India and integrate it into the British empire.

Later in the century a combination of factors—rivalry between European states, competition for access to markets, the pressure of special interest groups, and the desire for symbols of imperial glory—led to an intense wave of colonial acquisitions in Africa and Asia. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the bulk of the African continent had been absorbed into one or another European empire, and over 50 percent of the territory of Asia was under European colonial rule.

The colonial experience was a mixed one for the colonized. The colonialism of weaker powers, such as Belgium and Portugal, tended toward the brutal and rapacious. British colonialism, with its long experience and sophisticated methods of indirect rule through local elites, checked to some degree by democratic public opinion at home, was less harsh and more developmental. Colonialism provided a framework for transfers that could benefit the recipient societies: modern technologies, capital, education, public health, and Western-originated values of nationhood and democracy. But colonial administrations also imposed fiscal burdens on local populations and retarded local economic development when it threatened to conflict with the needs of the metropolis. The balance sheet of colonialism is complex, but at the end of the day it must incorporate the fact that colonial development was undertaken in a way that served the interests of the colonial masters and not local societies. Moreover, the liberal Western cultural values that were transferred with colonization contained within them a powerful critique of the ethos of colonial dependency.

These processes fused with the impact of two global wars, in which colonial resources were mobilized to strengthen the military needs of the European colonial powers. In the aftermath of World War I (1914–1918), indigenous resistance to colonialism began to assume a new form, centered on a nascent anticolonial nationalism. World War II (1939–1945) intensified this process still further, and in its wake modern forms of anticolonial nationalism erupted throughout the colonial world.

This ushered in a long, and often highly conflictual, process of decolonization, especially bitter where nationalist forces had to deal not only with colonial administrations but also with privileged white settler groups, as in Algeria, Kenya, and Rhodesia. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 marked the commencement of this process, which unfolded throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Imperialism And Neocolonialism

The ending of colonialism, however, did not end the dependent condition of many former colonies. The term neocolonialism was coined to characterize the continuing dependence of former colonial societies on Western capitalist states, either their former colonial masters or the new dominant force in the world order, the United States.

Several features of these postcolonial states served to perpetuate their subordinate status within the international system. Their economies continued to rely on foreign investment centered on agricultural monocultures and natural resource extraction; they remained subject to trade regimes and international economic agencies controlled by the developed countries, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; and their states were often weak and deeply penetrated as a result of the dependence of local elites on ties with political, military, and business interests in the developed countries (often the former imperial power). Even those countries that at a later stage emerged as newly industrializing economies often did so on the back of heavy indebtedness to international financial institutions.

Neocolonialism conceived in this way could be extended to include countries that had never been formally colonized, such as the Central and South American states that were highly dependent on the United States, and it seems conceptually logical to extend the term imperialism to include this form of informal domination, whose economic, political, military, and cultural dimensions continue to penetrate many parts of the third world just as deeply as European colonialism did in its era.

The Theory Of Imperialism: Marxism

The contemporary usage of the term imperialism is strongly influenced by the role it assumed in Marxist discourse—both Marxist theory and Marxist polemic in the era of the cold war. Marxism has provided the most developed and influential theorization of the phenomenon of imperialism, although the term assumes a more specific meaning within Marxist discourse.

Marx himself dealt with imperialism in a relatively limited way; however, several elements of his work provided a basis for the later development of the Marxist theory of imperialism: the observation that capitalism developed in close association with the world market, his notion of capitalism as a distinct mode of production, his view that capitalism was a system driven toward continual expansion in its search for profit, his idea that the dynamics of the capitalist system led to the progressive concentration of capital in large enterprises, and his concept of the state as a social instrument that serves the interests of the ruling class.

Subsequent Marxist thinkers—in particular Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, and Vladimir I. Lenin—developed a theory of imperialism that saw capitalism progressively extending the world market and displacing precapitalist forms of production in favor of capitalist ones. The increasing domination of national capitalist economies by large firms intertwined with banks (finance capital), the heightened competition between national capitalist interests, and the influence of capitalist forces over state policy were seen as the root causes of the late-nineteenth-century colonial scramble and the international tensions that culminated in World War I.

Lenin And Finance Capital

The most influential analysis was that developed by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916.This work was not so much a theoretical exposition as a political polemic seeking to characterize World War I as a conflict between rival imperialisms, although it later acquired iconic status as a summary of the Marxist theory of imperialism.

Lenin argued that the dominance of finance capital in the leading capitalist economies resulted in an over accumulation of capital that could not be absorbed in the national economy. Capitalist groups sought to protect their home markets, leading to international economic conflict, but they were also driven to seek new outlets for investment through the export of capital, especially to less-developed regions. However, overseas investments required political security, which could be effectively provided only by extending the territorial authority of the national state through colonial acquisitions.

These interrelated processes constituted a new stage of capitalism in which the export of goods increasingly took second place to the export of capital. It produced intensified competition between national blocs of capital that moved from the economic to the international political plane. One manifestation of this was the scramble for colonial possessions; another—crucial for Lenin’s political argument—was the outbreak of World War I, which he viewed as a conflict driven by rival imperialist ambitions.

Particular elements of Lenin’s analysis have been subject to telling criticism, in particular the implication that nineteenth-century colonial expansion was driven by the export of capital, when in fact more capital flowed into countries not subject to colonial rule (either developed countries or those in Latin America) and finance capital was least developed in the most important colonial power, Britain. However, the general sweep of his argument—the identification of a distinct, highly internationalized phase of capitalism based on the export of capital—appears quite prescient. His unidimensional reduction of international relations to interimperialist competition looks oversimplified, failing to give sufficient weight to an autonomous dynamic of state power seeking, but he appears to be right in calling attention to the importance of economic objectives in foreign policy and to the close connection between state power and control of economic resources.

Later Marxist writers have largely followed Lenin’s model of imperialism and his linkage between economic objectives and interstate conflict. However, with the establishment of new noncapitalist societies, first in the Soviet Union and then in eastern Europe and China, it was argued that interimperialist rivalry was overshadowed by the conflict between the two opposed social systems and that the imperialist countries became united under the leadership of their most powerful member—the United States—in efforts to prevent the socialist model from spreading to other countries. Later Marxist writings therefore shifted their attention to the structure of the postwar international system and to the relationship between the leading capitalist countries and that section of the world that was seen as being subject to the most intense exploitation: the third world.

The Theory Of Imperialism: Hobson And Schumpeter

The influence of non-Marxist interpreters of imperialism has not been as durable but was of considerable significance in their time. The most important was the liberal economist J. A. Hobson, who produced the pioneering work Imperialism: A Study in 1902, used extensively by Lenin. Hobson also located the “tap root” of imperialism in the concentration of capital and an increased volume of capital-demanding outlets for profitable investment, and he saw aggressive international behavior by capitalist states as the political counterpart to this economic drive. He did not assign as great an importance as Lenin to capital exports, seeing the search for foreign export markets as of parallel importance, and did not see imperialism as a distinct structural form of capitalism. For Hobson, imperialism was a particular form of policy, advanced by particular business interest groups. The insufficiency of the home market was a consequence of monopoly regulation of prices and wages, which squeezed consumer incomes; an alternative to imperialism therefore existed in social reform—policies designed to enhance workers’ wages and strengthen domestic demand.

Another non-Marxist approach to imperialism was developed by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In an article published in 1918 (“The Sociology of Imperialism”), Schumpeter argued that imperialism—which he defined rather restrictively as “the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force”—was not a product of capitalist development but of the continued influence of precapitalist aristocratic and military elites in modern societies, due to the tendency of some capitalist groups to forge alliances with such social strata. For Schumpeter, imperialist policies would eventually disappear as capitalism became more firmly established and capitalist classes acquired the self-confidence to abandon such social alliances. In this argument, Schumpeter can be seen as a forerunner of the idea of democratic peace, which has acquired influence in contemporary international relations theory.

Imperialism, Empire, And The Contemporary International System

One important issue for analysts of imperialism in the post– World War II era is the extent to which the term can be applied to the United States, which emerged as the dominant capitalist power economically, militarily, and politically. The United States was never a major colonial power; indeed its self-image is that of an anticolonial force, based on its own history of rebellion against British rule, its espousal of an open-door policy toward China from the late nineteenth century onward, and its support for the independence of colonial states in the postwar period.

However, it can be argued that such policies are the way a late-developing but economically dynamic state in competition with European colonial powers could best facilitate its access to overseas markets. Furthermore, the United States developed a systematic pattern of informal influence in other countries, beginning with its own periphery in Latin America and taking on global dimensions in the postwar world. This led radical critics of American foreign policy during the cold war, such as William Appleman Williams, to talk about an “American empire” in their analysis of postwar American foreign policy.

More recently, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a more far-ranging account has developed that seeks to conceptualize the whole contemporary world order as constructed around an American empire. With the United States’s being the dominant power in a unipolar international system and the later formulation of an aggressive foreign policy under the George W. Bush presidency, this concept found favor among both critics and supporters of U.S. global military action.

A major debate among international relations analysts has ensued as to whether the U.S. position in the post-1989 international system is more accurately captured by the concept of empire or by alternative concepts such as hegemony, which suggest a more distinctive and fluid pattern of relations. The use of empire in this context has a rather metaphorical character and is based less on the structure of the U.S.-dominated international system than on a characterization of one style of U.S. foreign policy as imperial—that is, relying on the unilateral global projection of U.S. power, especially military power.

Parallel to this discussion is a debate as to whether the global role of the United States is subject to the cycle of expansion and collapse typical of historical empires—imperial overstretch. While this is a complex and multidimensional issue, the experience of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan would seem to suggest that U.S. global strategic power is subject to more severe limitations than many policy makers and analysts envisaged.

Contemporary social scientists working within the Marxist tradition draw systematically on the concept of imperialism to analyze the contemporary international system. Several issues concern them with respect to contemporary developments: in particular, the extent to which the widely recognized phenomenon of globalization represents a further phase of capitalism, with different implications from those of the classical Leninist model. Some analysts suggest that capital has become genuinely globalized (i.e., has transcended particular national identities and links to specific national states) and that there is now a major transnational component of the capitalist class that underpins efforts to forge a corresponding transnational state apparatus to manage the international system. Others suggest that capital, regardless of the increased complexity of economic composition, remains wedded to the national state and its relations are inherently conflictual, thus preserving the broad validity of the classical model.

In studying the phenomenon of imperialism, it is important to be clear what the object of analysis is. The term has been used to refer to the structure of the world economy and to the structure of global political and military relations. While these may be interrelated, they may also each be subject to different dynamics and causal processes. It may therefore be fruitful to distinguish the economic and political dimensions of imperialism and to recognize that each has, at least, a partial autonomy from the other. An understanding of the distinctive dynamics of each of these dimensions may be a necessary prerequisite to a full appreciation of the functioning of the system as a whole.

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