Imperialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, and its name traces back to a single Latin word, imperium, meaning to command, to be sovereign, or to rule. The word was coined in the 19th century to describe Napoleon III's attempts to gain political support by invasion. By the 1880s it had picked up a positive connotation in the West, before turning into one of the heaviest insults in modern political language. The political theorist Kenneth Waltz put the matter bluntly. Empires, he said, are built by those who have organized themselves and exploited their resources most effectively. Weakness invites control. Strength tempts one to exercise it, even if only for the good of other people. How did a word for a French emperor's ambitions come to cover Roman provinces, rubber plantations in the Congo, soap operas beamed across the Cold War, and Vladimir Putin comparing himself to Peter the Great? Who decided that empires were a stage of capitalism rather than a stage of history? And why did the people who drew the maps and wrote the textbooks insist all along that they were doing the conquered a favor?

• 2. Defining The Word

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  Hannah Arendt and Joseph Schumpeter defined imperialism as expansion for the sake of expansion, a definition that strips away every excuse and leaves only the appetite. The meaning never stayed still. The term was first applied to the British Empire during the 1870s, and by the end of the 19th century writers were using it to describe the behavior of empires at all times and places.

  Hobson, and in 1917 Lenin, tried to redefine imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, the moment when firms exported capital to dominate economically rather than territorially. In 1965 Nkrumah pushed it further, calling neocolonialism the last stage of imperialism and linking it to trade, bases, cultural dominance, and the IMF. Two years later Frank argued that unequal exchange, pricing controlled by the empire, itself reproduced empire.

  Edward Said gave the word its modern cultural edge in 1978, describing domination and subordination that reflected an imperial core and a periphery. Said wrote that imperialism also names the cultural attitudes accompanying the project, often the idea of exerting a civilizing or improving influence on peoples in the periphery. Marshall stretched the term even into space development, a sign that the concept had grown elastic enough to follow power wherever it went next.

• 3. Empire Versus Colony

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  Edward Said insisted on a distinction that scholars still argue over. Imperialism, he wrote, involved the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory, while colonialism referred to settlements on a distant territory. The line is geographic. A colony sits far from the imperial power.

  Young sharpened it from another angle, writing that imperialism implements state policy while colonialism may reflect commercial intentions, though still supported by force. Painter and Jeffrey offered yet another reading, where colonialism means one country in de facto control of another land, many of which had no history as a recognized nation, while imperialism came to mean less explicit dominance.

  Contiguous land empires such as the Russian, Chinese, and Ottoman have traditionally been called imperialist, even though they too sent populations into their remote territories. Colonialism, the scholars note, tries to develop resources for extraction by the colonizer, though not always successfully, as in Santo Domingo after 1520. Colonized peoples often adopt aspects of their colonizers' cultures, a quiet form of conquest that outlasts the soldiers.

• 4. The Age Of Imperialism

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  The phrase Age of Imperialism points to the period that pre-dates World War I, though historians cannot agree on when it began, placing the start anywhere between 1760 and 1870. The end is easier. It is commonly dated to 1914. Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé note that calling this stretch the Age of Empire reflects a Eurocentric bias, since imperialism had been prominent since the beginning of history, with its most intensive phase in the Axial Age.

  Industrialization gave European nations the tools to intensify colonizing, influencing, and annexing other parts of the world, and in the late 19th century the United States and Japan joined them. This was the era of the Scramble for Africa and the Great Game.

  In the 1970s the British historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson upended the standard picture. European leaders, they argued, rejected the idea that imperialism required formal legal control. Informal control of independent areas mattered far more. As Wm. Roger Louis put it, historians had been mesmerized by maps of the world with regions colored red, while the bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal empire. Their motto captured it: empire informally if possible, and formally if necessary.

• 5. Did Empire Pay

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  Between 1875 and 1914 the main empires showed a mixed record on profit, and the early dream of colonies as captive markets for manufactured goods proved mostly false outside the Indian subcontinent. By the 1890s imperialists had switched their hopes to cheap raw materials for the factories back home. Great Britain extracted profits from India, especially Mughal Bengal, but little from the rest of its empire. The Indian economist Utsa Patnaik estimated the wealth transfer out of India between 1765 and 1938 at 45 trillion dollars.

  The Belgian Congo was notoriously profitable as a rubber plantation owned and run by King Leopold II as a private enterprise, until scandal after scandal over atrocities in the Congo Free State forced the Belgian government to take it over in 1908, after which it became much less profitable. Germany and Italy got little from their empires. The Philippines cost the United States more than expected because of military action against rebels.

  D. K. Fieldhouse warned against reading empires as machines built for profit. Modern empires, he wrote, were not artificially constructed economic machines, and collectively no empire had any definable function. Steam railroads, telegraphs, and steam-driven ocean shipping moved goods and orders fast and cheap. By the 1880s the machine gun had become a reliable battlefield weapon, giving European armies an edge over opponents still fighting with arrows, swords, and leather shields, as the Zulus did during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The Ethiopian armies at the Battle of Adwa were a rare exception, though even they leaned on weapons imported from Europe.

• 6. Theories Of Capital

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  Benjamin Disraeli's opponents introduced the word imperialism into English in its modern sense in the late 1870s, attacking his allegedly aggressive and ostentatious imperial policies, before supporters like Joseph Chamberlain seized the concept for themselves. For some it meant idealism and philanthropy. For a growing number it meant capitalist greed.

  John A. Hobson built the most influential version of that argument in Imperialism: A Study, published in 1902. He claimed that financing overseas empires drained money needed at home, because lower wages paid to workers overseas produced higher profits and pulled investment abroad. Exporting capital, he concluded, put a lid on domestic wages and living standards. His cure was domestic social reform and state intervention through taxation, which could create wealth and encourage a peaceful, tolerant, multipolar world order.

  Vladimir Lenin absorbed Hobson's ideas into Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, portraying imperialism as monopoly capitalism on a global stage and explaining the world wars as battles between imperialists for external markets. His treatise became a standard textbook that flourished until the Soviet collapse in 1989 to 1991. By the 1970s historians such as David K. Fieldhouse, David Landes, and Oron Hale argued the British experience failed to support Hobson, and that modern imperialism was a political product of national mass hysteria rather than the work of capitalists. Walter Rodney pushed back from the other direction in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972, calling imperialism a phase of capitalism that embraced the whole world, one part exploiting and the other exploited.

• 7. The Civilizing Mission

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  Jules Ferry, the French politician, declared in 1883 that superior races have a right, because they have a duty, and that they have the duty to civilize the inferior races. That sentence is the civilizing mission in its rawest form, and the source returns to it again and again as the moral engine of empire. Hobson identified the same logic on general grounds, the belief that the earth should be peopled and developed by the races of highest social efficiency.

  Edward Said traced the cultural machinery behind it in Orientalism in 1978. The West, he argued, invented an imagined geography called The Orient, reducing the East to cultural essences and representing it as irrational and backward, the opposite of a rational and progressive West. Defining the East as an inferior negative of the Western world both flattered the West and made the East knowable, so that it could be dominated. Orientalism was the ideological justification of early Western imperialism.

  Maps carried the same freight. Bassett, studying 19th-century cartography during the Scramble for Africa, wrote that maps contributed to empire by promoting, assisting, and legitimizing the extension of French and British power into West Africa. Blank space on a map marked unknown territory and invited conquest to fill it. African explorers often sketched accurate maps of unknown areas on the ground, but those maps were not printed in Europe unless Europeans verified them first.

  Environmental determinism dressed prejudice as science, dividing the world into climatic zones. Northern Europe and the temperate Mid-Atlantic supposedly produced hard-working, moral, upstanding people, while tropical climates allegedly yielded laziness and moral degeneracy. The American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple argued that humans originated in the tropics but could only become fully human in the temperate zone. British settlement in 18th-century Australia rested on terra nullius, no man's land, treating the continent as unused by its original inhabitants.

• 8. Empires Old And New

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  Augustus became the first Roman emperor in 27 BC, and at its peak under Trajan around 117 AD the Roman Empire covered roughly 5 million square kilometres and ruled 60 to 70 million people, extending Roman law, Latin, and eventually Christianity to the conquered. The Eastern Roman Empire preserved those traditions until 1453, the same year Mehmed the Conqueror captured Constantinople and made it the Ottoman capital. The Ottoman state lasted from 1299 to 1922, reaching its height under Suleiman the Magnificent before a long decline that ended with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Republic of Turkey.

  Japan offers the sharpest modern case. After more than 200 years of feudal isolation, military pressure from the United States in the 1850s forced the country open, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 reunified power under the emperor. Lacking natural resources, Japan turned to imperialism under the motto Fukoku kyohei, enrich the state, strengthen the military. It annexed the Ryukyu Islands in 1879, took Taiwan after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, annexed Korea in 1910, and shook the world by defeating the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the first time an Asian nation defeated a European power.

  Cultural imperialism works without armies at all. Depictions of opulent American lifestyles in the soap opera Dallas changed the expectations of Romanians during the Cold War, and smuggled South Korean drama-series later did similar work inside North Korea. The importance of this soft power is not lost on authoritarian regimes, which ban foreign popular culture and control satellite dishes to keep it out.

  The newest chapter carries the oldest logic. Since the 2010s Russia under Vladimir Putin has been described as neo-imperialist, with the 2008 invasion of Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Four months into that invasion Putin compared himself to Peter the Great, saying the tsar had returned Russian land to the empire and that it was now also Russia's responsibility to return Russian land.