Vladimir Lenin wrote the manuscript for Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism in Zurich between January and June 1916. He lived there as an exile during the early years of World War I while drafting his analysis of global economics from a Swiss safe house.
Lenin built his argument by synthesizing ideas from John A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding. Hobson published Imperialism: A Study in 1902 and described how investment abroad drove imperial expansion, while Hilferding released Finance Capital in 1910 to detail the merger of bank and industrial capital.
The book argues that banks ceased to be mere intermediaries between savers and borrowers and began to exert direct control over industry and finance through concentration of production. This merger created a financial oligarchy that dominated both the economy and government while monopolies emerged as large corporations swallowed smaller competitors in key markets.
The text appeared in mid 1917 under the imprint Zhizn i Znaniye Publishers after Lenin sent his manuscript to Parus, a Petrograd-based publishing house established by Maxim Gorky. A preface dated April 26 removed criticisms of Karl Kautsky from the initial draft before it entered print as part of a series on West European countries.
Kwame Nkrumah later drew inspiration from this work when writing Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965. His book title directly alluded to Lenin's original thesis while updating it for post-war decolonization movements across Asia Africa and Latin America throughout the twentieth century.