The idea of ‘imperialism'

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the British Liberal dissident J.A. Hobson diagnosed a new colonial synthesis in his classic Imperialism: A Study (1902), published only three months after the end of the South African War (1899-1902).

With the term ‘imperialism’, Hobson meant an unprecedented, perverted policy of economic exploitation of conquered territories in the interior of Africa. The economic and domestic dynamics of colonialism, Hobson argued, had become much different from traditional settler colonialism, which

Hobson regarded as a legitimate expansion of the colonising nation and society. Hobson contrasted Britain’s ‘genuine colonies’ in the temperate Cape Colony, North America, Australia and New Zealand with the colonies carved out in the tropics. These new colonies had been conquered for their plantations and mines, profiting investment bankers in the City of London but not the British people as a whole. This conspiracy stood in contrast with what Hobson viewed as the older, established legitimate tradition of colonial settlement:

It is a debasement of this genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable peoples, that marks the passage from nationalism to a spurious colonialism on the one hand, Imperialism on the other. Colonialism, where it consists in the migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands, the emigrants carrying with them full rights of citizenship in the mother country, or else establishing local self-government in close conformity with her institutions and under her final control, may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality, a territorial enlargement of the stock, language and institutions of the nation. Few colonies in history have, however, long remained in this condition when they have been remote from the mother country.³⁶

With the long and bloody South African War, the ‘new imperialism’ was revealed as no longer relying upon population settlements, but protecting the investments of a small, powerful cabal.³⁷

Vladimir Lenin built upon Hobson’s theory to define imperialism in the early twentieth century as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’.³⁸ Hobson’s work thus proved decisive in tying the European partition of Africa to advanced industrialisation.

To challenge this MarxistLeninist synthesis, in the 1950s and 1960s Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson focussed upon continuity in economic motives in British policy before, during and after the scramble for Africa.³⁹ However, the ‘new imperialism’ can be recast in another way, because emigrant settlement was still continuing in Africa and elsewhere. Italy clearly was not part of the new imperialism of economic exploitation. As a developing economy, Italy lacked the necessary capital to invest in plantations and mines, but did have a large and crowded population that might settle in Italian territories. Italian colonialists saw themselves as continuing the tradition of settler colonisation, practised in ancient Rome but also in the British Dominions and in French Algeria. The bloody legacy of this form of racial colonisation would become clearer later in the twentieth century.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

The idea of ‘imperialism'

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