Globalization – IMPERIALISM

Imperialism is a broad concept that describes various methods employed by one country

to gain control (sometimes through territorial conquest) of another country (or geographic

area) and then to exercise control, especially political, economic, and military control, over

that country (or geographic area), and perhaps many other countries (as, most famously,

did the British Empire) (Brewer 2012). It is an idea and reality that came of age in the midto

late 1800s (although its history, as we will see, is far more ancient), and is therefore

rooted, at least since that time, in the idea of the nation-state and the control that it exercises

over other nation-states as well as less well-defined geographic

areas.

Imperialism can encompass a wide range of domains of control. In the era of the cultural

turn in sociology, the latter is of increasing interest and concern and has come to be labeled

cultural imperialism (more specific manifestations of cultural imperialism are sufficiently

important to earn a label of their own with the most important being media imperialism

[see Chapters 8 and 9 for a discussion of these two forms of imperialism]).1

The term imperialism itself comes from the Roman imperium (Markoff 2007: 609–14)

and was first associated with domination and political control over one or more neighboring

nations. The term “empire” is derived from imperium and it was used to describe political

forms that had characteristics of Roman rule, especially the great power of the leader

(the Roman imperator or emperor) and the huge chasm between the power of the ruler and the ruled
(Gibbon 1998). Over time, the notion of empire, and of the process of imperialism,

came to be associated with rulership over vast geographic spaces and the people who

lived there. It is this characteristic that leads to the association between imperialism and

globalization. In fact, many of the processes discussed in this book under the heading of

globalization – trade, migration, communication, and so on – existed between the imperial

power and the geographic areas that it controlled.

The term imperialism came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century as a number

of nations (Germany, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain, France, United States) competed for

control over previously undeveloped geographic areas, especially in Africa. (Before that,
Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands had been other leading imperialist nations.) While

used mainly descriptively at first, imperialism came to have a negative connotation beginning,

perhaps, with the Boer War (1899–1902). Questions were being raised about the need

for political control by the imperial powers. Also being questioned was the longstanding

rationale that the “superior” cultures associated with imperial powers were necessary and

beneficial to the “inferior” cultures they controlled. While it is true that much culture

flowed from the imperial nations to the areas they controlled, culture flowed in the other

direction, as well. Imperial nations exercised great, albeit variable, political, economic, and

cultural control over vast portions of the world.

In terms of political power, Great Britain exercised great control over a vast empire well

into the twentieth century (that included the United States until the end of the Revolutionary

War [also called the “War of Independence” from Great Britain] and the Treaty of Paris in

1783; India until its independence in 1947, and so on). The Soviet Union created a great

political empire in the early part of the twentieth century by integrating various nations into

it (e.g. the Ukraine), as well as exercising great control over other Soviet bloc nations (e.g.

Poland, East Germany). The United States has also been an important, perhaps the most

important, imperialistic nation, but its political control has generally (but certainly not

always) been more subtle and less direct than that exercised by Great Britain and the Soviet

Union in their heyday.

Political imperialism declined dramatically after WW II as most imperial nations withdrew,

often reluctantly, from the domains they controlled. The imperial power of the Soviet

Union continued longer, but it disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

While there is little, if any political imperialism today (i.e. the representatives of an imperial

nation ruling a controlled area), other forms of imperialism persist.

In terms of imperialism in an economic sense, the actions of the British were most notable.

For example, the British East India Company (the Dutch, French, and Swedish also had

East India Companies) exercised great economic (as well as political and military) power

on behalf of Great Britain in India. Also important was Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company

which, from its base in Canada, exercised great control over the fur trade, and later other
forms of commerce, in North America. However, it is the United States that dominated the

world economy, especially throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, as an imperialistic

power, at least in an economic sense.

Vladimir Lenin (1917/1939), the first leader of the Soviet Union, was an important early

theorist of imperialism, especially in his book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Lenin was influenced by J. A. Hobson’s (1902/1905/1938) even earlier 1902 book, Imperialism.

The title of Lenin’s work well expresses his view that the economic nature of capitalism2 leads

capitalistic economies, and the nation-states that are dominated by such an economic system,

to seek out and control distant geographic areas. This was also Hobson’s (1902/1905/1938: 85) view:
“Thus we reach the conclusion that Imperialism is the endeavour of the great controllers

of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their surplus wealth by seeking

foreign markets and foreign investments to take off the goods and capital they cannot sell

or use at home.” Control over those areas was needed to provide resources for capitalist

industries and also to create new markets for those industries. In other words, a capitalist

economic system tended to expand imperialistically throughout the world.

While he recognizes that there are other dimensions to imperialism, Lenin sees “purely

economic factors” as the most basic, as the essence of imperialism. His definition of

imperialism

encompasses five dimensions, all of which highlight economic factors:

1. The concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it created

monopolies3 which play a decisive role in economic life.

2. The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of

this “finance capital,”4 of a “financial oligarchy[”].

3. The export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from

the export of commodities.

4. The formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among

themselves.

5. The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed

(Lenin 1917/1939: 89).

The (mainly European) capitalist nations and firms are seen as having expanded throughout

the world and as having carved up that world among themselves. From a revolutionary

point of view, Lenin sees imperialism as a parasitic system and one that is part, and reflects

the decay, of capitalism. Thus, it is an(other) indication of the rottenness of capitalism and

the fact that capitalism is either in danger of collapse or that its decayed carcass will eventually

prove easy to discard.

Ironically, although it was not capitalistic, it was Lenin’s Soviet Union that became an

important imperial power, especially politically, but also through the economic exploitation

of the countries in the Soviet bloc. While political imperialism has all but disappeared, economic

imperialism remains quite powerful, if for no other reason than the fact that capitalism

remains preeminent in the global economic system.

The continuing importance of the idea of imperialism has been challenged in one of the

most important books in the study of globalization, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s

Empire (2000). In their view, the often heavy-handed, nation-based forms of imperialism

described above have been replaced by a far more subtle and complex network of global

political/economic/cultural processes that are exercising a new form of control that is better

captured, in their view, by the idea of empire rather than imperialism. We will have occasion

to examine their work in detail in the next chapter, but the key point is that while the process

may have changed, efforts at gaining hegemonic control continue unabated.

Related to Hardt and Negri’s argument is the idea that the decline of the importance of

the nation-state makes it difficult to continue to talk in terms of imperialism which, at its

base, is a view that a given nation (or elements of it, e.g. in the case of media imperialism,

the US’s Voice of America) exercises control over other nations (or geographic areas) around

the world. It is this decline that leads to Hardt and Negri’s more “decentered” view of globalization.

That is, imperialism was a modern process and perspective that was “centered”

on the nation-state (Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the US), but the declining importance of the nation-
state requires a very different view of control exercised on a global scale. To

Hardt and Negri it is the power exercised by a decentered empire that has replaced that

exercised by imperialism and practiced by nation-states.

THE NEW IMPERIALISM

David Harvey (2003) has articulated the idea that a “new imperialism” has arisen with the

United States as its prime (if not only) representative. He calls this “capitalist imperialism”

and sees it as a contradictory fusion of economics and politics. Thus, Harvey offers a more

integrated view of imperialism than did Lenin or Hobson. More specifically, it involves a

fusion of the political – “imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors

whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and

natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends” and the economic –

“imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command

over and use of capital takes primacy” (Harvey 2003: 26). There are fundamental differences

between the two (political interest in territory and capitalist interest in command,

and use, of capital), but the “two logics intertwine in complex and sometimes contradictory

ways” (Harvey 2003: 29). For example, to the American government the Vietnam War made

sense from a political point of view, but it hardly made sense from an economic perspective

and may even have adversely affected the American economy. More generally, Harvey

wonders

whether we are now seeing an increase in US political imperialism (e.g. Iraq and

Afghanistan) while it is declining in importance from the perspective of economic imperialism

(e.g. the rise in economic power of China, the EU, India, etc.).

To Harvey, the new imperialism is the uncomfortable mix of these two types under the

broad heading of capitalist imperialism. In addition, what is “new” here, at least in reference

to the classic imperialism of say the British, is that it is the US that is the paradigm for, and

the leader in, the new imperialism. Harvey not only describes US imperialism, but is highly

critical of it. He sees it as burdened by a series of internal and external contradictions and

problems which make it unsustainable in the long term (and perhaps even in the short

term). Whether or not he is correct in that prognostication, he makes a useful contribution

to our understanding of imperialism by offering a more balanced sense of its economic and

political aspects, as well as their interrelationship.