Imperialism
Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power and soft power. Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more formal empire.
While related to the concept of colonialism, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.
Definition
The word imperialism is derived from the Latin word imperium, which means 'to command', 'to be sovereign', or 'to rule'. It was coined in the 19th century to describe Napoleon III's attempts to gain political support by invasion. The term was applied to the British Empire during the 1870s; by the 1880s it had acquired a positive connotation in the West. By the end of the 19th century, the term was used to describe the behavior of empires at all times and places. Hannah Arendt and Joseph Schumpeter defined imperialism as expansion for the sake of expansion.Hobson, and in 1917, Lenin, attempted to redefine imperialism as the "highest stage of capitalism", as firms exported capital to dominate economically rather than territorially. In 1965 Nkrumah went with calling neocolonialism "the last stage of imperialism", linking it to trade, bases, cultural dominance and the IMF. In 1967 Frank claimed that "unequal exchange" itself reproduced empire. In 1978 Said used the term to describe domination and subordination reflecting an imperial core and a periphery. Marshall further pushed the term to encompass phenomena such as space development.
Colonialism
Imperialism and colonialism have been distinguished by scholars such as Young who wrote that imperialism implements state policy, while colonialism may reflect commercial intentions, although supported by force. Said stated that colonialism implies geographic separation between the colony and the imperial power. He distinguished them, stating, "imperialism involved 'the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory', while colonialism refers to the 'settlements on a distant territory.'" Contiguous land empires such as the Russian, Chinese or Ottoman have traditionally been called imperialist, although they also sent populations into their remote territories.Imperialism and colonialism both involve political and economic advantage over a land and its population. However, scholars sometimes find it difficult to illustrate the difference between the two. According to Painter/Jeffrey, colonialism refers to one country in de facto control of another land, while imperialism lately refers to less explicit political/economic dominance. Colonialism attempts to develop resources for extraction by the colonizer,although not always successfully. Colonies often adopt aspects of their colonizers' cultures.
Age of Imperialism
Imperialism has been present and prominent since the beginning of history, and its most intensive phase occurred in the Axial Age. But the concept of the Age of Imperialism refers to the period pre-dating World War I. While the end of the period is commonly fixed in 1914, the date of the beginning varies between 1760 and 1870. The latter date makes the Age of Imperialism identical with the New Imperialism. According to Historians Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé, the widespread use of the term "Age of Empire" for this specific period reflects a Eurocentric bias in terms of time.The Age saw European nations, helped by industrialization, intensifying the process of colonizing, influencing, and annexing other parts of the world. In the late 19th century, they were joined by the United States and Japan. Other 19th century episodes included the Scramble for Africa and Great Game.
In the 1970s British historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson argued that European leaders rejected the notion that "imperialism" required formal, legal control by one government over a colonial region. Much more important was informal control of independent areas. According to Wm. Roger Louis, "In their view, historians have been mesmerized by formal empire and maps of the world with regions colored red. The bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal British Empire. Key to their thinking is the idea of empire 'informally if possible and formally if necessary.'" Oron Hale says that Gallagher and Robinson looked at the British involvement in Africa where they "found few capitalists, less capital, and not much pressure from the alleged traditional promoters of colonial expansion. Cabinet decisions to annex or not to annex were made, usually on the basis of political or geopolitical considerations."
Looking at the main empires from 1875 to 1914, there was a mixed record in terms of profitability. At first, planners expected that colonies would provide an excellent captive market for manufactured items. Apart from the Indian subcontinent, this was seldom true. By the 1890s, imperialists saw the economic benefit primarily in the production of inexpensive raw materials to feed the domestic manufacturing sector. Overall, Great Britain did well in terms of profits from India, especially Mughal Bengal, but not from most of the rest of its empire. According to Indian Economist Utsa Patnaik, the scale of the wealth transfer out of India, between 1765 and 1938, was an estimated $45 Trillion. The Netherlands did well in the East Indies. Germany and Italy got little trade or raw materials from their empires. France did slightly better. The Belgian Congo was notoriously profitable when it was a capitalistic rubber plantation owned and operated by King Leopold II as a private enterprise. However, scandal after scandal regarding atrocities in the Congo Free State led the international community to force the government of Belgium to take it over in 1908, and it became much less profitable. The Philippines cost the United States much more than expected because of military action against rebels.
Because of the resources made available by imperialism, the world's economy grew significantly and became much more interconnected in the decades before World War I, making the many imperial powers rich and prosperous.
Europe's expansion into territorial imperialism was largely focused on economic growth by collecting resources from colonies, in combination with assuming political control by military and political means. The colonization of India in the mid-18th century offers an example of this focus: there, the "British exploited the political weakness of the Mughal state, and, while military activity was important at various times, the economic and administrative incorporation of local elites was also of crucial significance" for the establishment of control over the subcontinent's resources, markets, and manpower. Although a substantial number of colonies had been designed to provide economic profit and to ship resources to home ports in the 17th and 18th centuries, D. K. Fieldhouse suggests that in the 19th and 20th centuries in places such as Africa and Asia, this idea is not necessarily valid:
During this time, European merchants had the ability to "roam the high seas and appropriate surpluses from around the world and to concentrate them in Europe".
File:British ships in Canton.jpg|thumb|British assault on Canton during the First Opium War, May 1841
European expansion greatly accelerated in the 19th century. To obtain raw materials, Europe expanded imports from other countries and from the colonies. European industrialists sought raw materials such as dyes, cotton, vegetable oils, and metal ores from overseas. Concurrently, industrialization was quickly making Europe the centre of manufacturing and economic growth, driving resource needs.
Communication became much more advanced during European expansion. With the invention of railroads and telegraphs, it became easier to communicate with other countries and to extend the administrative control of a home nation over its colonies. Steam railroads and steam-driven ocean shipping made possible the fast, cheap transport of massive amounts of goods to and from colonies.
Along with advancements in communication, Europe also continued to advance in military technology. European chemists made new explosives that made artillery much more deadly. By the 1880s, the machine gun had become a reliable battlefield weapon. This technology gave European armies an advantage over their opponents, as armies in less-developed countries were still fighting with arrows, swords, and leather shields. Some exceptions of armies that managed to get nearly on par with the European expeditions and standards include the Ethiopian armies at the Battle of Adwa, and the Japanese Imperial Army of Japan, but these still relied heavily on weapons imported from Europe and often on European military advisors.
File:Victor Gillam A Thing Well Begun Is Half Done 1899 Cornell CUL PJM 1136 01.jpg|upright=1|thumb|This cartoon reflects the view of Judge magazine regarding America's imperial ambitions following McKinley's quick victory in the Spanish–American War of 1898.
Theories of imperialism
Anglophone academic studies often base their theories regarding imperialism on the British Empire. The term imperialism was originally introduced into English in its present sense in the late 1870s by opponents of the allegedly aggressive and ostentatious imperial policies of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Supporters of "imperialism" such as Joseph Chamberlain quickly appropriated the concept. For some, imperialism designated a policy of idealism and philanthropy; others alleged that it was characterized by political self-interest, and a growing number associated it with capitalist greed.Historians and political theorists have long debated the correlation between capitalism, class, and imperialism. Much of the debate was pioneered by such theorists as John A. Hobson, Joseph Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and Norman Angell. While these non-Marxist writers were at their most prolific before World War I, they remained active in the interwar years. Their combined work informed the study of imperialism and its impact on Europe, and contributed to reflections on the rise of the military-industrial complex in the United States from the 1950s.
In Imperialism: A Study, Hobson developed a highly influential interpretation of imperialism that expanded on his belief that free-enterprise capitalism had a harmful effect on the majority of the population. In Imperialism, he argued that the financing of overseas empires drained money that was needed at home. It was invested abroad because lower wages paid to workers overseas made for higher profits and higher rates of return, compared to domestic wages. So, although domestic wages remained higher, they did not grow nearly as fast as they might otherwise have. Exporting capital, he concluded, put a lid on the growth of domestic wages and the domestic standard of living. Hobson theorized that domestic social reforms could cure the international disease of imperialism by removing its economic foundation, while state intervention through taxation could boost broader consumption, create wealth, and encourage a peaceful, tolerant, multipolar world order.
European Marxists picked up Hobson's ideas incorporated them their own theory of imperialism, most notably in Vladimir Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin portrayed imperialism as monopoly capitalism at the global stage, resulting in colonial expansion in order to secure capitalist economic growth and profits. Later Marxist theoreticians echo this conception of imperialism as a structural feature of capitalism, which explained the world wars as the battle between imperialists for control of external markets. Lenin's treatise became a standard textbook that flourished until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91.
File:CaptureOfLang-Son.jpg|thumb|The capture of Lạng Sơn during the French conquest of Vietnam in 1885
Some theoreticians on the non-Communist left have emphasized the structural or systemic character of "imperialism". Such writers have expanded the period associated with the term so that it now designates neither a policy, nor a short space of decades in the late 19th century, but a world system extending over a period of centuries, often going back to Colonization and, in some accounts, to the Crusades. As the application of the term has expanded, its meaning has shifted along five distinct but often parallel axes: the moral, the economic, the systemic, the cultural, and the temporal. Those changes reflect—among other shifts in sensibility—a growing unease, even great distaste, with the pervasiveness of such power, specifically, Western power.
By the 1970s, historians such as David K. Fieldhouse, David Landes, and Oron Hale argued that the Hobsonian conception of imperialism was no longer supported. They advocated that modern imperialism was primarily a political product caused by the national mass hysteria rather than by the capitalists. The British experience failed to support it.
Walter Rodney, in his 1972 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, proposes the idea that imperialism is a phase of capitalism "in which Western European capitalist countries, the US, and Japan established political, economic, military and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world which were initially at a lower level and therefore could not resist domination." As a result, Imperialism "for many years embraced the whole world – one part being the exploiters and the other the exploited, one part being dominated and the other acting as overlords, one part making policy and the other being dependent."