Introduction
In the field of international relations (IR), discussion of empire and imperialism ebbs and flows with current events. With the outbreak of the global war on terror in 2001, scholars debated whether the US invasion of Iraq constituted an imperialist war.Footnote 1 In the ensuing debate, the discourse ranged from critiques of what appeared like imperialist aggressionFootnote 2 to advocacy and embrace of a ‘liberal’ empire that could finally speak its nameFootnote 3 to scepticism about the relevance of the concept of imperialism in analyses of contemporary world politics.Footnote 4 Before these debates could register a theoretical impact, however, they were redirected by another crisis – the global financial crisis of 2008. If the immediate effect of the 2008 crisis was to reaffirm the American state and central bank as the anchor of the world economy, the political and geopolitical effects have been much more ambiguous.Footnote 5 Since 2016, IR debates have centred on the fate of US hegemony and competing assessments of a fraying or resilient liberal international order.Footnote 6 With major wars in Europe and the Middle East, escalating trade wars and global imbalances, massive financial sanctions, and intensifying industrial and technological competition, it is now uncontroversial to say that we live in a new era of multipolarity, of great power rivalry, or even a new age of imperialism.Footnote 7
If imperialism is once again relevant in mainstream international discourse, the term itself remains both normatively loaded and conceptually underdetermined. This reflects the fact that, despite surface appearances, empire and imperialism have rarely been objects of systematic reflection in contemporary IR theory, in contrast to concepts such as anarchy, sovereignty, and hegemony, which boast large analytical literatures.Footnote 8 If empire generally denotes a geopolitical formation of interpenetrating yet stratified political orders, post-war IR theory has been based on the concept of anarchy, understood as the absence of a centralized ruling authority in the international sphere.Footnote 9 In this scheme of things, the international is something like a state of nature, as in the work of classical liberal theory, yet to be transcended by a social contract and the formation of a world government.Footnote 10 Debates in IR have thus centred on the implications of the anarchical structure of world politics and the possibility (or lack thereof) that anarchy might be mitigated or overcome through establishing norms and cooperative institutions of global governance.Footnote 11 Significantly, this understanding of the anarchical structure of world politics is often retained even in recent work that has sought to integrate hierarchy into contemporary IR theory.Footnote 12
Of course, critical IR scholars have for a long time challenged the dominance of the anarchy problematic, creating openings through which an analysis of imperial histories and imperial trajectories can be pursued.Footnote 13 Today, for example, postcolonial IR scholarship can scarcely be deemed marginal to the field,Footnote 14 even if some continue to neglect its achievements, and one scholar has recently counted five different schools of (neo-)Marxist IR.Footnote 15 Additionally, recent research into the historical formation of IR as an academic field has shown that the relative neglect of empire in the academic study of the international is a peculiar condition of relatively recent origin.Footnote 16 Far from treating issues of empire with indifference, the first scholars to focus on the distinct problems of international theory and policy understood empire, imperialism, and colonial administration to be central, even pressing, concerns.Footnote 17 The growing call for a post-Eurocentric ‘global’ IR has been programmatically articulated by Amitav Acharya in his landmark presidential address to the International Studies Association.Footnote 18
Taking all of this together, a new consensus has arguably emerged: empire and imperialism are central, not peripheral, concerns for IR theory. However, this prompts a series of challenging theoretical and methodological questions. Is imperialism an historical phenomenon that ended with the last waves of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century? Or does imperialism remain a fundamental dynamic of international politics, and thus a central theoretical concern for scholars of contemporary global order? Further, why did the imperial as a distinct analytic disappear from the mainstream of IR discourse in the post-war period? How, in short, do we define the parameters, conceptually and methodologically, for the study of empire and imperialism today?
Building on the critical IR and political economy literature and on recent efforts to construct a framework adequate to the analysis of imperialism in contemporary world politics,Footnote 19 this article seeks to clarify the analytical status and purchase of the concept of imperialism for IR theory today. I argue that imperialism is best understood in contemporary studies as the systematic interplay of capitalist development and geopolitical conflict in the construction and reproduction of international hierarchy. To make this argument, I trace the concept’s shifting valences from its emergence in late-nineteenth-century International Relations discourse to post-war IR theory. The approach taken here mirrors Joseph Massad’s critical history of the concept of ‘self-determination’.Footnote 20 Like Massad, I excavate several moments of conceptual transformation that are often flattened and lost in contemporary usage. Unlike Massad’s story, however, which traces how self-determination emerged in Marxist circles and was appropriated, modified, and ultimately defanged by Western liberalism, the story of imperialism is in some ways the opposite. Originally formulated by a liberal elite as a solution to capitalist crises, imperialism was appropriated and retooled by Marxists, socialists, and anti-colonial nationalists.Footnote 21 The radical theory of imperialism as a function of the contradictory logic of capitalism left the bourgeois intellectuals with a need to perform damage control. This was effected principally by working to narrow the concept of imperialism to territorial expansion, or more precisely the colonial incorporation and administration of territory. This theoretical counter-revolution was especially effective, I argue, in disabling critique of imperialism in the post-war era of decolonization. It has been all the more effective for having been forgotten.
To be clear, the object of my investigation is the theoretical discourse of imperialism in international relations. The conceptual history offered here contributes to a rich body of work that has sought to clarify the meaning and utility of empire, imperialism, and colonialism as analytical categories in international theory.Footnote 22 A large and valuable scholarship investigates imperialism as a broad concept of world-historical analysisFootnote 23 and as a political ideology.Footnote 24 My treatment contrasts with, but supplements, this broader analysis by recovering the specific global conjuncture out of which the classical theories of imperialism emerged: the waning of British imperial hegemony and the emergence of a multipolar world of industrial capitalist competition.Footnote 25 Recovering the historical specificity of this discourse and its subsequent appropriation in the field of IR is necessary if the concept is to be of use in throwing light on contemporary crises of global order.
The following theoretical excavation thus proceeds in three sections. In the first section I examine the emergence of the discourse of imperialism from the turn of the twentieth century to World War I. In its classical forms, theories of imperialism sought to explain the waning of British imperial hegemony and the intensification of inter-imperial rivalry as a function of the dynamics of the multipolar maturation of capitalist development and the new forms of economic crisis industrial capitalism spawned. The second section examines how Western scholars, confronted with the more radical implications of the theory, came to relinquish it, with the result that imperialism lost its sophisticated and multifaceted meaning and was reduced to a synonym of colonialism, or direct political control over territory. The third section turns to how post-war IR theory inherited this theoretical counter-revolution and reproduced the conflation of imperialism with colonial empire-building. This reactionary narrowing, I argue, had two effects that remain in force: it evacuated the theory of its concern with the relationship between capitalist development and international conflict; and, in the era of decolonization, it encouraged the displacement of the question of imperialism into the past, as a phenomenon of mere historical interest. A brief conclusion highlights how the theoretical reconstruction offered here provides an avenue to reintegrate the subfields of international political economy (IPE) and security studies in the analysis of contemporary world politics in an age of escalating geopolitical tensions and the re-emergence of multipolarity.
The birth of ‘imperialism’
In tracing the origins of the concept of ‘imperialism’ it is useful to begin by distinguishing it from ‘empire’. While it is reasonable to think of these terms as connected, where imperialism is the process and empire the result,Footnote 26 this can also be misleading. Empire, derived from the Latin imperium, is an ancient concept, whereas the neologism imperialism emerged as a term of art in international relations only at the close of the nineteenth century.Footnote 27 As Hobsbawm reminds us, imperialism emerged into popular use not with reference to empire-building across time, but as ‘a novel term to describe a novel phenomenon’.Footnote 28 That novel phenomenon was the breakdown of the British Empire’s dominance over the global political economy – from industry to trade and finance – and the emergence of a multipolar world of capitalist development and inter-imperial competition over territory and markets.Footnote 29 While historians continue to debate the periodization and causes of what contemporary writers came to call ‘imperialism’, or ‘the new imperialism’, there is no question that the waning of British hegemony over the world system and the re-emergence of inter-imperial rivalry over colonies and spheres of influence constituted a major shift in the dynamics of the international system.
This was the context in which the classical theories of imperialism were propounded and elaborated. The intensification of colonial expansion and inter-imperial rivalry called for an explanation. As the British geographer H. J. Mackinder would theorize in 1904, the territorial basis of international political power was undergoing an epochal shift, a global transition ‘from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency’.Footnote 30 While the search for territorial extensions for the metropolitan capitalist state was a major feature of the new imperialism, at issue was not solely the question of colonialism. Intensified colonial expansion was one of the signals of the shift, not the shift itself. As Lenin famously put it during World War I, ‘For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible’.Footnote 31 As he further explained the logic: ‘without a forcible redivision of colonies the new imperialist countries cannot obtain the privileges enjoyed by the older (and weaker) imperialist powers’.Footnote 32 Inter-imperial rivalry over the underdeveloped world and the struggle for relative efficiency in industrial output were the new structural dynamics governing the international political system.
The classical theories of imperialism were diverse and complex, but one characteristic most of them shared was an emphasis on economic forces, or more precisely the turbulent dynamics of industrial capitalist development.Footnote 33 Capitalist production and large-scale industry produced unprecedented quantities of wealth, but they also created novel forms of surplus and therefore new problems for (re)investment and profit rates. Some theorists of capitalism’s crisis tendencies emphasized the disequilibrium between production and consumer demand, and the resulting problem of underconsumption.Footnote 34 But consumer demand is not the only type of demand in a capitalist economy, and accordingly others emphasized falling rates of profit tied up with the production of capital goods.Footnote 35 In any case, whether theorists named the problem ‘underconsumption’ or ‘overproduction’, the unifying point was that capitalist development generated both surplus product and surplus savings which, when left unmanaged, produced crises of increasing intensity and instability.Footnote 36
These crises led to the intensification of the labour movement, but also to the resolve of capitalist interests to solve the problem by other means than expanding workers’ rights. On the domestic front the solution was, on the one hand, to allow the formation of monopoly trusts, which could manipulate the market through corporate planning and price fixing, and, on the other, to allow a more active role for the state in managing the economy.Footnote 37 On the international front, the solution was imperialism: the export of capital, the administration of foreign economies, and the siphoning off of cheap (or simply stolen) resources and labour from outside the confines of the national economy.Footnote 38 In short, imperialism was understood as the deployment of the power of the state to extend markets and investment outlets and to integrate capitalist states with territories external or peripheral to the circuits of capital accumulation.Footnote 39
It is commonly assumed that the theory of capitalist imperialism was originally propounded by left-wing writers such as Hobson and Lenin, and then elaborated by anti-colonial nationalists in the context of the Second and Third Internationals.Footnote 40 But upon inspection this is not the case. The theory of imperialism in its classic form, in which state-assisted foreign investment and the forcible incorporation of non-European economies into the systems of metropolitan accumulation were theorized as requirements of industrial capitalism, was first propounded not by left-wing theoreticians but by liberal capitalist ideologues themselves in the journals of business and financial opinion.Footnote 41 More critical writers, from Hobson to the Marxist and anti-colonial traditions, were making reference to, and attempting to counter, this earlier liberal theory.
One of the earliest architects of the theory of imperialism was the American business journalist and internationally acclaimed expert on banking and finance Charles Arthur Conant.Footnote 42 Criticizing classical theories of natural market equilibrium, Conant argued that the development of large-scale industry threw up new problems which were best analysed in terms of the periodic booms and busts of the business cycle and the corresponding structural disequilibrium between production and demand. Drawing on a critical – even proto-Keynesian – reading of classical political economists from J. S. Mill to Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Conant and others glossed this new phenomenon as ‘over-saving’ or ‘overproduction’.Footnote 43
A particularly clear statement of the implications of capital’s structural tendency towards disequilibrium or overproduction was presented in an evocatively titled article, ‘The Economic Basis of “Imperialism”’, published in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish–American War in September 1898.Footnote 44 There, Conant gave expression to the common view among business interests that a glut of capital increasingly threatened the economic order,Footnote 45 and he outlined four possible directions for relieving the pressure from ‘this enormous congestion of capital’ in the industrial countries. First was ‘the socialistic solution’, i.e. redistribution and nationalization, an impractical solution in the immediate term and an undesirable one from the standpoint of the business class. Second, capital could discover new sources of domestic demand, but according to Conant this would not be possible on a scale sufficient to counteract the severity of the problem of excess savings. Third, Conant envisaged ‘the waste of capital in war’, but for Conant that was ‘only a form of consumption’, not accumulation. Finally, this left a fourth possibility, ‘the equipment of new countries with the means of production and exchange’, in other words the export not only of capital but of capitalist society itself, a solution Conant rather ominously termed ‘the final resource’.Footnote 46 This idea would prove the most important in the formation of the classical theory of imperialism, from the British liberal Hobson to the great Central European Marxists in the first years of the twentieth century.Footnote 47
Conant gained significant influence thereafter, perhaps best indexed in the attention paid to his work by Lenin in the latter’s voluminous notebooks on imperialism.Footnote 48 Nor was Conant’s influence confined to theory. In one of the theory’s first practical applications, Conant would go on to become a key policy advisor of the US government, designing the currency and banking system for the US colonial state in the Philippines, and later dispensing expert assistance to governments from Central America and the Caribbean to China.Footnote 49 Two points of clarification must be made, however, regarding the theory of imperialism in its original form. First, while writers such as Conant occasionally slipped into a form of mechanical determinism, in which imperialism was a structural necessity of industrial capitalist development, they were often careful to note that the obstacles to domestic accumulation were, strictly speaking, conjunctural and political, not immanent to capitalist development itself. This is a point that subsequent theorists, whether radical or mainstream, have often failed to appreciate.Footnote 50 Second, it is crucial to recognize that Conant observed a distinction between the means and the ends of imperialism. Conant posited a number of imperial techniques, of which formal colonial rule was but one end of the spectrum. Informal methods with a lighter political footprint were often preferable to colonial conquest. As Conant wrote, looking out towards the Pacific:
Whether the United States shall actually acquire territorial possessions, shall set up captain generalships and garrisons, whether they shall adopt the middle ground of protecting sovereignties nominally independent, or whether they shall content themselves with naval stations and diplomatic representations as the basis for asserting their rights to the free commerce of the East, is a matter of detail.Footnote 51
One could hardly ask for a more concise index of the modalities of imperial power that would come to dominate world politics in the twentieth century.
In a fascinating transmission of ideas, H. Gaylord Wilshire, a Los Angeles real estate developer and self-styled ‘millionaire socialist’, extracted the arguments from the business press and transformed them into a more radical doctrine.Footnote 52 Wilshire, long since forgotten, was in fact one of the first Marxists to preach socialism or barbarism. His pamphlet The Problem of the Trust (1900) is still worth reading, not only because Wilshire was a skilled propogandist, but also because it embodies theoretical arguments that remain relevant to the conceptualization of capitalist imperialism.Footnote 53
Though he undoubtedly had little acquaintance with the working class and refers to ‘the American people’ as a ‘great drove of donkeys’, Wilshire believed he had divined from his reading of Marx and of the business press that the collapse of capitalism was not only imminent but an ‘inexorable necessity’. Wilshire was not alone in perceiving that the emergence of Rockefeller’s oil trust and the parallel movements in other industries at the turn of the century strikingly reflected the postulation of Marx’s Capital that industrial accumulation brought with it perilous tendencies towards concentration and monopoly. But his version of the argument came years before that of any European Marxist. He proceeded to explain that the contemporary movement towards the formation of monopolies, cartels, and trusts was an unavoidable result of capitalist development and that the growing calls for imperialism and the export of capital were but a symptom of these secular trends. Drawing on the business press and writers like Conant, Wilshire explained that ‘[o]ver-production arises because our productive capacity has been developed to the highest degree with labor saving machinery operated by steam and electricity, while our consumptive capacity is crippled by the competitive wage system which limits the laborers, who constitute the bulk of our consumers, to the mere necessities of life’. The American worker, ‘breathing sewer gas, eating tuberculous beef, drinking typhoid bacilli in his milk and fusel oil in his whiskey’, was not going to provide the needed boost to the economy. The consumption of the rich, which was spent on ‘necessities’ such as ‘beefsteaks’, ‘truffles’, ‘champagne’, and ‘picture galleries’ would not be sufficient either. Even the replacement and improvement of plant and machinery, which ‘has been the great sluice-way for carrying off the surplus product of labor’, appeared to be rapidly damming up.Footnote 54
It was these circumstances that explained the rise of trusts and monopolies, a development widely perceived to be a watershed in the history of capitalism. If the trust was a means of easing the decline in profits in national industries, Wilshire reasoned, ‘“Imperialism” is a means of diverting to foreign shores this threatening deluge of domestic savings’.Footnote 55 This build-up of savings was the ultimate source of the growing call for imperialism that was then becoming familiar to any reader of American newspapers. Whether the problem was the emergence of monopolies and trusts at home or imperial expansion abroad, Wilshire took a principled Marxist line: ‘we should not stultify ourselves by striving to prevent a result without first attacking the cause’. Wilshire preached what many a Marxist has preached since: ‘Revolution and not reform must be our battle cry’. If the root of the problem was the nature of private capitalist enterprise, then there could only be one solution: ‘The Nationalization of Industry’.Footnote 56
Wilshire’s evocative prose caught the eye of a political economist on the other side of the Atlantic, J. A. Hobson, who was busy at work on his own study of the new imperialism.Footnote 57 Hobson would reference Wilshire’s contribution in his article ‘The Economic Taproot of Imperialism’, which would soon be published as the centrepiece of his 1902 study. Though Hobson did not follow Wilshire in preaching the impending breakdown of capitalism, he concurred with Wilshire and with international business opinion that the central problem of capitalist development was its tendency to produce surplus savings. Where he differed from Wilshire was in his faith that, with some domestic reform, capital could find profitable outlets at home and could overcome the imperialist drive for foreign markets.Footnote 58 If the taproot of imperialism was the inequalities of wealth and income engendered by capitalist development, then the solution lay in a politics of domestic redistribution.
For Hobson, if nationalism was a healthy movement towards political unity within a definite territory and internationalism was its pacific, cooperative flowering, then imperialism was ‘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’.Footnote 59 Unlike colonialism, which Hobson understood – and advocated – as the finite extension of the nation through settlement (i.e. settler colonialism), imperialism was a more pervasive ‘[e]arth hunger’.Footnote 60 Its principal manifestations were militarism and ‘the scramble for markets’. Imperialism was thus not a narrow but a capacious concept, encompassing ‘a sliding scale of diplomatic language, hinterland, sphere of interest, sphere of influence, paramountcy, suzerainty, protectorate, veiled or open, leading up to acts of forcible seizure or annexation which sometimes continue to be hidden under “lease”, “rectification of frontier”, “concession”, and the like”.Footnote 61
Hobson’s text crystallized the main forces of international relations and issued a scathing critique of the special interests driving imperialism, though his reformist politics manifested at the international level, too, through his advocacy for a trusteeship system for managing the affairs of colonial subjects, who he believed were incapable of governing themselves.Footnote 62 In other words, Hobson was a critic of the ‘new imperialism’, in the narrow and historically specific sense detailed in this article, but he was not opposed to colonial rule over non-European lands, and certainly not opposed to what we now call settler colonialism.Footnote 63 Nor was Hobson alone in seeking to theorize the new imperialism and to advocate for imperial reform. On the contrary, Hobson was intervening in a sophisticated international discourse on the new forms of imperial expansion and on the pressures they exerted on the structure of global order.Footnote 64 Central to this discourse was the emergence of the modern social sciences, including, of course, political science and international relations.Footnote 65
Hobson drew, for example, on the work of the American political scientist Paul Reinsch, whose major work of 1900 defined ‘national imperialism’ as all ‘endeavors to increase the resources of the national state through the absorption or exploitation of undeveloped regions and inferior races’.Footnote 66 Reinsch too, conceptualized imperial relations as a complex continuum in which informal control over territory shades imperceptibly into formal political rule:
The most radical method of imperial expansion is that of directly seizing territory or the control or protection thereof, without waiting for the normal expansion of trade, industry, and colonization [i.e. settlement]. The degree of control exercised over territory thus obtained varies from the diplomatic, veiled protectorate exercised by England in Egypt and the imaginary ‘spheres of influence’ delimited in China, through a long range of variations, to complete and direct government as exercised in the English crown colonies.Footnote 67
Like Hobson, Reinsch worried that the new imperialism might augur a coming world conflict, ‘a great final struggle for dominion’. But this did not lead him, as it did not lead Hobson, to a fully anti-imperialist position. The only way Reinsch could conceive of avoiding a world war was to argue ‘that there is sufficient work for all nations in developing and civilizing primitive regions’, and that imperial states should work towards cooperation rather than rivalry.Footnote 68 Indeed, Hobson only drew on the works of Reinsch and others before him in making essentially the same argument.
It is little wonder that Marxist scholars and activists quickly grasped onto the theory and radicalized it for their own purposes. Theorists sympathetic to the interests of capital had inadvertently legitimized concerns about the instability and violence that appeared to be inherent in capitalist development. Yet they advocated for economic and imperial reform, not anti-imperialism. Rudolf Hilferding would make the first major contribution to the left critique of imperialism (with due respect to Wilshire), which was hailed as an update of Marxist theory in its accounting for the increasingly intimate relationship between financial capital and large-scale industry, a fusion which he termed ‘finance capital’.Footnote 69 Rosa Luxemburg would shortly follow this up with her Accumulation of Capital, which argued that capitalism’s crisis tendencies would drive it to the ends of the earth, at which point it would reach a geographical limit and self-implode.Footnote 70 Drawing on all these thinkers as well as on the latest from the business press, Lenin would crystallize the argument that imperialism was a function of the development of the monopoly-finance stage of capitalism, an inevitable outgrowth of the structural logic of capitalist development.Footnote 71 As Lenin put it, ‘The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism’.Footnote 72 If imperialism had its origins in the inexorable logic of capitalism, then it could be stopped by nothing short of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism itself. Hobson’s plea for redistribution rather than expansion was at best wishful thinking.
In the same period, this European Marxist discourse was supplemented by theorists outside Europe and the anglophone world, from M. N. Roy and Sun Yat-Sen to the Black radical tradition.Footnote 73 For example, in his remarkable and now well-known analysis of the origins of World War I, W. E. B. Du Bois placed the material and ideological forces of imperialism at the centre of the story, but unlike many of his colleagues he saw in it not the result of biological forces, but a thoroughly social calamity.Footnote 74 Du Bois also anticipated the arguments of the European Marxists that an imperial compact between capital and labour in the metropole threatened the socialist movement worldwide, an analysis that would be extended and sharpened by revolutionary thinkers throughout much of the twentieth century.Footnote 75 Alain Locke, too, poured scorn on the dominant view ‘that Anglo-Saxon dominance is due to Anglo-Saxon superiority, and that Anglo-Saxon superiority is inherent and hereditary upon the basis of race’.Footnote 76 For the purposes of this article, what is notable is that neither Locke nor Du Bois left any ambiguity that the struggles among empires over markets, resources, and fields of investment were above all ‘economic’ in origin, the science of racial types being a rationalization rather than an explanation of the phenomenon.
‘Imperialism is no word for scholars’: theoretical counter-revolution in the interwar period
By the end of World War I and with the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 the idea of imperialism – originally propounded by capitalist elites – had taken on a decidedly radical cast. The predictions and fears of Hobson and Reinsch had been realized in an unprecedented clash of empires. Nor would such prescient analyses end in 1914. Luxemburg wrote from her jail cell during the war that, in the absence of an international proletarian revolution, the end of great power hostilities could only ‘lead to new, feverish armaments in all nations – defeated Germany, of course, at the head – and would introduce an era of undivided rule for militarism and reaction all over Europe, with a new war as its final goal’.Footnote 77 The same horrifying prospect shaped the very different perspective of Woodrow Wilson and informed his advocacy in the early years of the Eurasian war for a ‘peace without victory’: defeat on either side ‘would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand’.Footnote 78
The problem of imperial reform lay at the centre of the design and establishment of the League of Nations, and especially the Mandates System.Footnote 79 On both sides of the Atlantic, the leading textbooks of the interwar period can be read as attempts to systematize the vast literature on imperialism and ‘race development’ of the preceding years. Consider, for example, Raymond Leslie Buell’s widely read International Relations. In the weighty middle section of the book – titled ‘The Problems of Imperialism’ – Buell dealt in detail with such topics as ‘The Causes of Imperialism’, ‘Self-Determination and the Backward Peoples’, ‘Capital and the Backward Regions’, and ‘Indirect Forms of Imperialism’, among other pressing issues of the time.Footnote 80 In his gruesome chapter on ‘The Policy of Exploitation’, which reads like an extension of Marx’s pages on ‘primitive accumulation’, Buell discusses ‘the methods of exploitation’ at length, among them ‘forced or imported labor; the confiscation, total or partial, of the natives’ land; brutality, discrimination and debauchery’. ‘If imperialism means exploitation of this type’, Buell ponders, ‘it is surely an evil thing’. Much like his predecessors, however, Buell held out hope that the excesses of imperialism could be tamed through cooperation and reform. Thus, Buell ends his chapter on exploitation on a sunnier note: ‘Fortunately for the native, for the peace of the world, and for the honor of western civilization, the policy of exploitation … is gradually giving way to the policy of trusteeship’.Footnote 81 It is easy to dismiss such a view in light of the mass violence that characterized the process of decolonization.Footnote 82 The point here is to recognize how Western scholars saw this movement of imperial reform and trusteeship as a way of salvaging the project of a liberal world order.Footnote 83
Yet it is also crucial to register a change that began to take place in how imperialism was conceptualized after World War I. As I will now suggest, a theoretical counter-revolution took hold after the cessation of hostilities. Imperialism, which had represented a diverse theoretical discourse attempting to explain the complex relations between capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and war, was reduced to the more narrow concept of colonial rule and colonial administration. In other words, in the era of imperial reform, the rise of US power, and, eventually global decolonization, imperialism came to mean colonialism, and colonialism was both un-American and a thing of the past.Footnote 84
This conceptual shift can be observed as early as the influential work of Leonard Woolf (1919), whose Empire and Commerce in Africa appeared in 1919.Footnote 85 Woolf effected a number of changes in the imperial studies research programme. Though he uses the term ‘economic imperialism’ to indicate its relevance to the pre-war debates, his story begins with seventeenth-century mercantilism; he focuses the bulk of his attention on nineteenth-century empire-building; the so-called Scramble for Africa is used as the main test case for theories of imperialism; and the focus shifts from the pre-war concern with the newly rising imperial powers to the larger, older empires of Britain and France. In British discourse, this shift would be pushed along especially by scholars working within the Roundtable tradition of imperial historiography and Chatham House.Footnote 86 On the other side of the Atlantic, the veterans of the Paris Peace Conference would set up the Council on Foreign Relations to work out the details of post-war imperial reform and its logics of international trusteeship and world development.Footnote 87
By the 1930s, the stakes of the discourse had become increasingly obscure as bourgeois scholars sparred with Marxist radicals over the parameters of the theory of imperialism and its proper object of explanation. In 1935, William L. Langer felt that a reappraisal of Hobson’s famous study was overdue, and he took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to provide it.Footnote 88 In commenting on Hobson, he made it clear that he also intended indirectly to comment on the state of Marxist theory as it had ‘been expounded in several ponderous German works’. The crux of his critique of Hobson and the ‘Neo-Marxians’ was quite simply that ‘the actual course of history refutes the thesis’, especially since ‘the export of capital seems to have little to do with territorial expansion’. ‘Some may argue’, Langer acknowledged, ‘that imperialism is more than a movement toward territorial expansion and that financial imperialism in particular lays the iron hand of control on many countries supposedly independent’.Footnote 89 However, despite his nod to Conant’s foundational article, he quickly disposed of this idea.Footnote 90 ‘Imperialism is, in a sense, synonymous with the appropriation by the western nations of the largest part of the rest of the world. If you take it to be anything else, you will soon be lost in nebulous concepts and bloodless abstractions’.Footnote 91 The conflation of imperialism with the narrower concept of colonial rule over territory was becoming a consensus view.
A perhaps more extreme approach was taken by W. K. Hancock, who opened his Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs with the recommendation that the term imperialism be banished from the scholarly lexicon.Footnote 92 It was ‘a word so arrogantly and capriciously used that it has become a positive hindrance to thought’, Hancock declared. True, he conceded, ‘The Marxist critics who have adopted this difficult word have managed to hammer it into some sort of consistency, so that it circulates within their restricted circle as coin which has at least its own definite ring’. But it was ‘a harsh ring’ because the Marxists saw in all economic matters ‘the presence of “an invisible hand” whose operation is always evil’. ‘Imperialism is no word for scholars’, he admonished. ‘The emotional echoes which it arouses are too violent and too contradictory. It does not convey a precise meaning’.Footnote 93 Instead, Hancock recommended that we speak of empire, not imperialism; and he even attached for interested readers an appendix written by a colleague, which he insisted on calling ‘Marxist Theories of Empire’.
D. K. Fieldhouse laid down the interpretation that would become dominant in the post-war period:
The central feature of the theory of imperialism by which it must stand or fall, is the assertion that the empires built up after 1870 were not an option but a necessity for the economically advanced states of Europe and America: that these capitalist societies, because of their surplus of domestically produced capital, were forced to export capital to the under-developed regions of the world: and that it was only this investment – prospective or existing – that supplied a motive for the acquisition of colonies.Footnote 94
This sensibility marks the successful domestication of the theory of imperialism that remains largely in force to this day.Footnote 95 The ground was set for the dismissal of the economic drivers of international intervention and geopolitical conflict, and for the treatment of imperialism, now identified with colonial empire, as an historical artefact. However, as Stokes argued long ago, and as Etherington would later elaborate, this revisionist critique amounts to a shifting of the goalposts.Footnote 96 The classical theory of imperialism, or the economic theory of imperialism, which was propounded from around 1900 to 1917, did not aim principally to explain colonial expansion from 1870 to 1900, and still less did it aim to provide a general theory of modern colonialism. The classic theorists of imperialism were concerned not with questions of historical interpretation, but with explaining the dynamics of imperialism in their own day and their consequences for the political future. As Lenin repeatedly clarified in his writings, the object of the theory of imperialism was the immediate conjuncture: ‘Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the imperialist epoch of world capitalism, which began not earlier than 1898–1900’.Footnote 97 The question now was not division but redivision, driven on by the ruthless dynamic of capitalist competition. It is precisely this conjunctural nature of the analysis that the liberal theorists reviewed in this section – however unwittingly – diverted, defanged, and domesticated.
The next section aims to demonstrate that post-war IR theory took its cues from this theoretical counter-revolution and not from a close reading of the classical theories. To be sure, the scepticism post-war theories developed towards the classical theories was, in part, an appropriate reaction to the real limitations of Marxist and other critical theories, which too often reduced the exigencies of global politics to the structural logics of capital at the expense of an analysis of the relative autonomy of political and geo-strategic factors.Footnote 98 As we have seen, though, the economic interpretations put forward by the classic theories of imperialism were diverse, both inside and outside the Marxist tradition, and not always determinist or reductionist. All parties to the debate recognized that no explanation could fail to account for the transformative dynamics of industrialization worldwide, which challenged the economic pre-eminence of Britain, and how this political and economic struggle manifested in geopolitical tension and war.
Empire and imperialism in post-war international relations theory
Though mainstream IR theories are increasingly derided for their Eurocentrism, ahistoricism, and inattention to the centrality of empire and imperialism in international history, this neglect of the imperial as a category of analysis is not as absolute as critics sometimes imagine.Footnote 99 For example, in Politics Among Nations, Hans Morgenthau dedicated a chapter to developing the concept of imperialism, which he theorized as one of three possible foreign policies a state can pursue.Footnote 100 Later, in 1979, Kenneth Waltz opened his Theory of International Politics with an extensive critical discussion of the classical theories of imperialism of Hobson and Lenin and their reception and revision by post-war dependency theorists.Footnote 101 And a third key instance is Michael Doyle’s study of the nature and causes of imperial expansion from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century, combining the methods of IR theory with comparative-historical sociology.Footnote 102 This section dissects how imperialism is treated in these three classic works, which completes my demonstration of the conceptual narrowing of imperialism from its classic concern with the interplay of capitalist development and geopolitical conflict.
Morgenthau delineates the concept of imperialism by distinguishing it from what he calls a status quo policy.Footnote 103 If a status quo policy aims to reproduce an existing distribution of power between states in the international system, a policy of imperialism aims to upend and invert that distribution. One major implication of this definition is that, in opposing a policy of imperialism to a status quo policy, Morgenthau is forced to make the unfortunate deduction that many actually existing empires do not pursue a policy of imperialism. Additionally, it appears that in Morgenthau’s definition only comparatively weak states can pursue policies of imperialism in their efforts to disrupt the status quo. If imperialism means the pursuit of a change in the existing balance of international power, then anti-colonial struggles for national independence are pursuing a policy of imperialism, while a metropolitan state seeking merely to hang on to its colonies is not.
It is perhaps difficult to imagine a more inappropriate definition of imperialism than one that excludes empires but includes anti-colonial nationalism. Nevertheless, to be fair to Morgenthau we should remember that his concern was to distinguish between a conservative policy, namely ‘the maintenance, defense, and stabilization of an empire already in existence’, and the disruptive ‘dynamic process of acquiring one’.Footnote 104 This is an important distinction to make in any theory of imperialism, even if it is drawn in Morgenthau’s case at the expense of all previous work on the subject.
The contribution of Waltz to the theory of imperialism is more interesting and more challenging, in part because it is also more thoroughly grounded in previous literature. Waltz begins his discussion by summarizing and criticizing the classic works of Hobson and Lenin. As we have seen, while Hobson and Lenin differed on many points, their theories of imperialism converged on the basic interpretation that economic crises in the industrial capitalist world – characterized by a lack of investment opportunities and effective demand in the home market – provoked a powerful drive among capitalist interests to expand markets for goods and capital in foreign lands, and, where necessary, to employ the armed power of the state to achieve this expansion. As Waltz summarizes, Hobson and Lenin argued that imperialism had a fundamentally economic basis, emerging out of ‘the push that originates in underconsumption at home combined with the pull provided by the lure of higher profits through investment abroad’.Footnote 105 For Waltz, this form of argument is ‘reductionist’ in that it identifies the causes of imperialism in domestic political economy.
Against this, Waltz seeks to develop a theory that attributes causality to a force that is more properly international and thus external to the domestic sphere, namely the anarchical structure of the international system itself. ‘Rather than refer to capitalist imperialism’, Waltz suggests, ‘one might more aptly write of the imperialism of great power. Where gross imbalances of power exist, and where the means of transportation permit the export of goods and of the instruments of rule, the more capable people ordinarily exert a considerable influence over those less able to produce surpluses’.Footnote 106 Thus, beyond the empirical contingencies of particular cases, Waltz argues, the causes of imperialism are attributable to imbalances in state power – that is, economic and military power. The point is as simple as it is universal: ‘Weakness invites control; strength tempts one to exercise it’.Footnote 107 In sum, for Waltz, the taproot of imperialism is not to be found in the crises of capitalism, but in the logic of the anarchical structure of the international system.
Waltz’s reading of the classic theories is vulnerable to two criticisms. First, Waltz projects his own understanding of ‘theory’ onto the early theorists of imperialism. For Waltz, theory is by definition transhistorical: it is interested in the general, not the particular, which is the province of ‘history’.Footnote 108 ‘Imperialism’, Waltz admonishes, ‘is at least as old as recorded history. Surely it is odd to learn that the cause (capitalism) is much younger than the effect it produces (imperialism)’.Footnote 109 This point suggests that Waltz has not understood the aims of the theories he is attempting to criticize. In fact, as we have seen, the conception of theory as transhistorical is foreign both to Hobson and Lenin. Lenin responded to such misdirected criticism well in advance in specifying that his focus was the historically specific form of imperialism spawned by the emergence and proliferation of industrial capitalism.Footnote 110 Second, Waltz assumes that in speaking of capitalism, Hobson and Lenin are speaking of a bounded national economy. But here too it appears Waltz has projected his own conception of capitalism onto their work, since Hobson and Lenin both sought to analyse the international constitution of capitalist development. Both errors in Waltz’s reading stem from the fact that he violates his own first principle of critique, laid out in his opening chapter, that theories need to be assessed according to the definitions they employ.Footnote 111
Doyle’s Empires is perhaps the most formidable study of empire and imperialism to appear in the mainstream of IR scholarship in the post-1945 era. Doyle begins with the recognition that ‘empire turns on their heads the central insights of international relations scholars’. The reason for this, he explains, is that ‘[i]mperialism’s foundation is not anarchy, but order, albeit an order imposed and strained’.Footnote 112 Doyle offers a compelling definition of terms at the outset. ‘Empire’, he writes, ‘is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society’. ‘Imperialism’, he continues, ‘is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire’.Footnote 113 Doyle’s text is an attempt to grapple with the historical diversity of empires across time and to generalize between them in order to produce a model of imperial formations in world politics. To do so, he engages with a vast historiography ranging from ancient to early modern empires, and ending with an extended analysis of late-nineteenth-century imperialism.
While this approach would appear to give space to informal, i.e. non-colonial, modalities of imperialism, his case studies draw exclusively on colonial empires. Moreover, as if to show that his interest is purely historical, he conspicuously omits the US case, even though the United States would have made for an appropriate case study of colonial empire, at least after 1898 if not long before.Footnote 114 Nevertheless, Doyle helpfully systematizes the theoretical and historical literature on empire into three main models of causation. Some, according to Doyle, have focused on the metropolitan sources of imperialism; others have emphasized causes emanating from the periphery; and still others, as we have already seen, emphasize the ‘systemic’, or more precisely the ‘anarchic’ sources of imperialism. The theories of Hobson and Lenin fit into the first category because they stress the economic pressures of a metropolitan state in driving imperial expansion, whether in the form of conquest or informal subordination. One of the limits of such a perspective is that imperialism can appear to be reduced to ‘a force emanating from the metropole like radio waves from a transmitter’.Footnote 115 It thus is liable to ignore how influences flow both ways and to leave under-theorized the agency of societies on the frontiers of imperial expansion.
A traditional focus on the metropolitan sources of imperialism eventually compelled scholars to begin focusing more carefully on the periphery for an explanation of imperial expansion.Footnote 116 At their best, scholars who emphasize the periphery are concerned to show how informal power relations are transmuted into more overt and visible forms of political control when crises of various kinds emerge in the periphery. It is a perspective consonant with postcolonial approaches that aim to return agency to the subjects of empire, and to reject the portrayal of the metropole as omnipotent and of imperial relations as flowing from centre to periphery only.Footnote 117 Less generously, though, this perspective can appear to deflect attention from metropolitan interests and power, and to attribute the causes of imperialism to those who suffer its impositions.Footnote 118 Finally, we have already covered the ‘systemic’ or ‘anarchic’ explanation in our discussion of Waltz’s work above. This is a theory that emphasizes the inherent anarchy of the international system and explains imperialism negatively as the result of an absence of constraints on expansion.
Doyle’s call to develop more sophisticated explanations of imperialism was reflected in scholars of imperial history’s growing appreciation of the need to ‘treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field’.Footnote 119 And yet, much of this work, both mainstream and critical, relies on a conflation of imperialism and colonialism inherited from the theoretical counter-revolution this article has sought to expose. One major limitation this imposes on contemporary critical scholarship is that imperial studies in IR are overwhelmingly concerned with the question of the ‘legacies’ of empire to the exclusion of the question of contemporary forms of imperialism. This leaves scholars interested in the operation of imperialism today at something of a dead end, and it has been the purpose of this theoretical reconstruction to suggest that returning to the classical theories can both clarify the question of imperialism and contribute to the renewal of theoretical frameworks for contemporary analysis of an increasingly multipolar and post-hegemonic world.
Conclusion
This article has argued that imperialism, once a capacious concept that sought to link the dynamics of capitalist development with geopolitics and war, has been reduced to a synonym of colonialism through what I have termed a theoretical counter-revolution. This counter-revolution has taken effect through two discrete steps: first, by conflating imperialism with one of its modalities, colonialism; and second, with the collapse of the major colonial empires in the post-war period, by displacing imperialism into the past. The first move has created a rift between colonial and postcolonial history, obfuscating the continuities that lay underneath this global transformation. The second has constrained critical scholarship to the question of the legacies of (colonial) empire. The implicit concession is that imperialism is no longer an active force in the world, but an after-effect of historical experience.
While the legacies of colonial empire are assuredly powerful forces that require analysis, critique, and contestation, it would be an error to regard this as the totality of the work for a renewed IR theory of empire and imperialism. For one thing, if formal colonialism has receded as a primary formation of global political ordering, it would clearly be a mistake to regard it as a thing of the past. The Russian war on Ukraine can be grasped in Lenin’s terms as a struggle for territorial redivision.Footnote 120 The Israeli war on Palestine and the wider Middle East region represents a settler colonial frontier in the classic sense, and in its most extreme and exterminatory form.Footnote 121 The wager of this article is that such contemporary forms of colonial and inter-imperial violence can be better grasped when their basis in a world of uneven capitalist development is kept in view. Accordingly, a key insight to be drawn from the classical theories of imperialism as reconstructed above is that colonization represents an extreme form of imperial expansion in the era of industrial capitalism, but not the only or the primary form. This thesis is common to the early liberal and Marxist theoreticians of imperialism: capital surpluses drive restless capitalist states abroad in a diversity of ways – formal and informal, economic and political – engendering a range of geopolitical tensions. What sets the two approaches apart is their treatment of possible alternatives to imperialism in an industrial capitalist world.
Apart from the liberal defense of imperialism represented by Conant’s work, the liberal critique, from Hobson to today, is that disequilibria of production and demand can and should be managed, not by violent imperial expansion, but by increasing the state’s role in the allocation of capital and in the domestic distribution of wealth and income. This argument is alive and well today. For instance, Klein and Pettis’s influential analysis of current trade tensions explicitly frames its intervention as an extension of Hobson’s theory of imperialism: capitalist dynamics of maldistribution and inequality drive trade imbalances, which then drive the escalation of geopolitical tensions as states manoeuvre to adjust these imbalances.Footnote 122 If the corporate share of income can be disciplined and the consumer share allowed to grow, then global imbalances of trade and capital can be tamed, and with them geopolitical tensions.
The Marxist tradition rejects this vision of a reformed, more pacific and consumer friendly capitalism. Capitalists don’t defend yawning inequalities in their home societies and export their savings abroad because they like to do so. They do so because of global competitive pressures and growth imperatives – because they have to do so.Footnote 123 The key agents of change, therefore, are not an enlightened reformist elite, but those struggling from below – workers, peasants, and revolutionary leaders from the core to the periphery. The stakes of such struggles, moreover, are not only those of national liberation and development, but the threat of global cataclysm that capitalist development poses.
In a time of escalating geopolitical tensions, global economic imbalances, and re-emergent multipolarity in the world system, the question of imperialism has clear relevance and urgency. In its first year, the current US administration has engaged in high-risk military interventions from Iran to Venezuela. It has launched a full and committed assault on the liberal trading order, sparing few allies. It has self-consciously formulated a new corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in its 2025 National Security Strategy.Footnote 124 The document can be read as marking the end of high globalization and the return to a world of spheres of influence to be protected and policed. The classical theories of imperialism – in all their richness, tensions, and limitations – are a particularly important and fertile source for scholars to draw on as we build a framework adequate to the escalating economic and geopolitical crises of this emerging multipolar world. But to do so, the theoretical counter-revolution examined above needs to be identified and defused.
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Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the International Studies Association, the Graduate Colloquium in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and the Early Career IPE Workshop in the Department of International Relations at the LSE. I thank all participants for their comments and critique. For reading and commenting on previous versions, I thank Shahab ud Din Ahmad, Ronay Bakan, Bikrum Gill, George Lawson, Robbie Shilliam, Gloria Novović, and Asha Herten-Crabb. Ben Taylor provided frequent and wise counsel. Thanks finally to the editors of this journal, and to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments and criticisms greatly enhanced the final product. All remaining shortcomings are my own.
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