It would be hard to deny that imperial expansion in the past two centuries was in some way related to the beginning of the industrial age, with its enormous increases in per capita production and consumption, but historians of Europe disagree about what, precisely, that relationship may have been. Much of the discussion deals with aggregates of uncertain but familiar content, such as industrial revolution, capitalism, and imperialism.

Economic historians have not yet satisfactorily settled the problem of identifying the precise relationship between industrial technology and the Western form of economic organizations, broadly but loosely called capitalism. The term originated in the 1900s, but it has been extended, backward through time and forward to the present, to refer to a set of economic institutions that has changed so dramatically, even over the past two centuries, that it can hardly be considered a single entity. With one of these aggregates so imprecise a concept, it is difficult to accept it as a prime mover, yet some authorities have suggested that capitalism caused both the industrial revolution and imperialism, and other relationships among these three aggregates have their advocates. Until the economic historians of Europe supply the rest of us with a sufficiently clear and plausible statement about the relations between capitalism and industrial technology, and with a convincing argument that either was the principal cause of imperialism, it is safer to proceed with a lower order of generalization.