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This thesis will argue that there is nothing ‘New’ about ‘New Imperialism’. Imperialism extends its nation’s political dominion over other areas, whereas new imperialism has been described as the period between 1870 and 1914. Imperialism is interpreted in a variety of ways. Moreover, the call ‘New imperialism’ is equally debated. This thesis will show that imperialism is just the continuation of capitalism. In essence, imperialism is the foundational reason that morphs itself into war as the likely outcome when capitalism stalls as a way of resetting itself to create another market. Capitalism is essentially the investment of money in the expectation of making a profit (Fulcher, 2015). Imperialism is a continuation of capitalism and a type of system consisting of a complex whole made up of several interacting connected and independent offshoots that enable it to execute its functions. Froim what presplective decide ?
Imperialism emerged from the latter part of the nineteenth century rather than the slave trade, which was more of a seventeenth and eighteenth-century process but built on the slave trade. Some scholars argue it stopped when it became less profitable. Instead, Marx highlighted that accumulation was the driving force of capitalism. Although amazed by the capitalist system during his lifetime, Marx knew that capital would concentrate.
Marx foresaw the modern structure of capitalism as the final phase of capitalism resulting from the extreme concentration of capital. This is the starting point taken by most Marxists, especially Lenin (Mandel, 1966). A little further on, he generalized this idea by insisting that a capitalist society must continuously extend its base, its area of exploitation (Mandel, 1966). Harvey (2001) terms this as a ‘spatial fix’ that takes many forms, one being large-scale infrastructure projects to absorb surpluses while facilitating expansion into new territories, which has occurred throughout capitalist development (Harvey, 2001).
Lenin (1916) stated that without reading Marx or having a Marxist understanding of the economy, there was no way to understand imperialism (Lenin, 1916). Lenin argued that monopoly capitalism is not something that just arose by accident but an inevitable phase of capitalism itself. The type of capitalism that Marx was analyzing was the competition between equally sized enterprises. As one enterprise starts to kill off, another power becomes concentrated (Lenin, 1916).
Hobson (2011) asserted that accumulating more and more capital is a routine consideration in a capitalist economy and addressed that reinvestment was central to capitalism’s fight for viability and vitality because reinvesting was required to accumulate. However, he argued that good places to reinvest were limited in, which drove the capital abroad associated with the finance and big banks. According to Hobson (2011), the banks drove imperialism, who rejected the idea that somehow imperialism was simply a political decision or that it was a national imperative to build up the nation, whether it was just the patriotic duty of people to join. A popular reason espoused among some was that imperialism was essentially missionary work to Christianise the savages and allow them to reach heaven.
The arms manufacturers selling evermore rifles and other weapons to subjugate other peoples or those who manufactured for the export trade textile corporations were among those who were beneficiaries of imperialism. However, Hobson (2011)
asserted that there were not many profitable opportunities within. Why could the capital not produce enough of the commodities at home and then benefit from international relations? It was because so much money was gained from their monopoly; they could not spend it all, and then the workers could not spend very much because of their meager wages. It was why investment and subsidiaries went abroad, which destroyed cultures and took them over (Hobson, 2011).
However, imperialism could not succeed abroad if countries were not civilized. Could imperialism have become the excuse for the ‘white man’s burden’? Hobson (2011) argued that it was not the capitalist system itself that could have been tamed if more supported trade unionism and socialists and welfare policies would increase equity and income distribution.
Rosa Luxemburg conveyed that imperialism is an extension of Marx’s idea of primitive accumulation, which was the accumulation of the slave trade, taking of the new world of gold and all of that went into creating the original accumulations needed to launch capitalism (McMahon, Siddhant and Brown, 2021). She argued that imperialism is simply an extension of that process where the world is ravaged to meet the needs for markets for home industries and for places to invest (McMahon, J., Siddhant, I. and Brown, R., 2021).
The four objectives of imperialism are to grab raw materials, control them, separate the workers from the means of production, and create wage laborers. For example, the enclosure movement in drove workers away from their ownership of small plots of land and into the cities where they had nothing but their labor to sell (McMahon, J., Siddhant, I. and Brown, R., 2021). Luxemburg thought this was the same kind of process as imperialism in a country with a natural economy and cooperative labor in a small village. Instead, workers are separated from having control of their means of production and made into wage laborers on whatever plantations to create the market system there. So in the process, the natural economy is transformed into a market economy and creates a division of labor in the industry, trade, and agriculture in a national economy (McMahon, J., Siddhant, I. and Brown, R., 2021).
Engels also added a more detailed elucidation to Marx’s comments. In his last writings, from the beginning of the industrial revolution until the 1870s, exercised an industrial monopoly over the world market (Mandel, 2022).
Thanks to that monopoly, in the second half of the nineteenth century, English capitalism could grant necessary concessions to a section of the working class at the rise of craft unions. But, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the German, French, and American competition made inroads into this English monopoly and inaugurated a period of sharp class struggle in Great Britain (Mandel, 2022)
Parenti (2020) argues that one of the laws of capitalist motion development is an expansion into the expropriation of the third world. This process has been going on for hundreds of years not because these countries are poor. He stated that nobody goes to poor countries to make money, but because these countries are rich, there are billions to be made there to be carved out taken, as the timber, the flax, hemp, Coco the, rum, copper the, iron the rubber the slaves and the cheap labor. These countries are not underdeveloped. They are overexploited (Parenti, 2020).
Lenin (1916) sees imperialism as an extension of Marx’s laws of motion of capitalism. The characteristics of imperialism and the monopolization of each industry again were something Marx had already observed. He predicted when he talked about the concentration and centralization of capital would create a financial oligarchy (Lenin, 1916). The financiers dominate the fusion of bank and industrial capital, so when the banking industry becomes monopolized, it begins to have much more power over the industrial capitalists, similar to what Hobson and Luxembourg argued. For example, in financial oligarchy Wall Street or the Britains financial sector, bank of the export of capital then becomes a characteristic, and cartels in the world divide up each market and the imperialists have divided the entire world among themselves so by the turn of the 20th century. According to Hobsbawm (1989), much of the globe outside of Europe and the Americas was partitioned into areas under the formal control of or informal political dominance of a handful of governments between 1800 and 1914. The dominant powers were Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, the USA, and Japan. Hobsbawm (1989) states this was probably a period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially regarded themselves by Western diplomats as deserving of the title of emperor was at its maximum. Gallagher and Robinson (1953) assert that imperialism was indeed made possible only through the combined efforts of indigenous peoples in the final quarter of the nineteenth century; it was more a function of African or Asian local politics that had European economic or geopolitical interests. When they ran out of collaborators, they had to leave, and when so many African leaders petitioned Europe for help, it looked like a Scrabble for protection in Africa (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). Africa was the last field of European penetration but not the most important. In the so-called expansionist era, the main work of imperialism was in developing areas already linked with the world economy. In tropical Africa, the imperialists were merely scraping the bottom of the barrel (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953).
Lenin also argued that the world was divided among the imperialists, so there is no virgin territory from the standpoint of imperialists.
Imperialism experiences uneven development, a very fundamental characteristic of dialectics, and that is the specific case that led up to WW1 once Germany became a country in 1871 under Bismarck and then it grew rapidly, causing tension with, who had been the established imperialists throughout the ninetieth century (Lenin, 1917).
J Hobson (2011) believes that military missionaries, industrialists, and financiers established a coalition of convenience to force Western colonial domination on foreigners. However, the backbone of imperialism was the influence of financial capitalists. In their imperialism of free trade, Gallagher and Robinson (1953) suggest there is continuity in imperialism throughout the ninetieth century and that finance men played only a minor role. In their view, imperialism was the direct political aspect of integrating new regions into the expanding worldwide economy. Direct rule was necessary for regions with significant economic opportunities or strategic interests. However, where security was minuscule indirect informal control through free trade was the preferred method of imperialism. Both formal and informal empires were functions of the extending pattern of overseas trade investment (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953).
Robinson and Gallagher (1953) theorize that diplomats and merchants worked together to spread the rule of free trade from Buenos Aires to Istanbul from Niger to the Yangtze. Regions were drawn into the empire of informal sway. The reason for colonies in Africa was not for empire building but for the strategic necessity of protecting sea routes to India.
However, when power broke down moved into the military (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). However, MacDonagh (1962) critiques the impact the Gallagher-Robinson thesis has and conveys that the idea of ‘free trade imperialism’ should be revised. He acknowledges the authors were successful in establishing the imperialist nature of policy and public attitude in the years I845-6o, dispelling the opposing idea (MacDonagh, 1962); however, he adds that they mislead us dangerously when they downplay the presence of an unyielding opposition to imperialism and deny variation in imperial strategy during the Victorian era. In fact, In no other decade, perhaps, did fortune favor the imperialists so markedly as in the I850s (MacDonagh, 1962). In the last quarter of the 19th century, commercial and industrial supremacy was challenged by other powers in Europe like France and Germany. They were forced to protect what they already owned by the method of imperial expansion. Their African empire was the product of fear, a fear of losing early lead geography is more critical to empire-building than frontiers are critical. Afghanistan comes to mind as an example of protecting India by conquering more and more land. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by the United States and enforced by the navy, sufficed to spare Latin America new European adventures. The outcome of the U.S. Civil War ensured that North America would not develop a multilateral balance-of-power system (Shahid, 2019).
Cain and Hopkins (1986) and their imperialism thought the cause of imperialism was the gentlemanly capitalism of aristocrats and bankers. It was a metropolitan phenomenon with three hundred years of continuity from 1688 to the twenty-first century. The informal empire of free trade and manufacturers did not exist, and the periphery was a sideshow. The most significant expansion of finance into the foreign market took place from 1850 to 1914. After WW1 had to compete on worsening terms with other financial centers such as Japan, Germany, and the United States. Cain and Hopkins (1986) state
that imperialism was a collaborative process and required the integration of world economics with Britain as an early example of globalization. However, acknowledge that when the terms of credit from the city bankers involved loss of sovereignty to other nations expansion became imperialism. There is a story of city bankers and loafing aristocrats pursuing the peaceful art of lending money. Nevertheless, there is one area in which Cain and Hopkins and Gallagher and Robinson agree that the actions of economically motivated actors do not rely on Marxian structure to explain imperialism.
Conclusion
Is new imperialism simply a response to a reduction in profitability?
Slavery happened because capitalism didn’t exist then slavery wouldn’t have happened capitalism is extremely treacherous and will destroy anything in its way. However, what could these concentrated capitalists do they could either spend their income and stockpile a bunch of unsold goods which is usually not a good idea, or refuse to spend all their money and then reduce effective demand which would ensure a glut or they could find a foreign place to invest so it’s pretty straight forward that the investment abroad. The flip side to conquering land this that imperialism was about finance and not strategic interests but whatever it is the baseline the circumstances still present themselves as the continuity of capitalism. Provide indications of the intrinsic interest in the historical importance of the subject as well as justification for historians’ continued preoccupation.
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