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Title: Economic Imperialism
Author: A. J. P. Taylor
Date: 1952
Language: en
Topics: anti-capitalist, economics, history
Source: Retreived on April 30th, 2009 from http://www.panarchy.org/taylor/imperialism.1952.html

A. J. P. Taylor

Economic Imperialism

Ideas live longer than men, and the writer who can attach his name to an

idea is safe for immortality. Darwin will live as long as Evolution,

Marx be forgotten only when there are no class-struggles. In the same

way, no survey of the international history of the twentieth century can

be complete without the name of J A Hobson. He it was who found an

economic motive for Imperialism. Lenin took over Hobson’s explanation,

which thus became the basis for Communist foreign policy to the present

day. Non-Marxists were equally convinced, and contemporary history has

been written largely in the light of Hobson’s discovery. This discovery

was an off-shoot from his general doctrine of under-consumption. The

capitalists cannot spend their share of the national production. Saving

makes their predicament worse. They demand openings for investment

outside their saturated national market, and they find these openings in

the undeveloped parts of the world. This is Imperialism. In Hobson’s

words, ‘the modern foreign policy of Great Britain has been primarily a

struggle for profitable markets of investment’ — and what applied to

Great Britain was equally true of France or Germany. Brailsford put it a

few years later in a sharper way:

Working men may proceed to slay each other in order to decide whether it

shall be French or German financiers who shall export the surplus

capital (saved from their own wages bill) to subdue and exploit the

peasants of Morocco.

This idea is now so embedded in our thought that we cannot imagine a

time when it did not exist. Yet the earlier Radical opponents of

Imperialism knew nothing of it. They supposed that Imperialism sprang

from a primitive greed for territory or a lust for conquest. The more

sophisticated held that it was designed to provide jobs for the younger

sons of the governing classes (a theory which James Mill invented and

himself practised and which Hobson did not discard). Marx had no theory

of Imperialism. In classical Marxist theory, the state exists solely to

oppress the working classes — to silence their grievances, destroy their

trade unions and force them ever nearer to the point of absolute

starvation. Marx jeered at the ‘night-watchman’ theory of the state, but

the only difference in his conception was that it stayed awake in the

day-time. Hobson added a true Marxist refinement. Marx had demonstrated

that the capitalist, however benevolent personally, was condemned by

economic law to rob the worker at the point of production. Similarly

Hobson showed that the capitalist, however pacific, must seek foreign

investment and therefore be driven into imperialist rivalry with the

capitalists of other states. Previously Marxists had condemned

capitalism as being pacific and particularly for preventing the great

war of liberation against Russia. Now all wars became ‘capitalistic’,

and war the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. It is not

surprising that, when the first world war had broken out, Lenin seized

on Hobson’s ‘bourgeois-pacifist’ theory and made it the cornerstone of

neo-Marxism. Like most prophets he boasted of his foresight only when

his visions had become facts.

Hobson wrote his book immediately after the partition of Africa and when

the experiences of the Boer war were fresh in everyone’s mind. For him,

Imperialism was mainly acquisition of tropical lands, and what he

foresaw next was the partition, or perhaps the joint exploitation, of

China. In the spring of 1914 Brailsford applied similar doctrines to a

wider field. The War of Steel and Gold (1914) is a more brilliant book

than Hobson’s, written with a more trenchant pen and with a deeper

knowledge of international affairs. Though less remembered now, it had

probably a stronger influence on its own generation, and American

historians between the wars, in particular, could hardly have got on

without it. Our own thought is still unconsciously shaped by it.

Brailsford speaks more to our condition. The aggressive, self-confident

Imperialism of the Boer war seems remote to us; the competition of great

armaments is ever-present in our lives.

Both writers wrote with Radical passion. The first sensation in

re-reading them is to cry out: ‘Would that we had such writers

nowadays!’ Take Hobson’s peroration:

Imperialism is a depraved choice of national life, imposed by

self-seeking interests which appeal to the lusts of quantitative

acquisition and of forceful domination surviving in a nation from early

centuries of animal struggle for existence... It is the besetting sin of

all successful States, and its penalty is unalterable in the order of

nature.

Or Brailsford’s

Let a people once perceive for what purposes its patriotism is

prostituted, and its resources misused, and the end is already in sight.

When that illumination comes to the masses of the three Western Powers,

the fears which fill their barracks and stoke their furnaces will have

lost the power to drive. A clear-sighted generation will scan the

horizon and find no enemy. It will drop its armour, and walk the world’s

highways safe.

These are heavyweights of political combat. The intellectual diet of the

mid twentieth century cannot nourish such stamina. But we must stay the

flood of our admiration with some doubting questions. Was the

Hobsonian-Leninist analysis of international capitalism a true picture

either then or now? Has the struggle for overseas investments ever been

the mainspring of international politics?

The export of capital was certainly a striking feature of British

economic life in the fifty years before 1914. But its greatest periods

were before and after the time of ostensible Imperialism. What is more,

there was little correspondence between the areas of capitalist

investment and political annexation. Hobson cheats on this, and Lenin

after him. They show, in one table, that there has been a great increase

in British investments overseas; in another that there has been a great

increase in the territory of the British Empire. Therefore, they say,

the one caused the other. But did it? Might not both have been

independent products of British confidence and strength? If openings for

investment were motive of British Imperialism, we should surely find

evidence for this in the speeches of British imperialists, or, if not in

their public statements, at any rate in their private letters and

opinions. We don’t. They talked, no doubt quite mistakenly, about

securing new markets and even more mistakenly, about new openings for

emigration; they regarded investment as a casual instrument. Their

measuring-stick was Power, not Profit. When they disputed over tropical

African territory or scrambled for railway concessions in China, their

aim was to strengthen their respective empires, not to benefit the

financiers of the City. Hobson showed that Imperialism did not pay the

nation. With longer experience, we can even say that it does not pay the

investors. But the proof, even if convincing, would not have deterred

the advocates of Imperialism. They were thinking in different terms.

The economic analysis breaks down in almost every which has been

examined in detail. Morocco has often been treated as a classical case

of finance imperialism, by Brailsford himself and in more detail by E D

Morel. In fact, the French financiers were forced to invest in Morocco

much against their will, in order to prepare the way for French

political control. They knew they would lose their money, and they did.

But Morocco became a French protectorate. Again, Brailsford made much

play with the British investment in Egypt, which Cromer had promoted.

But Cromer promoted these investments in order to strengthen British

political control, and not the other way round. The British held on to

Egypt for the sake of their empire; they did not hold their empire for

the sake of Egypt. Even the Boer war was not purely a war for financial

gain. British policy in South Africa would have been exactly the same if

there had been no gold-mines. The only difference is that, without the

profits from the dynamite-monopoly, the Boers would have been unable to

put up much resistance. Rhodes was a great scoundrel in Radical eyes,

and quite rightly. But not for the reasons that they supposed. Rhodes

wanted wealth for the power that it brought, not for its own sake. Hence

he understood the realities of politics better than they did.

Those who explained Imperialism in terms of economics were rationalists

themselves and therefore sought a rational explanation for the behaviour

of others. If capitalists and politicians were as rational as Hobson and

Brailsford, this is how they would behave. And of course a minority did.

They took their profits, agreed with their enemy in the way and died

quietly in their beds. But they did not set the pattern of events. It is

disturbing that, while Hobson and Brailsford were so penetrating about

the present, they were wrong about the future. Hobson ignored Europe

altogether — rightly, since he was discussing colonial affairs. He

expected the international capitalists to join in the exploitation of

China and even to recruit Chinese armies with which to hold down the

workers of Europe. Brailsford looked to Europe only to reject it. He

wrote — this in March 1914: ‘the dangers which forced our ancestors into

European coalitions and Continental wars have gone never to return’. And

again, ‘it is as certain as anything in politics can be, that the

frontiers of our modern national states are finally drawn. My own belief

is that there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers.’ Even if

there were a war, ‘it is hard to believe that ... German Socialists

would show any ardour in shooting down French workmen. The spirit which

marched through Sedan to Paris could not be revived in our generation.’

It may be unfair to judge any writer in the light of what came after.

Yet men with far less of Brailsford’s knowledge and intellectual

equipment foresaw the conflict of 1914, and even the shape that it would

take. The true vision of the future was with Robert Blatchford, when he

wrote his pamphlet, Germany and England, for the Daily Mail.

This is a sad confession. Hobson and Brailsford are our sort. We think

like them, judge like them, admire their style and their moral values.

We should be ashamed to write like Blatchford, though he was in fact the

greatest popular journalist since Cobbett. Yet he was right, and they

were wrong. Their virtues were their undoing. They expected reason to

triumph. He knew that men love Power above all else. This, not

Imperialism, is the besetting sin. Lenin knew it also. Hence, though a

rationalist by origin, he turned himself into a wielder of power. Thanks

to him, there is nothing to choose between Rhodes and a Soviet

commissar. Nothing except this: the capitalist may be sometimes

corrupted and softened by his wealth; the Soviet dictators have nothing

to wear them down. If the evils which Hobson and Brailsford discovered

in capitalism had been in fact the greatest of public vices, we should

now be living in an easier world. It is the high-minded and inspired,

the missionaries not the capitalists, who cause most of the trouble.

Worst of all the men of Power who are missionaries as well.