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bernardporter2013 posted: "
The USA is widely considered to be – or at least to have once been – an ‘imperialist’ power; and deservedly so, as I’ve related in my book Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (2006). This is despite the protestations of many Amer"
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bernardporter2013
February 15
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The USA is widely considered to be – or at least to have once been – an ‘imperialist’ power; and deservedly so, as I’ve related in my book Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (2006). This is despite the protestations of many Americans; for after all weren’t they as a nation born of an anti-colonial revolt? That apparent contradiction – or hypocrisy - is unpicked in the book.
A few days ago, however, one prominent American, Erik Prince, ‘businessman, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater’ (Wikipedia), came out of the closet, and not only admitted to the charge, but suggested that the US should ‘put the imperial hat back on’, and take over ‘countries around the world [which] are incapable of governing themselves’. This would include ‘pretty much all of Africa’, and much of South America too. Accused of being a neo-colonialist, he replied: ‘absolutely, yes.’ Colonialism he characterised as ‘a great concept’, and the answer to all today’s diplomatic ills. (See https://theintercept.com/2024/02/10/erik-prince-off-leash-imperialism-colonialism/.) - So there we have it: imperialism of the direct, formal, territorial sort stirring in the West once again. (After Russia’s and Israel’s to the east.) A red rag, you would think, to Leftist bulls everywhere.
Well yes, of course. But I do sometimes resile at how the mere words ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ so often automatically provoke this kind of response on the Left, without an examination of the sorts of colonialism and imperialism that are meant. This was first suggested to me very early on in my career as a postgraduate historian researching into turn-of-the-20th-century anti-imperialism, concentrating on the writer and economist John Atkinson Hobson, whose theory of ‘capitalist imperialism’ has remained the foundation for most anti-imperialist thinking ever since.
The European imperialism of his time, Hobson argued, whatever its avowed motives and rationales, had as its ‘tap-root’ (his term) the appetites of capitalists and capitalist countries for easy commercial profits in the less ‘developed’ world; and indeed not only their appetites, but also their needs, in the face of the diminishing domestic profit-margins which at that stage of capitalist development were threatening to bring the whole system down. So it was a kind of imperative; which is what attracted determinist Marxists like Lenin (Imperialism: The Last [or Latest] Stage of Capitalism) to the theory a little later on.
Hobson wasn’t a Marxist. He, like Keynes (another of his disciples), thought the problem could be solved with social democracy at home and liberal internationalism abroad. He also wasn’t against imperialism tout court, but only this modern version of it. If the colonial powers hadn’t taken over African countries, what would likely have been left would not be ‘free’ nations, but anarchy and indigenous tyranny, at least for a while. Slave-trading, for example, would have endured, but in the hands of the Arabs and African chiefs who had started it in the first place. This was why his sort of Radical favoured a more ‘enlightened’ form of European colonial rule, protecting the ‘natives’ from this kind of thing.
It was these men’s thinking (and one woman’s: she’s in my book too) that dominated the Leftist debate about ‘imperialism’ in Britain thereafter, in the minds and hands of – for example – the (socialist) Fabian Society, which published books about it, and of most other constructively-minded Leftists; and which substantially influenced Labour and Liberal government policies towards the colonies from 1924-on. (It was racist Tories, incidentally, who were the most overt anti-imperialists then, on the grounds that Africans and other ‘races’ were too fundamentally inferior to be worth bothering with.) It was this consideration that led me to change the title of my doctoral thesis (and later book) from The Anti-Imperialists, to Critics of Empire (1968; re-published 2008), which seemed to me to be more accurate, and fair.
What I liked and admired about my ‘Critics’, however, was the sophistication that informed their arguments, by contrast with the simplicities of much Leftist thinking about the subject today. Rejecting instant (but not ultimate) decolonisation, and resisting the idea that any form of external influence or sway over other peoples was illegitimate; and in addition rejecting the notion – still very potent on the Left - that nearly all the ills of the world could be blamed on the latter, they made room for an analysis of the political, economic and social relations between different peoples that was not necessarily ‘racist’ in the modern sense, or even patronising (although it often was that), and was usually far more sympathetic towards ‘alien’ cultures than the strict ‘anti-imperialist’ view of them was. What they mainly criticised was not ‘imperialism’ per se, but its capture by the ‘big’ capitalism which was the real villain of the piece. That was the basis, for example, of ED Morel’s and Mary Kingsley’s critique of probably the worst example of 19th-century colonialism in Africa, which was Belgium’s ‘Congo Free State’: ‘free’ that is, for the rubber-farming capitalists, rather than for the horribly exploited Congolese.
Quite apart from this, imperialism could be benevolent, at least in the motives of some of its agents, and even occasionally beneficial, if only tangentially - look at the spread of cricket. This is demonstrably less true of ‘colonialism’, which is often confused with it, but is in fact a different creature, usually involving stealing people’s lands.
All of which is not to be blind to the atrocities committed in the names of both of these activities, and the flaws and evils that could – and often did - arise from even the ‘best’ of imperial motives. The point I’m making here is that the simple fact of something’s being tarred as ‘imperialist’ does not say all that could be said about – and against – it. We need to apply a more discriminating glass to it; to ‘deconstruct’ it, in every case. Not that I think that Erik Prince is likely to be exonerated by this - I wouldn't trust his version of America imperialism - but it’s worth bearing in mind.
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