new imperialism essay

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 6, read: industrial imperialism, the “new” imperialism.

• READ: Responses to Industrial Imperialism
• READ: Ottilie Baader (Graphic Biography)
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Experiencing Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• WATCH: Experiencing Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Asian Responses to Imperialism
• WATCH: Asian Responses to Imperialism
• READ: Dadabhai Naoroji (Graphic Biography)
• READ: Struggle and Transformation in China
• READ: Dual Consciousness
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Resisting Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• WATCH: Resisting Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• Imperialism

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• How did the political structure of the African continent change between 1880 and 1914?
• How are the terms imperialism and colonialism used differently in this article?
• What made “New Imperialism” new?
• How did racism contribute to imperialism?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• What do you think is this author’s attitude towards imperialism? Do you think that affects his analysis, and how?
• At this point in your studies, to what extent do you think racism motivated imperialism or simply justified it?

Industrial Imperialism, the “New” Imperialism

Was the “new imperialism” actually new, why did the new imperialism happen.

• Technology : Before the late nineteenth century, European states (and Japan) couldn't conquer much of the tropical world. They were held back by disease, sure. But also there were large, organized societies in many of these regions that were pretty well armed with low-tech, but effective weapons. Even if invaders had been able to take vast areas, slow communications systems would have made ruling them too difficult. All that changed when several new technologies appeared. New medicines made it possible for Europeans and white Americans to survive malaria and other tropical diseases. The machine gun and other new weapons gave conquerors a big military advantage. Telegraphs, trains, and steamships reinvented communications and travel, making it much easier to rule bigger empires.
• Industrialization and capitalism : This high-tech wave had been born mostly out of industrialization, giving Europe, the United States, and Japan these big advantages. But before you give credit to industrialization for solving problems, it's a good idea to look at the problems it created. The growth of factories in industrialized countries meant that their businesses had an increasing demand for raw materials. Korea, the African continent, and Southeast Asia had almost no factories, but plenty of raw materials. Since imperialists were also capitalists for the most part, they needed customers for all this great new stuff they were making. They went for a kind of two-for-one deal by conquering territories that could provide the raw materials they needed, and a population who would then buy their finished products.
• Racism : Existing misconceptions about race, many of which emerged with the Atlantic slave trade, were becoming even more solidified in this era. Many people within these big imperial powers believed it was their right to rule over people they thought were inferior. Within their own societies, there was already some level of racial segregation. For example, in the United States at this time, post-slavery Jim Crow laws tried to reduce the freedoms and rights of African Americans. When applying these superior/inferior racist ideas to ruling people overseas, some even justified their invasions as if they were doing a favor. They viewed empire expansion as a "civilizing mission" to improve the lives of the "uncivilized" and "inferior" people they conquered.
• Nationalism : You may remember that nationalism began with the idea that all people (the "nation") should have the right to rule themselves through their own government (the "state"). But nationalism could be twisted to the idea that one's own nation was superior to other nations, and had a right to rule over them (see "racism", above). It could also create a competitive attitude among nations. In this era, in particular, nationalism pushed the governments of Britain, France, Germany, and other European powers to compete, first in Europe and then around the world. Nationalism motivated imperialists to take new colonies before their competitors could.
• “Men-on-the-spot” : This term was created when writers paid less attention to women in history, but in hindsight it may not be an achievement you'd want on your résumé anyway. Everything we have mentioned so far was the result of big trends in the organization of societies. But sometimes, power shifted because of one person or a few people. In some cases, new colonies were carved out because a general or a businessman who had employees with guns just went out and grabbed some new territory, often because they were greedy or wanted glory, and there was no one there to stop them. This happened more often than you might think!

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From Imperialism to Postcolonialism: Key Concepts

An introduction to the histories of imperialism and the writings of those who grappled with its oppressions and legacies in the twentieth century.

Imperialism, the domination of one country over another country’s political, economic, and cultural systems, remains one of the most significant global phenomena of the last six centuries. Amongst historical topics, Western imperialism is unique because it spans two different broadly conceived temporal frames: “Old Imperialism,” dated between 1450 and 1650, and “New Imperialism,” dated between 1870 and 1919, although both periods were known for Western exploitation of Indigenous cultures and the extraction of natural resources to benefit imperial economies. Apart from India, which came under British influence through the rapacious actions of the East India Company , European conquest between 1650 and the 1870s remained (mostly) dormant. However, following the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, European powers began the “ Scramble for Africa ,” dividing the continent into new colonial territories. Thus, the age of New Imperialism is demarcated by establishment of vast colonies throughout Africa, as well as parts of Asia, by European nations.

These European colonizing efforts often came at the expense of other older, non-European imperial powers, such as the so-called gunpowder empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires that flourished across South Asia and the Middle East. In the case of the Ottomans , their rise coincided with that of the Old Imperialism(s) of the West and lasted until after World War I. These were not the only imperial powers, however; Japan signaled its interest in creating a pan-Asian empire with the establishment of a colony in Korea in 1910 and expanded its colonial holdings rapidly during the interwar years. The United States, too, engaged in various forms of imperialism, from the conquest of the tribes of the First Nation Peoples, through filibustering in Central America during the mid-1800s, to accepting the imperialist call of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which the poet wrote for President Theodore Roosevelt on the occasion of Philippine-American War. While claiming to reject naked imperialism, Roosevelt still embraced expansionism, promoting the creation of a strong US Navy and advocating for expansion into Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Philippines to exert American influence .

The Great War is often considered the end of the new age of imperialism, marked by the rise of decolonization movements throughout the various colonial holdings. The writings of these emergent Indigenous elites, and the often-violent repression they would face from the colonial elite, would not only profoundly shape the independence struggles on the ground but would contribute to new forms of political and philosophical thought. Scholarship from this period forces us to reckon not only with colonial legacies and the Eurocentric categories created by imperialism but also with the continuing exploitation of the former colonies via neo-colonial controls imposed on post-independence countries.

The non-exhaustive reading list below aims to provide readers with both histories of imperialism and introduces readers to the writings of those who grappled with colonialism in real time to show how their thinking created tools we still use to understand our world.

Eduardo Galeano, “ Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane ,” Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (NYU Press, 1997): 1 –8.

Taken from the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this classic text, Eduardo Galeano’s introduction argues that pillaging of Latin America continued for centuries past the Old Imperialism of the Spanish Crown. This work is highly readable and informative, with equal parts of impassioned activism and historical scholarship.

Nancy Rose Hunt, “ ‘Le Bebe En Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies  21, no. 3 (1988): 401–32.

Colonialism affected every aspect of life for colonized peoples. This intrusion into the intimate lives of indigenous peoples is most evident in Nancy Rose Hunt’s examination of Belgian efforts to modify birthing processes in the Belgian Congo. To increase birth rates in the colony, Belgian officials initiated a mass network of health programs focused on both infant and maternal health. Hunt provides clear examples of the underlying scientific racism that underpinned these efforts and acknowledges the effects they had on European women’s conception of motherhood.

Chima J. Korieh, “ The Invisible Farmer? Women, Gender, and Colonial Agricultural Policy in the Igbo Region of Nigeria, c. 1913–1954 ,” African Economic History No. 29 (2001): 117– 62

In this consideration of Colonial Nigeria, Chima Korieh explains how British Colonial officials imposed British conceptions of gender norms on traditional Igbo society; in particular, a rigid notion of farming as a male occupation, an idea that clashed with the fluidity of agricultural production roles of the Igbo. This paper also shows how colonial officials encouraged palm oil production, an export product, at the expense of sustainable farming practices—leading to changes in the economy that further stressed gender relations.

Colin Walter Newbury & Alexander Sydney Kanya-Forstner, “ French Policy and the Origins of the Scramble for West Africa ,” The Journal of African History  10, no. 2 (1969): 253–76.

Newbury and Kanya-Foster explain why the French decided to engage in imperialism in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. First, they point to mid-century French engagement with Africa—limited political commitment on the African coast between Senegal and Congo, with a plan for the creation of plantations within the Senegalese interior. This plan was emboldened by their military success in Algeria, which laid the foundation of a new conception of Empire that, despite complications (Britain’s expansion of their empire and revolt in Algeria, for instance) that forced the French to abandon their initial plans, would take hold later in the century.

Mark D. Van Ells, “ Assuming the White Man’s Burden: The Seizure of the Philippines, 1898–1902 ,” Philippine Studies 43, no. 4 (1995): 607–22.

Mark D. Van Ells’s work acts as an “exploratory and interpretive” rendering of American racial attitudes toward their colonial endeavors in the Philippines. Of particular use to those wishing to understand imperialism is Van Ells’s explication of American attempts to fit Filipinos into an already-constructed racist thought system regarding formerly enslaved individuals, Latinos, and First Nation Peoples. He also shows how these racial attitudes fueled the debate between American imperialists and anti-imperialists.

Aditya Mukherjee, “ Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain,” Economic and Political Weekly  45, no. 50 (2010): 73–82. 

Aditya Mukherjee first provides an overview of early Indian intellectuals and Karl Marx’s thoughts on the subject to answer the question of how colonialism impacted the colonizer and the colonized. From there, he uses economic data to show the structural advantages that led to Great Britain’s ride through the “age of capitalism” through its relative decline after World War II.

Frederick Cooper, “ French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation ,” Critical Inquiry  40, no. 4 (2014): 466–78. 

It can be tempting to write the history of decolonization as a given. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the colonial powers would not easily give up their territories. Nor is it safe to assume that every colonized person, especially those who had invested in the colonial bureaucratic systems, necessarily wanted complete independence from the colonial metropole. In this article, Frederick Cooper shows how conflicting interests navigated revolution and citizenship questions during this moment.

Hồ Chí Minh & Kareem James Abu-Zeid, “ Unpublished Letter by Hồ Chí Minh to a French Pastor ,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies  7, no. 2 (2012): 1–7.

Written by Nguyễn Ái Quốc (the future Hồ Chí Minh) while living in Paris, this letter to a pastor planning a pioneering mission to Vietnam not only shows the young revolutionary’s commitment to the struggle against colonialism, but also his willingness to work with colonial elites to solve the system’s inherent contradictions.

Aimé Césaire, “ Discurso sobre el Colonialismo ,” Guaraguao 9, no. 20, La negritud en America Latina (Summer 2005): 157–93; Available in English as “From Discourse on Colonialism (1955),” in  I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy , ed. by Fred Lee Hord, Mzee Lasana Okpara, and Jonathan Scott Lee, 2nd ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 196–205.

This excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s essay directly challenges European claims of moral superiority and the concept of imperialism’s civilizing mission. He uses examples from the Spanish conquest of Latin America and ties them together with the horrors of Nazism within Europe. Césaire claims that through pursuing imperialism, Europeans had embraced the very savagery of which they accused their colonial subjects.

Frantz Fanon, “ The Wretched of the Earth ,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato , ed. Mitchell Cohen, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2018), 614–20.

Having served as a psychiatrist in a French hospital in Algeria, Frantz Fanon experienced firsthand the violence of the Algerian War. As a result, he would ultimately resign and join the Algerian National Liberation Front. In this excerpt from his longer work, Fanon writes on the need for personal liberation as a precursor to the political awaking of oppressed peoples and advocates for worldwide revolution.

Quỳnh N. Phạm & María José Méndez, “ Decolonial Designs: José Martí, Hồ Chí Minh, and Global Entanglements ,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political  40, no. 2 (2015): 156–73.

Phạm and Méndez examine the writing of José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh to show that both spoke of anticolonialism in their local contexts (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively). However, their language also reflected an awareness of a more significant global anticolonial movement. This is important as it shows that the connections were intellectual and practical.

Edward Said, “ Orientalism ,” The Georgia Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 162–206; and “ Orientalism Reconsidered ,” Cultural Critique no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 89–107.

As a Palestinian-born academic trained in British-run schools in Egypt and Jerusalem, Edward Said created a cultural theory that named the discourse nineteenth-century Europeans had about the peoples and places of the Greater Islamic World: Orientalism. The work of academics, colonial officials, and writers of various stripes contributed to a literary corpus that came to represent the “truth” of the Orient, a truth that Said argues reflects the imagination of the “West” more than it does the realities of the “Orient.” Said’s framework applies to many geographic and temporal lenses, often dispelling the false truths that centuries of Western interactions with the global South have encoded in popular culture.

Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ,” boundary 20, No. 2 (Summer 1993), 24–50.

Gayatri Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” shifted the postcolonial discussion to a focus on agency and “the other.” Explicating Western discourse surrounding the practice of sati in India, Spivak asks if the oppressed and the marginalized can make themselves heard from within a colonial system. Can the subordinated, dispossessed indigenous subject be retrieved from the silence spaces of imperial history, or would that be yet another act of epistemological violence? Spivak argues that Western historians (i.e., white men speaking to white men about the colonized), in trying to squeeze out the subaltern voice, reproduce the hegemonic structures of colonialism and imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “ Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History ,” Social History 26, no. 1 (January 2001): 60–71.

In this article, Antoinette Burton considers the controversies around using the social and cultural theory as a site of analysis within the field of imperial history; specifically, concerns of those who saw political and economic history as “outside the realm” of culture. Burton deftly merges the historiographies of anthropology and gender studies to argue for a more nuanced understanding of New Imperial history.

Michelle Moyd, “ Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa ,” International Labor and Working-Class History , no. 80 (2011): 53–76.

Michelle Moyd’s work focuses on an often-overlooked part of the imperial machine, the indigenous soldiers who served the colonial powers. Using German East Africa as her case study, she discusses how these “violent intermediaries” negotiated new household and community structures within the context of colonialism.

Caroline Elkins, “ The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies  33, no. 1 (2000): 25–57.

Caroline Elkins looks at the both the official rehabilitation policy enacted toward Mau Mau rebels and the realities of what took place “behind the wire.” She argues that in this late colonial period, the colonial government in Nairobi was never truly able to recover from the brutality it used to suppress the Mau Mau movement and maintain colonial control.

Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Decolonization as Moment and Process,” in  Decolonization: A Short History , trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton University Press, 2017): 1–34.

In this opening chapter of their book, Decolonization: A Short History , Jansen and Osterhammel lay out an ambitious plan for merging multiple perspectives on the phenomena of decolonization to explain how European colonial rule became de-legitimized. Their discussion of decolonization as both a structural and a normative process is of particular interest.

Cheikh Anta Babou, “ Decolonization or National Liberation: Debating the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa ,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science  632 (2010): 41–54.

Cheikh Anta Babou challenges decolonization narratives that focus on colonial policy-makers or Cold War competition, especially in Africa, where the consensus of colonial elites was that African colonial holdings would remain under dominion for the foreseeable future even if the empire might be rolled back in South Asia or the Middle East. Babou emphasizes the liberation efforts of colonized people in winning their independence while also noting the difficulties faced by newly independent countries due to years of imperialism that had depleted the economic and political viability of the new nation. This view supports Babou’s claim that continued study of imperialism and colonialism is essential.

Mahmood Mamdani, “ Settler Colonialism: Then and Now ,” Critical Inquiry  41, no. 3 (2015): 596–614.

Mahmood Mamdani begins with the premise that “Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed.” Then, he seeks to turn this paradigm on its head by looking at America from an African perspective. What emerges is an evaluation of American history as a settler colonial state—further placing the United States rightfully in the discourse on imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “S Is for SCORPION,” in  Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times , ed. Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani (Duke University Press, 2020): 163–70.

In their edited volume, Animalia, Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani use the form of a bestiary to critically examine British constructions of imperial knowledge that sought to classify animals in addition to their colonial human subjects. As they rightly point out, animals often “interrupted” imperial projects, thus impacting the physical and psychological realities of those living in the colonies. The selected chapter focuses on the scorpion, a “recurrent figure in the modern British imperial imagination” and the various ways it was used as a “biopolitical symbol,” especially in Afghanistan.

Editor’s Note: The details of Edward Said’s education have been corrected.

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• Pourquoi la Palestine est une question féministe et anticoloniale
• لماذا تعتبر قضية فلسطين قضية نسوية ومناهضة للاستعمار؟
• Por qué Palestina es una cuestión feminista y anticolonial
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Developing Economics

A critical perspective on development economics, the changing face of imperialism: colonialism to contemporary capitalism.

By  Sunanda Sen and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo

How is imperialism relevant today? How has it mutated over the past century? What are different theoretical and empirical angles through which we can study imperialism? These are the questions we deal with in our edited volume on The Changing Face of Imperialism (2018) .

We understand imperialism as a continuing arrangement since the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriations, on part of those who wield power vis-à-vis those who are weak. The pattern of ‘old imperialism’, in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin, were framed in the context of the imperial relations between the ruling nations and their colonies with political subjugation of the latter, captured by force or by commerce, providing the groundwork for their economic domination in the interest of the ruling nations. Forms of such arrogation varied, across regions and over time; including  the early European invasions of South America, use of slaves or indentured labour across oceans, and the draining off of surpluses from colonies by using trade and financial channels. Imperialism, however, has considerably changed its pattern since then, especially with institutional changes in the  prevailing power structure.

The essays in the volume offer a renewed interpretation, which include the alternate interpretations of imperialism and its changing pattern over space and time, incorporating the changing pattern of oppression which reflects the dynamics underlying the specific  patterns of oppression. The pattern can be characterised as ‘new imperialism’ under contemporary capitalism as distinct from its ‘old’ form under colonialism. The varied interpretations of imperialism  as in the literature do not lessen the significance of the common ground underlying the alternate positions, including the diverse pattern of expropriations under imperialism.

The volume offers fourteen chapters by renowned authors. In this blog, we organise them in the following manner: the first five of those deal with the conceptual basis of imperialism from different angles, the next three chapters deal with contemporary imperialism, and then the rest six chapters of book deal with India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism.

The conceptual basis of imperialism: different angles

Satyaki Roy’s Imperialism: the old and the new, departures and continuities sets the tone of the volume by making the point that we do not have a single theory of imperialism applicable to all times, but several which correspond to multiple historical manifestations of imperialism in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Roy sees in earlier theories of imperialism a focus on the conflicts between nations representing interests of national capitals, while nation-states  currently are no longer the organizing unit in the context of globalisation and universal capitalism. Thus, the characterisation of imperialism today cannot be limited to a rivalry between advanced capitalist countries nor as an expression of conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations. Rather, it has to encompass the power structure and internal articulation of global capitalism.

Above is followed by a paper on Marx’s capital and the global crisis by John Smith dwelling on the current status of the working class worldwide (workers as ‘global labour’). The paper looks at the cost-cutting exercises by Multi-National Corporations, which displaces the domestic workers by cheaper foreign labour, achieved either through emigration of production (“outsourcing”) to overseas or through immigration of workers. This so-called neoliberal globalisation is the new imperialist stage of capitalist development, where imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of “southern” labour by northern “capital”.

The next chapter is on Reflections on Contemporary Capitalism by Prabhat Patnaik. It takes us from the original formulation of imperialism by Lenin, who associated imperialism with centralisation of capital in industry and among banks, along the different phases of imperialism since then, to its present form marked by the hegemony of international finance capital, globalisation and neoliberal policies. Interestingly, Patnaik takes issue with interpretations of imperialism as a political project undertaken by the ruling state of US, through enlisting the support of other advanced capitalist States. For him, taking the leading country as the driving force behind imperialism means attributing to its state an autonomy , which none of the present capitalists countries have. Instead, as he argues, today’s imperialism is marked by the retreat and subservience of the state to international finance and, consequently, as the only political option, a selective delinking of the national economy from the global economy.

The particularity of imperialism today is also the topic addressed in Anjan Chakrabarti in the following chapter. Neoliberal globalisation has re-shaped the international division of labour and intra-national division of labour by mechanisms of offshoring, outsourcing and subcontracting, so that globalisation has been able to fragment activities across time zones, spaces and enterprises within the nation states. The methodology of the analysis draws on Bukharin (1915) and his notion of policy of conquest. Thus, for Chakrabarti, today’s imperialism is a policy of conquest through force and violence over the “outside” of the capitalist world.

Subhanil Chowdhury ’ s chapter departs from the classical notion of imperialism based on the division of the world into two clear segments of advanced and the other (third world). Imperialism, seen as a thwarting capitalist development in the developing countries, is no longer true in today’s world, at least for a set of large countries, such as India and China. The “third world” countries, now located within the overall circuit of global capital, have access to global finance, markets and technology, and their big bourgeoisie have become major players in the international market However, the significant factor remains that the workers in these countries are way behind those of the United States, in terms of their wages, and their lives are not on par with those of the workers in developed countries. Through reforms and globalisation, we witness a process of enrichment of the ruling classes, while the vast masses of people remain detached from these capitalist processes and remain impoverished.

Contemporary imperialism

The variety of imperialism as domination through financialisation and neo-mercantilism is the background of all three following chapters. The discussion looks at the region where this domination originated (the United States) and examines how it impacted on Latin America and other world regions.

Noemi Levy’s Latin America in the new international order: new forms of economic organisations and old forms of surplus appropriation examines the performance of six Latin American economies and points out that the region failed to adopt a successful neomercantilist model, also that the region did not benefit from the new international division of labour, which shifted the manufacturing industry from the United States to developing economies. The imperialist relationship between the United States and Latin America forms the core of Amiya Bagchi’s chapter, which reviews the US domination through military and political control, with complicity of the domestic elite in Latin America.

The points raised tally with the next chapter by Gerald Epstein on the role of military spending in US, with imperialism as the velvet glove as opposed to the iron fist of the rise of neoliberal policies and globalisation. Quantifying the effects of the military expenses  Epstein  arrives at the conclusion that workers do not, on balance, gain from US imperialism, at least since 1985. This contrasts the  previous three decades when US workers had much more power to get a piece of the imperialist pie. Oil prices were extremely low and very stable. Taxes were more progressive and trade competition was not as intense.

India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism

Utsa Patnaik’s chapter provides the general framework of British domination by providing data on the exceptionally large magnitude of India’s export earning appropriated by Britain. The mode shows the major role the colony was made to play in providing real and financial resources for sustaining the British Empire. Britain largely re-exported imported tropical goods and secured imports from temperate lands, providing wage goods (corn) and raw materials (cotton, iron) without which a large part of its domestic output could not be produced.  She concludes that Britain, the world capitalist leader at the centre of the global payments system, was crucially dependent on India’s export earnings for financing the current account deficits with the rest of world.  With access to the rising foreign exchange earnings of its colonies, Britain could settle its own external deficits as well as to export capital overseas.

In the next chapter Sunanda Sen looks at another dimension of the imperialist relationship between India and Britain in colonial times. This include the “trading” so to say, of indentured labour’ from India. Faced with a shortage of labourers at the end of slavery, the planters in the British colonial islands pressurised their imperial government to find ways to supplement labour cheaply. The desperately poor and famine-stricken populations of colonies in Asia and in India, in particular, turned out as the target of an organised large-scale emigration of indentured labourers from India to plantation colonies, on basis of coerced labour in sugar plantations. It can also be seen that the waves in immigrant flows were singularly linked to the fortunes of sugar plantations. A triangular network involving labour (indentured), commodities (both raw sugarcane and processed) and finance characterised the relationship between Britain and the such colonies. This was the variety of imperialism, rooted initially in slave trade and later in movements of indentured labour which proved a lucrative source of earning surpluses and it’s appropriation  by commercial and financial interests of imperial Britain.

Indenturing of labour, as above from India (and China) continued till the 1920s, followed by the commencement of a new era in labour welfare and labour control in colonial India. This is the theme of the next chapter by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya that looks at the interaction between the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the welfare and labour legislation in India between 1919 and 1929. The post-First World War time saw the emerging global economic system, the growth of transnational capital and the internationalisation of the labour market, which required the devising of an international normative on labour. One of those aims was to make sure that the higher wages and benefits did not become an impediment in developed countries to compete with less developed countries where wage costs were lower. As for labour laws in India, the colonial state put on the statute books an impressive number of labour laws, however ineffective in terms of applications.  Those only  show the pressure coming from Britain, where lobbying was active to promoting labour legislation in India  since cheaper labour in India was perceived as a threat.

Next chapters of the book address the issues connected with liberalisation and deregulation in contemporary India,  viewed  as a process  in  new pattern of imperialism, with effects damaging in terms of income distribution, poverty and social inequality within the country. The piece by Sukanya Bose and Abhishek Kumar looks at the role of finance and services in the Indian economy. Examining the contrasting evidence  in empirical studies  the authors offer their main hypothesis that several service sectors, namely, banking, insurance, real estate and business services, did not contribute to the growth of industrial sectors and vice-versa. The linkages of these sectors with the rest of the economy have “probably been weak such that their expansionary phase has not been accompanied by a revival of overall economic  growth”. The hypothesis is put to test in the paper by using empirical exercises, which confirms their hypothesis that there has not been any finance/service-led growth in India. Next, Byasdeb Dasgupta looks at the Indian labour market and the effects of the neoliberal reforms, in particular the dismantling of the welfare-state and of the system of labour protections, especially in India. This is followed by Surajit Mazumdar’s closing piece bringing together various threads of analysis relating to  imperialism as presented in the previous chapters, and with particular reference to India. Attention is drawn to  the distribution of income  moving very sharply in favour of corporates, which is to the disadvantage of India’s working population, mostly in agriculture and in the informal non-agricultural sectors.

The volume seeks to provide a global panorama of imperialism, across time and space. The conceptual arguments support the analysis of the disadvantaged part of the world in South America and major parts of Asia, like India. The study will provide new ideas and insights in the continuing pattern of expropriation in the global economy.

Sunanda Sen is former Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She researches contemporary capitalism, international finance, economic history and development. She tweets at @sensunanda .

Maria Cristina Marcuzzo is Professor of Economics, University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’, Italy, and Fellow of the Italian Academy of Lincei. She has worked on classical monetary theory, the Cambridge School of Economics, Keynesian economics and, more recently, on Keynes’s investments in financial markets.

Photo : Andreas Lehner

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New Imperialism

• First Online: 03 November 2023

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• Brett Bowden   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2544-0171 7  

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This chapter begins by discussing the era of New Imperialism that ran from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as a second wave of colonial expansion took place. It goes on to further discuss a second era of New Imperialism from the late twentieth century on in which imperialism took on different forms that did not necessarily require the formal conquest and annexation of territory. Examples include neo-imperialism, economic imperialism, cultural imperialism, liberal imperialism, humanitarian imperialism, democratic imperialism, Western imperialism and American imperialism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of moral imperialism suggesting that all forms of imperialism have a moral dimension.

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Bowden, B. (2023). New Imperialism. In: Williams, H., Boucher, D., Sutch, P., Reidy, D., Koutsoukis, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36111-1_15

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What is imperialism in history?

Does imperialism still exist today, did imperialism cause world war i.

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Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other territories and peoples. Because it always involves the use of power, whether military or economic or some subtler form, imperialism has often been considered morally reprehensible. Examples from history include Greek imperialism under Alexander the Great and Italian imperialism under Benito Mussolini .

Today the term imperialism is commonly used in international propaganda to denounce and discredit an opponent’s  foreign policy . International organizations, including the United Nations, attempt to maintain peace using measures such as collective security arrangements and aid to developing countries. However, critics say imperialism exists today; for example, many in the Middle East saw the U.S. -led Iraq War as a new brand of anti-Arab and anti-Islamic imperialism.

Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, European nations sought to extend their economic and political power overseas, especially in Africa, in a period dubbed “the New Imperialism .” This competition led European elites and the broad literate classes to believe that the old European  balance of power  was over and a new world order was dawning. Some scholars argue that this process intensified imperial rivalries and helped provoke World War I .

imperialism , state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas. Because it always involves the use of power, whether military or economic or some subtler form, imperialism has often been considered morally reprehensible, and the term is frequently employed in international propaganda to denounce and discredit an opponent’s foreign policy .

Imperialism in ancient times is clear in the history of China and in the history of western Asia and the Mediterranean—an unending succession of empires. The tyrannical empire of the Assyrians was replaced (6th–4th century bce ) by that of the Persians , in strong contrast to the Assyrian in its liberal treatment of subjected peoples, assuring it long duration. It eventually gave way to the imperialism of Greece . When Greek imperialism reached an apex under Alexander the Great (356–323 bce ), a union of the eastern Mediterranean with western Asia was achieved. But the cosmopolis, in which all citizens of the world would live harmoniously together in equality, remained a dream of Alexander. It was partially realized when the Romans built their empire from Britain to Egypt .

This idea of empire as a unifying force was never again realized after the fall of Rome. The nations arising from the ashes of the Roman Empire in Europe, and in Asia on the common basis of Islamic civilization ( see Islamic world ), pursued their individual imperialist policies. Imperialism became a divisive force among the peoples of the world.

Three periods in the modern era witnessed the creation of vast empires, primarily colonial. Between the 15th century and the middle of the 18th, England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain built empires in the Americas, India , and the East Indies . For almost a century thereafter, relative calm in empire building reigned as the result of a strong reaction against imperialism. Then the decades between the middle of the 19th century and World War I (1914–18) were again characterized by intense imperialistic policies.

Russia , Italy, Germany, the United States , and Japan were added as newcomers among the imperialistic states, and indirect, especially financial, control became a preferred form of imperialism. For a decade after World War I the great expectations for a better world inspired by the League of Nations put the problem of imperialism once more in abeyance . Then Japan renewed its empire building with an attack in 1931 upon China. Under the leadership of Japan and the totalitarian states—Italy under the Fascist Party , Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union —a new period of imperialism was inaugurated in the 1930s and ’40s.

In their modern form, arguments about the causes and value of imperialism can be classified into four main groups. The first group contains economic arguments and often turn around the question of whether or not imperialism pays. Those who argue that it does point to the human and material resources and the outlets for goods, investment capital, and surplus population provided by an empire. Their opponents—among them Adam Smith , David Ricardo , and J.A. Hobson—often assert that imperialism may benefit a small favoured group but never the nation as a whole. Marxist theoreticians interpret imperialism as a late stage of capitalism wherein the national capitalist economy has become monopolistic and is forced to conquer outlets for its overproduction and surplus capital in competition with other capitalist states. This was the view held, for instance, by Vladimir Lenin and N.I. Bukharin , for whom capitalism and imperialism were identical. The weakness in their view is that historical evidence does not support it and that it fails to explain precapitalist imperialism and communist imperialism.

A second group of arguments relates imperialism to the nature of human beings and human groups, such as the state . Such different personalities as Machiavelli , Sir Francis Bacon , and Ludwig Gumplowicz , reasoning on different grounds, nevertheless arrived at similar conclusions—which Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini also endorsed , though not for intellectual reasons. Imperialism for them is part of the natural struggle for survival. Those endowed with superior qualities are destined to rule all others.

The third group of arguments has to do with strategy and security. Nations are urged, proponents of this viewpoint say, to obtain bases, strategic materials, buffer states, “natural” frontiers, and control of communication lines for reasons of security or to prevent other states from obtaining them. Those who deny the value of imperialism for these purposes point out that security is not thereby achieved. Expansion of a state’s control over territories and peoples beyond its borders is likely to lead to friction, hence insecurity, because the safety zones and spheres of influence of competing nations are bound to overlap sooner or later. Related to the security argument is the argument that nations are inevitably imperialistic in their natural search for power and prestige .

The fourth group of arguments is based on moral grounds, sometimes with strong missionary implications . Imperialism is excused as the means of liberating peoples from tyrannical rule or of bringing them the blessings of a superior way of life. Imperialism results from a complex of causes in which in varying degrees economic pressures, human aggressiveness and greed, the search for security, the drive for power and prestige, nationalist emotions, humanitarianism, and many other factors are effective. This mixture of motivations makes it difficult to eliminate imperialism but also easy for states considering themselves potential victims to suspect it in policies not intended to be imperialistic. Some states of the developing world have accused the former colonial powers and other nations of neocolonialism . Their fear is that the granting of aid or the supply of skilled personnel for economic and technical development might be an imperialist guise.

Under international organizations , attempts have been made to satisfy by peaceful means the legitimate aspirations of nations and to contain their illegitimate ones. Measures for these purposes have included collective security arrangements, the mandate and the trusteeship system for dependent areas, the stimulation of cultural relations between nations, aid to developing countries, and the improvement of health and welfare everywhere. See also colonialism .

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New Imperialism: Toward a Holistic Approach

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Steven Kettell, Alex Sutton, New Imperialism: Toward a Holistic Approach, International Studies Review , Volume 15, Issue 2, June 2013, Pages 243–258, https://doi.org/10.1111/misr.12033

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A prominent theme in scholarly analyses of contemporary international affairs concerns the extent to which the unrivalled power and activities of the United States can be said to constitute a form of imperialism. Typically, the contours of this debate center on the ostensible differences between “old” and “new” varieties of imperialist practice. Yet the concept of “new imperialism” remains one on which little consensus exists. Wide differences of opinion on its origins, dynamics, and characteristics are evident, as is an analytical bifurcation between distinct “economic” and “geopolitical” explanations. This absence of conceptual unity leads to accounts of new imperialist strategy that are partial, limited, and incomplete. If the theoretical value of new imperialism is to be realized, a more holistic approach is needed. To this end, some of the key differences between the contexts of new and old imperialism are explored.

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• DOI: 10.1163/156920607X225870
• Corpus ID: 153918439

In What Ways Is 'The New Imperialism' Really New?

• Published 2007
• Political Science, Economics, Geography
• Historical Materialism

52 Citations

New imperialism: toward a holistic approach, imperialism in context: the case of france, what is to be done marx and mackinder in minsk, imperialism and capitalist development in marx’s capital, new imperialism, a theoretical war: accounting for american imperialism in the middle east, state, capital, crisis, dominant capital and the transformation of korean capitalism: from cold war to globalization, critical globalization studies: an empirical and theoretical analysis of the new imperialism, the historical constitution of the political forms of capitalism, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Philosophers for Change

Ideas for a new age.

The ‘new’ Imperialism

by Zoltan Zigedy

Imperialism, expressed as a nation’s securing economic dominance of, influence over, or advantage from other nations, remains much as Lenin characterized it in his 1916 pamphlet, Imperialism . Its uninterrupted persistence, from the time well before the pamphlet’s publication through today, certainly supports the claim that it constitutes the “highest stage of capitalism.” Its basic features, as outlined by Lenin, remain the same over a century: monopoly capital serves as its economic base, it supports a profound and growing role for finance capital, and the exportation of capital to foreign lands continues as a primary aim. Corporations spread their tentacles to every inhabitable area of the world and nation-states vie to encase those areas in their protected spheres of influence. War is the constant companion to imperialism.

While the character and grand strategy of imperialism never changed, the tactics evolved and shifted to adjust to a changing world. New developments, shifting power relations, and new antagonisms produced different responses, different approaches toward the imperialist project. With the success of the Bolshevik revolution in the immediate wake of an unprecedented bloodletting for nakedly imperial goals, the task of suffocating real existing socialism rose as the primary focus of imperialist powers. Those same powers recognized that the Soviets were encouraging and aiding the fight not only against the spread of colonies, but against their very existence.

Consequently, it is understandable that the next round of imperialist war was instigated by rabidly anti-Communist, extreme nationalist regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. World War II came as a caustic mix of expansionism, xenophobia, and anti-Communism.

In the twentieth century, accelerated by the technologies of war honed in World War I, oil production played a greater and greater role in shaping the future fields of imperial contest. Acquiring oil and other resources was not an insignificant factor in the aggressions of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Clearly, both economic factors and political factors shaped the trajectory of imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century.

While no one doubts that the old European great powers hewed to an imperialist course until World War II (after all, they ferociously clung to their colonies), the myth still exists that the US was a reluctant imperialist. Apologists point to the ‘meager’ colonial empire wrenched from Spain (conveniently ignoring the nineteenth-century expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans as well as the deals, wars, and genocide that ‘earned’ that expansion). They point to the ‘isolationist’ foreign policy of the US following the Treaty of Versailles, a claim demolished by the historian William Appleman Williams and his intellectual off-spring.[1] Appleman Williams showed that imperialist ends are achievable by many means, both crude and belligerent and subtle and persuasive. He showed that domination is effectively achieved through economic ties that bind countries through economic coercion, a tactic as effective as colonial rule. US policy, in this period, anticipates the financial imperialism of the twenty-first century. Appleman Williams and others revealed a continuous US imperialist foreign policy as doggedly determined as its European and Asian rivals.

A new model prevails

After World War II, the balance of power shifted in favor of a Euro-Asian socialist bloc centered around the Soviet Union and a liberated China, threatening even greater resistance to imperial world dominance. Through both mass resistance and armed struggle, colonial chains were loosened or broken. The war-weakened European powers strained to hang on to their colonial possessions. Moreover, the US, the supreme capitalist power, largely rejected the old colonial model.

In its stead, less coercive, but even more binding economic ties were secured through ‘aid,’ loans, investments, and post-war institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This ‘neo-colonial’ tactic especially recommended itself because of the needs of the Cold War and the vast economic asymmetries favoring US power. Since the Cold War was also a monumental battle of ideas, US rulers sought to cast aside the ugly, oppressive imagery of colonial administration and military occupation. Further, the enormous need for capital by those under-developed by colonialism or ravaged by war could easily be fulfilled by the US, but at the price of rigid economic ties binding a country to the global capitalist economy now dominated by US capital.

The towering figure of Africa’s most fervent advocate for unity, socialism, and defiance of imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah, was a pioneer in developing our understanding of neo-colonialism. He wrote in 1965 in words that ring true today:

Faced with the militant peoples of the ex-colonial territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, imperialism simply switches tactics. Without a qualm it dispenses with its flags, and even with certain of its more hated expatriate officials. This means, so it claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom,’ which has come to be known as neo-colonialism .[2]

President Truman affirmed the US commitment to the evolved neo-colonial program in his 1949 inaugural address when he rejected the ‘old imperialism.’

Gordon Gray, in a special report to the President issued on November 10, 1950, offered a motivation for the new program:

The largest part of the non-Soviet world… measured in terms of population and land areas, consists of economically underdeveloped regions. With some exceptions, the countries of the three areas–Latin America, Asia, and Africa–fall into this category. In the non-Communist parts of these areas live… 70 percent of the population of the entire non-Soviet world. These areas also contain a large part of the world’s natural resources… [T]hey represent an economic potential of great importance… The contrast between their aspirations and their present state of unrelieved poverty makes them susceptible to domestic unrest and provides fertile ground for the growth of Communist movements…[3]

But the US variant of classical imperialism predates the Cold War instantiation embraced by the Truman administration. As Appleman Williams notes, post-World War I leaders like Hoover, Coolidge, Hughes, and Stimson endorsed an international ‘community of interest,’ achieved by encouraging the penetration of US business worldwide. In Appleman Williams’s words, “These men were not imperialist in the traditional sense… They sought instead the ‘internationalization of business’… Through the use of economic power they wanted to establish a common bond… Their deployment of America’s material strength is unquestioned.”[4]

It is important to note that their choice of a more benign imperialism was not based upon moral considerations, but self-interest. Moreover, it necessarily preferred stability when possible, even if stability came through the exercise of military might. President Coolidge acknowledged this in a Memorial Day address in 1928: “Our investments and trade relations are such that it is almost impossible to conceive of any conflict anywhere on earth which would not affect us injuriously.”[5] As a late-comer to the imperial scramble, US elites chose the non-colonial option, avoiding the enormous costs in coercion, counter-insurgency, and paternalistic occupation associated with colonialism–and equally avoiding conflicts that might rock existing and expanding business relations.

In the post-World War II era, the Marshall Plan and The Point Four program were early examples of neo-colonial Trojan Horses, programs aimed at cementing exploitative capitalist relations while posturing as generosity and assistance. They, and other programs, were successful efforts to weave consent, seduction, and extortion into a robust foreign policy securing the goals of imperialism without the moral revulsion of colonial repression and the cost of vast colonies.

In the wake of World War II, US imperialism reaped generous harvests from the ‘new’ imperialism. Commerce Department figures show total earnings on US investments abroad nearly doubling from 1946 through 1950. As of 1950, 69% of US direct investments abroad were in extractive industries, much of that in oil production (direct investment income from petroleum grew by 350% in the five-year period).[6] Clearly the US had recognized its enormous thirst for oil to both fuel economic growth and power the military machine necessary to protect and enforce the ‘internationalization of business.’

One estimate of the rate of return on US direct investments from 1946 to and including 1950 claims that Middle Eastern investments (mainly oil) garnered twice the rate of return of investments in Marshall Plan participant countries which, in turn, produced a rate of return nearly twice that of investments made in countries that did not participate in the US plan.[7] Undoubtedly, US elites were pleased with the rewards of the new imperial gambit.

Patterns were set in the period immediately after World War II, patterns that persist even today. The basis for US hostility toward Venezuela can be anticipated in US imperialism’s early stranglehold on the Venezuelan economy. As early as 1947, the US exported nearly $178 million of machinery and vehicles to that country, primarily to and for foreign-owned oil companies. Only $21 million of that total went to domestically owned companies or for local agricultural use. In the same year, the income from American direct investments totaled $153 million.[8] Is it any wonder that the US would meet any independent path of development, such as the Bolivarian Revolution, with intense resistance?

The idea of parlaying economic power, capital resources, loans, and ‘aid’ into neo-colonial dependency through the mechanisms of free and unfettered trade–the ‘internationalization of business’–may well be seen as the precursor of the various trade organizations and trade agreements of today, like GATT, NAFTA, TPP, and so many other instruments for greasing the rails for US corporations.

Outside of the socialist bloc, much of the world was newly liberated from colonial domination, but ripe for imperialist penetration in the post-war era. For two decades after WWII, the socialist bloc was united in solidarity with the forces in opposition to imperialism. Arrayed against the anti-imperialist alliance were the imperialist powers bound together by the NATO alliance and their client states. In the imperialist camp, the anti-Communist Cold War imperatives secured US leadership and contained inter-imperialist rivalries in this period.

Two worlds, or three?

It is both useful and accurate to characterize that era as a confrontation between imperialism and its opponents: imperialism and anti-imperialism.

But in the battle of ideas, Western intellectuals preferred to divide the world in a different fashion. They preferred to speak and write about three worlds: a First World of developed, ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, a Second World of Communism, and a Third World of underdeveloped or developing countries. Clearly, the gambit here was to isolate the world of Communism from the dynamics of global capitalism and plant the notion that, with the help of some stern advice and perhaps a loan, the Third World could enjoy the bounty of the First World. The Three-World concept captured completely the world view espoused by Gordon Gray in his missive to President Truman quoted above. Assuredly, the three-world distinction was both useful and productive for elites in the West–decidedly more useful than the division between imperialists and anti-imperialists.

Sadly, late-Maoism, breaking away from the socialist bloc, uncritically adopted the three-world concept in its polemics against the Soviet Union. Embracing a tortured, twisted re-interpretation, Maoism sought to separate the socialist world from the anti-imperialist struggle and establish the People’s Republic of China as a beacon for the Third World. In reality, this theoretical contortion resulted in the PRC consistently siding with imperialism for the next three decades on nearly every front, including and especially in Angola and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, significant sectors of the Western left fell prey to the confusions engendered by the debates of that time. To this day, many liberals and left activists cannot locate opposition to US dominance as objectively anti-imperialist. They place their own personal distaste for regimes like that of Milosevic, Assad or Gaddafi ahead of a people’s objective resistance to the dictations of imperialism. Confusion over the central role of the imperialism/anti-imperialism dynamic breeds cynicism and misplaced allegiances.

For example, Islamic fundamentalist fighters sided with imperialism against the socialist-oriented government of Afghanistan and Soviet internationalists. When the same forces turned on their imperialist masters their actions , not their ideology, became objectively speaking anti-imperialist. For other reasons–irrationalism, fanaticism, intolerance–we may condemn or disown them, while locating them, at the same time, in the framework of anti-imperialism. Similarly, in the imperialist dismantling of Yugoslavia, it doesn’t matter whether imperialism’s collaborators were Croatian Ustashi-fascists, or Bosnian liberals, they were all aligned with imperialism and its goals. Those who opposed these goals were acting objectively in the service of anti-imperialism. Moral rigidity is no excuse for ignoring the course of historical processes. Nor are murky notions of human rights.

As it has for well over a century, viewing international relations through the lens of imperialism/anti-imperialism serves as the best guide to clarity and understanding; imperialists prey as well upon those who we may find otherwise objectionable.

Confront or undermine?

It would be wrong to leave the impression that US imperialism is solely based upon dollar persuasion or economic coercion. American military might exists as the international police force for imperial maintenance and expansion. The difference is that the US variant of imperialism chooses the option of planting military installations throughout the world–like the cavalry outposts of Western lore–rather than incur the costs of infrastructure and administration associated with Old World colonialism.

In addition, US imperialism confers special status on trusted watchdogs strategically placed in various regions. Before the revolution, the Shah’s Iran functioned as a regional cop, armed with the latest US weaponry. South Korea filled a similar role in the Far East, replacing Taiwan after US rapprochement with the PRC. With sensitivity to oil politics, the US has paired reliable Arab countries–Saudi Arabia or Egypt–with Israel to look after things in the Near East.

But employing regional gendarmes has challenged US policies as domestic upheavals or peer embarrassment has convinced some trusted clients that subservience will be widely viewed as–well, slavish subservience. Consequently, cooperation with the US has become more covert, less servile.

The hottest moments of the Cold War demonstrated that military confrontation with Communist led forces was not a wise move either in desired results or costs. The Korean and Indochinese Wars, interventions visiting a military reign of terror on small countries, proved that even the greatest imperialist military machine could not match the tenacity and dedication to victory of a far less materially advantaged foe. After the decisive victory of the Vietnamese liberators, the US never again sought a direct military confrontation with Communism.

But when the struggle of those fighting to escape imperialism and the capitalist orbit escalated, the US began relying more on surrogates, mercenaries, and clients. In place of direct military intervention, US policymakers relied on covert schemes, secret armies, and economic sabotage. In the Portuguese African colonies and South Africa, in Ethiopia, South Yemen, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and several other countries, Marxism-Leninism served as a guiding ideology for liberation and nation-building. At the same time, Marxist parties played a significant role in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in the Portuguese revolution, and in European politics. By the end of the 1970s, the zenith of militant anti-imperialism and the global influence of Marxism-Leninism were reached. Imperialism appeared to be in retreat worldwide. And the leading imperialist country, the US, had suffered a domestic crisis of legitimacy from the extra-legalities of the Nixon Administration and serious economic instability.

Unfortunately, supporting this shift in the balance of forces globally came at great costs to the Soviet economy. The newly born, socialist-oriented countries were largely resource-poor, economically ravaged, and riven with ethnic and social schisms, all of which were easily and readily exploited by imperialism. Aid and assistance taxed the Soviet economy and in no small way contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union a decade later. Civil war, dysfunctional economies (thanks to colonialism), insufficient cadres, and unskilled administrators left those committed to building socialism facing a profound challenge, a challenge that proved impossible for most after the demise of the Soviet Union. It would have taken decades to integrate these countries into the socialist economic community. Unfortunately, they were not granted that opportunity.

Faced with a deteriorating international position, the cornerstone of the imperialist alliance–the US and the UK–changed course, electing regimes that refused to accept a restructured world order disadvantaging imperialism. The Thatcher and Reagan administrations signaled a new belligerence, a vigorous and aggressive assault on the twentieth-century bastion of anti-imperialism, the socialist community. A massive arms build-up and innumerable covert interventions coincided with the rise of an ideologically soft-headed Soviet leadership to dismantle the European socialist community in the decade to follow.

With the demise of the European socialist bloc, imperialism regained its nineteenth-century swagger, enjoying a nearly unopposed freedom of action. TINA–the doctrine that There Is No Alternative–seemed to prevail as much for imperial domination, as for capitalism.

A shaken international left faced a new, unfavorable balance of forces going into a new century. Far too many stumbled, took to navel-gazing, or spun fanciful, speculative explanations of the new era. The moment was reminiscent of the period after the failed revolution of 1905 famously described by Lenin:

Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments. At the same time, however, it was this great defeat that taught the revolutionary parties and the revolutionary class a real and very useful lesson, a lesson in historical dialectics, a lesson in an understanding of the political struggle, and in the art and science of waging that struggle. It is at moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.[9]

Unfortunately, most of the left learned nothing from the defeat of 1991.

Militant anti-imperialism returns

If Marx teaches us nothing else, he reminds us that historical processes play out in unexpected, perhaps even unwelcome ways. The suppression of secularism as a tactic for disarming movements for independence or social progress is as old as the British Empire and probably older. Certainly the British colonial authorities were masters at divide and conquer, encouraging ethnic or religious differences to smother otherwise secular movements. It was this proven approach that joined US and Israeli policy planners in making every effort to discredit, thwart, split, and penetrate every secular movement in the Middle East: influential and substantial Communist Parties, left Ba’athists, radical democrats, nationalists, etc. The secular PLO was notably targeted. At the same time, they sought to use Islamic fundamentalists by covertly supporting them as an alternative and actively encouraging divisive conflict. Hamas was one such organization, chosen specifically as a hostile option to the militantly anti-imperialist PLO.

Similarly, the US and its allies sought to weaken the Soviet effort in Afghanistan by funding and arming the Islamic fundamentalists engaged in a civil war against forces advocating free, secular education, land reform, gender equality, and modernization.

Radical Islamic fundamentalism had waned in the 1950s and 1960s, losing momentum to the awakening inspired by Nasserism and other nascent national movements. But the encouragement and material support of the US and Israel rekindled these movements. Add the demise of the Soviet Union and the loss of support for secular national movements, and imperialism blazed a path for the growth and prominence of fundamentalism.

Not surprisingly, the grievances, the injustices endured by the people of the Middle East now found expression through the organs and institutions of fundamentalism, just as the peoples of Latin America found expression for their plight through the Catholic Church when denied other options by fascistic military dictatorships.

The Palestinian Hamas-inspired intifada shocked Israel and its allies from their smug arrogance. And the brutal attacks on US interests, the US military, and on targets in the domestic US further shocked imperialism. Lost in the revenge hysteria, hyper-patriotism, and religious bigotry fueled by the attacks were the casus belli invoked by the fundamentalists: the occupation of Palestine since the 1967 war and the use of Saudi bases as US military staging points before and after the 1991 invasion of Iraq.

While the targeting of civilians is regrettable, it is regrettable in its entirety : whether they be German civilians bombed by the allies in Dresden, Korean women and children massacred by US soldiers in Taejon, or villages destroyed by US aircraft in Vietnam. But it is more than a curiosity or a mark of barbarism that oppressed peoples facing a modern, advanced army with superior resources fight by different rules. Nor has there ever been an anti-imperialist movement that was not called ‘terrorist’ by its adversaries. Granting that Marx and Engels were not always consistent or correct on these questions, Engels offers insight in his column in the New York Daily Tribune published on June 5, 1857:

The piratical policy of the British Government has caused the universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners, and marked it as a war of extermination. What is an army to do against a people resorting to such means of warfare?… Civilization-mongers who throw hot shells on a defenseless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matters to the Chinese if it be only successful? Since the British treat them as barbarians, they cannot deny to them the full benefit of their barbarism. If their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres are what we call cowardly, the civilization-mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare. In short, instead of moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese, as the chivalrous English press does, we had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis , a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war. And in a popular war the means used by the insurgent nation cannot be measured by the commonly recognized rules of regular warfare, nor by any other abstract standard, but by the degree of civilization only attained by that insurgent nation.[10]

Writing well over a century-and-a-half ago, Engels better understood the dynamics of anti-imperialist resistance than modern-day commentators, including most of the left.

Failing to understand the dynamic of ‘popular war,’ as Engels called it, only led to escalation: an invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, a subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq, incursions in Somalia, drone attacks throughout the region, aggression against Libya, destabilizing Syria, isolating Iran and other actions proclaimed as ‘anti-terrorist,’ but perceived by the people of the Middle East as aimed at forcing their submission to outside diktats . Accordingly, there is little chance that the hostilities invited and unleashed by imperialism will ebb any time soon. Only an exit and a cessation of meddling can promise that result.

Writing in 1989, well before the full unfolding of militant Islamic fundamentalism, Manfred Bienefeld reflected upon what he saw as the dimming prospects for anti-imperialist struggle, speculating on the—

…terrible possibility that in today’s world these forces may be permanently beaten back aided by the massive resources and powers available to the ‘international system’ and their local collaborators. It is striking that those movements that appear to be capable of sustaining such resistance for any length of time are movements like those of Islamic fundamentalism which refuse to calculate costs and benefits according to the calculus of those who shape the international system. [my emphasis][11]

Bienefeld’s words were eerily prescient.

Like the Chinese response to British aggression, the resistance to US imperialism in the Middle East has been nasty; fighters have refused to submit to incineration and slaughter like the Iraqi army when faced with an overwhelmingly overpowering conventional army in 1991 and 2003. And like the English press cited by Engels, the Western media moralizes over tactics while purposefully ignoring the century of great-power aggression, occupation, and colonization of the region. For the apologists of imperialism, the systematic injustices of the past carry no moral weight against the most desperate actions of the powerless. One is reminded of the scene in Pontecorvo’s brilliant film, The Battle of Algiers , when the captured Ben M’Hidi is asked by a reporter why the liberation movement, FLN, plants bombs in discos and schools. His reply is succinct: “Let us have your bombers and you can have our women’s baskets.”

Where Islamic fundamentalism will take the people of the Middle East (and other areas of largely Islamic populations) is unclear. Close study of the different threads would undoubtedly show different and socially and economically diverse prospects. But what is clear is that as long as it carries the mantle of the only force resisting imperialism in the region, it will enjoy support and probably grow, though fraught with the contradictions that come from religious zealotry.

Risings in the south

Resistance to imperialism in the backyard of the US–Central and South America–has a long and noble history: long, because it traces back to the fight of the indigenous people against conquest and enslavement; noble, because millions have given life and limb in wars of liberation and movements of resistance.

But it wasn’t until 1959 that a Latin American country broke completely away from the grasp of imperialism. The Cuban revolution produced a government hostile to foreign intervention, rapacious landowners, and greedy corporations—a formula sure to bring the disapproval of the powerful neighbor to the north. The rebel leaders met threats with defiance. As US belligerence began to suffocate the revolution, the Cuban leaders turned to and received support from the socialist community. In retaliation for this audacious move, the US organized an invasion of the island, only to be met with overwhelming, unexpected resistance. Unable to bring Cuba to its knees, imperialism enacted a cruel quarantine of Cuban socialism that persists to this day.

In the post-war era, the cause of the Popular Unity program in Chile inspired a generation in much the way that the cause of the Spanish Republic inspired a generation in the 1930s. The Allende government embodied the aspirations of nearly the entire left: a break from US imperial domination and a peaceful, electoral road to socialism. In 1973 those aspirations were dashed by economic subversion, the CIA, and a brutal coup launched by the Chilean military. More importantly, the coup in Chile sent the message that US imperialism would readily accept military, even fascist rule in Latin America before it would tolerate others following the Cuban path, the path away from imperialist domination.

But the tide of anti-imperialism could not be held back. Leaders like Lula, Rousseff, and Bachelet emerged from resistance to military dictators or, like Morales, from trade union militancy. As democratic changes inevitably surfaced, all were positioned and prepared to take their respective countries in another direction. The Kirchners in Argentina were more a product of the Peronista tradition of populist nationalism, a tradition often annoying the superpower to the north.

But most interesting and, in many ways, most promising, was the emergence of Hugo Chavez as the lightning rod for anti-imperialism in Latin America. Because Chavez rose from the military, he seemed to hold a key to unlocking the problem of military meddling in Latin American politics. Moreover, the Venezuelan military was a Latin American rarity–a military unwelcoming to US training and penetration. Chavez’s prestige with the military held or neutralized much of the military from going over to the 2002 coup attempt.

Clearly the most radical of the wave of new Latin American leaders, Chavez advocated for socialism. While Venezuelan ‘socialism’ remains a visionary, moralistic project, neither fully developed nor firmly grounded, it counts as an energetic pole raising questions of economic justice in the most profound fashion. Growing from a strong personal relationship between Hugo and his spiritual kin, Fidel, Cuba and Venezuela mark one pole of militant anti-imperialism. Together, they stand for political and economic independence from the discipline of great powers, their institutions, and transnational corporations.

Because they cherish their independence, they have earned the enmity of US imperialism. Lest anyone believe the recent trade for the Cuban patriots negotiated by the Cuban government means that the US government seeks peaceful co-existence with anti-imperialism, think again. The US has, in fact, escalated its aggression against Venezuela and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on the heels of that exchange.

The other social and political movements formed in Latin America range across the political spectrum from cautiously social democratic to avowedly socialist. They stretch from Nicaragua in Central America through the entire Southern continent. Though they have no common political ideology, they have a shared aversion to accepting the demands of greater powers, a refusal to toe the imperialist line. To a lesser or greater extent, they support independence from the economic institutions governing the global economy. And they tend to support the consolidation and mutual support of their vital interests within the Latin American community. To that extent, they constitute a progressive, anti-imperialist bloc.

Today’s imperialism and its problems

Any survey of imperialism and its adversaries must note the pathetic role of most of the US and European left in recent years. Even in the most repressive moments of the Cold War, large anti-war movements challenged militarism, aggression, and war. But those movements have shriveled before indifference and ideological confusion. In the post-Soviet era, imperialism cynically appropriated the language of human rights and manipulated or bred an entire generation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with innocuous, seemingly socially conscious banners, but disruptive missions. So-called ‘color’ revolutions proliferated, paradoxically supported and directed by a host of government and private-capital funded NGOs. These organizations promoted a brand of ‘democracy’ that mobilized Western-oriented liberals and Western culture-mesmerized youth against established, often election-legitimized governments. Most of the Western left naively applauded and uncritically supported these actions with no understanding of the forces at play.

Much of the European and US left passively watched the dismantling of Yugoslavia–blinded by NATO proclamations about self-determination and ethnic violence, as if kindling the fires of extreme nationalism would produce anything other than separatism and hatred. In a masterful assault on credibility, NATO bombs were interpreted as enforcing human rights in Serbia and Kosovo.

The imperialist game of deception proved to work so well that it has been repeated again and again, in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, to only name a few. It’s a sad commentary on the US labor movement (and its European counterparts) that it stands aloof from US imperialism (when not assisting it). Samuel Gompers, the conservative, first President of the American Federation of Labor joined the Anti-Imperialist League over a century ago; his counterparts of today cannot utter the words.

Looking back, it is likely that few if any of the US and NATO aggressions of the last twenty-five years would have been dared if the Soviet Union still existed. Put another way, nearly all of the many interventions and wars against minor military powers were initiated because the US recognized that there was no powerful deterrent like the former Soviet Union. In that sense, imperialism has had a free hand.

Nonetheless, while twenty-first century imperialism endures, it does so despite great challenges and severe strains. Unending wars and deep and lasting economic crises have winded the US and its NATO allies. Military resistance to imperialism has proven resilient and determined, as would be expected of those fighting in defense of their own territory. The US all-volunteer military and low casualty rate have been a calculated success in pacifying many in the US, yet there is a widespread disillusionment with war’s duration and lack of resolution. Despite media courtiers continually stirring the pot of fear and hatred with hysterical calls for a war on ‘terror,’ the cost of that war in material and human terms becomes more and more apparent.

Memories of Vietnam haunt military strategists in the US who are finding it difficult to disengage in the face of escalating violence and the surfacing of new adversaries. It may be tempting to follow the lead of many liberals and label the trail of broken nations, shattered cities, slaughtered and maimed people traveled by the US military, its mercenaries, and camp followers as a product of incompetence and miscalculations. It is not. Instead, it is the product of imperialism’s failure to peacefully maintain a global economic system that guarantees the exploitative and unequal relations that enable imperialist dominance. In fact, it is a sign of a weakening imperialism that less than thirty years ago triumphantly stood admiring its final victory.[12]

The old symptoms return to afflict imperialism. Lenin saw the intensification of imperialist rivalries–competition for resources, spheres of influence, capital penetration–as an intrinsic feature of imperialism. In his time, the British Empire dominated, but with Euro-Asian rivals rising to challenge its supremacy. Commentators noted the ‘scramble’ for colonies and the rising tensions that ensued. Military and economic blocs were formed to strengthen the hands of the various contestants. World War followed.

While inter-imperialist war may not be imminent, the signs of discord, intensified competition, and shifting alliances are growing. Tensions between the US, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, and even the EU are constant. Japanese nationalism has stirred historic antagonisms in the Pacific region, challenging the PRC’s economic might. The US has sought not to diffuse these tensions, but to intervene to advance its own interests.

The US has promoted or prodded Eastern European nationalism to shear away countries that were formerly accepted as part of the Russian sphere of influence. Not surprisingly, Russia has interpreted these moves as hostile acts and taken countermeasures. The Ukrainian crisis has produced belligerence unseen since the Cold War. At the same time, the EU opposes escalating anti-Russian punitive sanctions urged by the US, sensing the danger of disrupted economic relations and even war at a time when the European community is already suffering severe economic pain.

New alliances have formed as a counter force to US imperialism. The BRIC group, for example, exists as a loose community made up of significant players in the global capitalist economy: PRC, India, Russia, and Brazil. Though the members are not ostensibly in conflict with the US, they oppose the hegemony of the US in international institutions and the tyranny of the US dollar in international markets. They espouse a multi-polar world without US domination. Theirs is not an anti-imperialist bloc, but an anti-US hegemony bloc. They are not opposed to the predation inherent in international economic competition; they are only opposed to US dominance of that predation.

This is in contrast to the ALBA bloc, a group of eleven Caribbean, Central and Southern American nations establishing an economic community. ALBA was envisioned by then Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an alliance moving to escape the clutches of the global economic system. Chavez saw the expanding development of mutual trade, shared institutions, integration and a common currency as steps toward a community more and more removed from the rapacious international capitalist system. Of course that is a promise only to be realized far into the future. Moreover, it is a project only capable of achieving escape velocity when the member states embrace socialist economic principles. Nonetheless, ALBA counts as a significant irritant to imperialism.

Political forces are unleashed worldwide that promise to disrupt the course of imperialism. Unanswered economic discontent has fueled nationalism and religious zealotry, forces that inspire distrust of existing institutions and open markets. Spain, for example, is riven with separatism; even the UK is threatened with Scottish autonomy. Economic nihilism and conspiratorial xenophobia have strengthened neo-fascist movements throughout Europe to the point where they seriously threaten the existing order.

Clearly, the political, social, and economic fabric of imperialism, its stability, and its ability to govern the world is under great stress. From world economic crisis to interminable wars, the world system has fallen far from its moment of celebration at the end of the Cold War.

Indeed, imperialism has changed. Colonialism–with the exception of Puerto Rico, Guam and a few other remnants of the past–is gone, with vestiges, like Hong Kong, either absorbed or liberated. Yet what otherwise exists today strongly resembles the imperialism of Lenin’s time, the imperialism of economically vulturous nations unfettered by a counter force like the Soviet Union. Perhaps, the ‘new’ imperialism is little more than a return to the imperialism that opened the last century with the US replacing Great Britain as the dominant imperial power–the ‘new’ is simply the reassertion of the old.

Understanding today’s imperialism requires some ideological re-tooling. The days of an alliance of socialist countries and newly liberated colonies searching for new roads under the socialist umbrella are past. In its stead are capitalist countries competing against the more dominating capitalist countries. Should they succeed in deposing the US, they in turn will fight to retain hegemony. That is, they will behave like a capitalist country. Of course opposing US hegemony is objectively anti-imperialist even when it seeks to impose its will on another capitalist country (Russia, today, for example). Indeed that is part of the struggle against imperialism–an essential part. Likewise, the struggle to resist and end US aggression and occupation of lands in the Middle East is a component of the contest with imperialism.

But the fight to end imperialism once and for all is the fight to end capitalism.

[Graphic: The Guardian ]

[1] See The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920’s , Science and Society , Winter, 1954 for an early exposition of this thesis.

[2] http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/ch01.htm

[3] The Point Four Program: Promise or Menace? Herman Olden and Paul Phillips, Science and Society , Summer, 1952, p 224.

[4] The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920’s , Science and Society , Winter, 1954, pp 13-16.

[5] Ibid. p 16.

[6] All data from Olden and Phillips pp 234-237.

[8] Olden and Phillips, p 232.

[9] Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder , International Publishers, 1969, p 13.

[10] Engels, Friedrich. Persia and China , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Colonialism , Foreign Languages Publishing House, ND, pp 127, 128.

[11] Bienefeld, Manfred. Lessons of History and the Developing World , Monthly Review, July-August, 1989, p 37.

[12] Most famously, in Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist The End of History and the Last Man , 1992.

[ Thank you ZZ for this essay .]

Zoltan Zigedy is the nom de plume of a US based activist in the Communist movement who left the academic world many years ago with an uncompleted PhD thesis in Philosophy. He writes regularly at ZZ’s blog , and on Marxist-Leninism Today . His writings have been published in Cuba, Greece, Italy, Canada, UK, Argentina, and Ukraine.

If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for Change , philosophersforchange.org . Thanks for your support.

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141 Imperialism Essay Topics & Examples

🔥 top imperialism topics, 🏆 best imperialism essay examples & topics, 👍 good imperialism essay topics, 💡 most interesting imperialism topics to write about, ❓ imperialism essay questions.

To write a high-quality imperialism essay, you will need to get a good topic and conduct thorough research. Our experts have gathered some original titles and examples to facilitate this task for you.

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• Imperialism, Colonialism, and Nationalism The concepts of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism were particularly prominent and essential in the 19th and 20th centuries. In conclusion, imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism played a key role in the course of the 19th and […]
• “When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism” by Teju Cole Photography, in this case, is a tool, which can be used in a wide variety of ways, and condemning it rather than the practices it allows to document is strange. This photograph is a striking […]
• H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and British Imperialism Though the British Empire was the complex of colonies, dominions, mandates, protectorates, and other territories ruled by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the people of the Empire lived in fear on […]
• American Imperialism in the 19th century The term can also be used to refer to the extension of practice, to acquire dominion, control by to the distant or closer union of territory/ nation.
• Pop Culture as a New Tool of Imperialism From the first standpoint, most of the experts agree upon the point that the effectiveness of pop culture as one of the instruments of the so-called “soft power” is unquestioned.
• Ecological Imperialism This work can be improved upon by ensuring that human development is not relegated to the sidelines as Crosby has argued.
• Imperialism and Modernization The skills learnt in farming were of great help to the colonies since they applied them in their farms after independence and this accelerated their modernization process.
• Imperialism in India By 1858, the British regained control and immediately passed the Government of India Act, which allowed the British Crown administrators to run the country instead of the British East India Company.
• European Imperialism Impact in Ibo Society Prior to the arrival of white men in Umuofia, the society was heavily dependent on agriculture. For instance, the Igbo would kill children given to the community as prisoners of war but this phenomenon was […]
• Industrialization and Imperialism in America The post-war era became a period of the tremendous growth of industries and modern businesses; giving the nation a new economic and political power both locally and abroad.
• Social Darwinism in European Imperialism Darwinism, in general, is a biological theory describing the appearance of new species and extinction of the existing ones defining species through the process of natural selection1 that is the core of Darwin’s theory and […]
• History: Imperialism Impacts in Spain It also strengthened the relationship between America and many European countries, which led to the development of more political, economic and military influence in these regions compared to other parts of the globe.
• Lenin on Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin, in his analysis on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, stated that the integration of bank capital with the industrial capital facilitates the creation of financial oligarchy.
• Relationship Between Modern Imperialism and Economic Globalization Modern imperialism also relates to economic globalization in that the European and Western powers emphasized on civilization, as they spread in most parts of the world; this ultimately led to economic globalization. Modern imperialism led […]
• Swift’s and Conrad’s Critiques of Imperialism So, the authors of the works of Jonathan Swift called Gulliver’s Travels and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, agreed in their view of the imperialistic system.
• Racism in the US: Settler Imperialism They prove that colonial imperialism is a structure, not a contextual phenomenon and that, as such, it propagates the marginalization of native people.
• Imperialism: Historical Background and Modern Perspective As a consequence of being denied a say in the creation of the laws and policies of the other country, its people are reduced to second-class citizens.
• The Concept of English Imperialism Settlers that had financial or other influences had also partaken in the moves to the Americas in order to escape the control of the royal family and the current government.
• The Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League The aggravation of the social contradictions of the imperialist era at the end of the 19th century gave rise to democratic movements. The league was formed in 1898 to fight the annexation of the Philippines.
• Modern Western Imperialism: Causes and Impacts From the 18th to the early 20th century, most of the populated territories in the world came to be dominated by just a handful of powers from Europe of North America.
• How Did Cold War and Post-Cold War U.S. Imperialism Affect African Societies? During the Cold War, both the socialist motives of the USSR and the imperialist nature of the United States affected African nations and their changing political states.
• Imperialism and Nationalism in Middle Eastern Politics Thus, in order to understand the political situation in the region, one needs proper knowledge of its history and the driving forces that led to the emergence of its contemporary countries.
• The State of Arab Science: Role of Imperialism The interviews revealed that there are people who are unaware of the role Arabs played in the development of science, while others believe that their contributions are marginalized today. Similarly, Arab contribution to science is […]
• Cultural Imperialism in the United States However, with the recent protests and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, more and more people start to believe that discrimination exists.
• Imperialism: Politics and Differences of Empires Therefore, the Ancient Roman army combined the peaceful mentality of protecting the land from invaders and the notion of the conquest of other states.
• Imperialism and Its Effect on the World He firmly believes that the western influence has been and is currently the cause of underdevelopment in the Third world countries.
• Imperialism and Its Negative Consequences The article was written in 1917 when Lenin gave his explanation of why the World War One broke out stating the ‘predatory’ essence of the powerful states to take over each other economically and politically.
• The Industrial Revolution & Imperialism The revolution began in the 18th century in England and subsequently spread to other parts of the world. The revolution has played a major role in the expansion of the global economy in the sense […]
• Imperialism as a Policy and an Ideology From a political point of view, Hobson argues that a genuine nationalism characterized by possession of a national history and collective pride by the European nations in the19th century marked the passage from traditional nationalism […]
• Globalization and Imperialism in the Third World In the face of globalization, communication as in the use of language and style in music, speech and art form the primary material for intercultural transmission in various forms of the media.
• How Imperialism Offered Great Opportunities to Elite Women These women more often interacted with native women and were moved by the plight of women in the remote regions they voyaged.
• Imperialism and Its Peoples: Facing Imperialism The European states occupied the whole of Africa and were competing amongst themselves for control of the territory. The European states that were economically stable and had stronger military occupied most of the regions.
• American History of Imperialism: Cultural and Economic Processes Cultural imperialism on the other hand is the subordination of the culture, traditions, and ideologies of the subordinate territory by those of the imperial state.
• American Empire and Cultural Imperialism So we can say that America has become imperialistic and the reason for it becoming one was in order to take the control of the market in order to sell its products and also to […]
• Was Christopher Columbus an Imperialist? The travel narratives of Christopher Columbus were given in the Letter and Journal of Columbus. The Letter by Columbus was addressed to his mentors namely Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, is not just a narrative […]
• Imperialism: A Study by John A. Hobson The author of this literature was found to be George Allen & Unwin, eminent economists, who appealed to the economists in the country against the school of imperialism opted by Great Britain in the early […]
• American Imperialism and Democracy It comes with increased control as well as the subjection of the conquered to the rules and the demands of the conqueror.
• The Practice of Wearing the Veil and Cultural Imperialism The questions that are raised by recent research in this context are whether banning headscarves is not cultural imperialism because it means the death of another culture.
• Western Feminist Critics and Cultural Imperialism To be able to fulfill the above-provided task, it would be necessary to discuss and analyze the issues of race, gender, sexuality, the oppression of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, the attitude of the feminists toward the […]
• Motives for British Imperialism in Africa By the stroke of the eighteen thirties the Boers who were by then the majority in South Africa, embarked on what has been called the Great Trek in order to run away from the colonial […]
• Imperialism vs. Anti-Imperialism in American History This is the first meaning of this word and the second is the development of the country as to be means of expanding its territory.
• Imperialist Global Order After World War I Thus, the general trend of the after-war years was the dismantling of multiethnic empires and the establishment of new nation-states. However, World War I also created new challenges to the existing hierarchies of wealth and […]
• Global Culture and Cultural Imperialism in the United States The influence of the Indian culture in the UAE is visible through the acceptance of Indian cultural values in the UAE social scene.
• World Civilizations and Imperialism The article discusses two theories explaining imperialism: the economic theory of imperialism advanced by Hobson and Lenin and the realists’ explanation promoted by Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Aron.
• Imperialism and the Life of Manly Courage The poem justifies the decision by the Europeans to enter Africa and mentions that it was a way of helping the Africans.
• Ecological Imperialism in World History Therefore, the impact of the conquest of America is that it led to the introduction of new diseases to different countries.
• Western Imperialism and Asian Response This defeat elevated the status of Japan as a military power, and it also led to the annexation of Korea by Japan.
• “New Imperialism” in the Late 19th Century The need for new markets and raw materials, missionary work, new military conflicts, and new ideology were the main reasons for the new imperialism.
• Sports Role in the Imperialism and Nationalism Development In that case, it is an indication of certain developments within the nation’s country that promote the ideas of inequality and superiority, such as the ideas of imperialism and nationalism.
• The Far East Nations: Isolation and Imperialism Consequently, Japan and China were unable to resist the imperialism of the Western nations such as the United States and Britain.
• American Imperialism and Global Identity The entry of America into imperialism was orchestrated through the military and economic approach. This implies that imperialism was a remedy for the lawlessness happening around the world.
• Japanese Imperialist Expansion and Its Drivers The expansion of the Japanese empire in the Asian continent took place in the same period when the Western countries were actively invading China.
• Politics and Western Imperialism in the Middle East At the height of the scramble for the Middle East countries, the Western powers first studied the region and also watched each other’s activities in the area.
• The United States and Imperialist Power The relevant assumption is typically applied to the example of the USA that is certainly one of the most powerful countries in the current civilization.
• Why Imperialism is Advantageous to the United States? Availability of resources and new markets will boost the development of the US economy. The US imperialism is one of the most efficient ways to solve this issue.
• Imperialism and Revolutions in East Asia However, the US opposed the idea of spheres of influence in 1899 and advocated the open market system, where every Western power had the right to the Chinese market.
• Holocaust and Nazi’s Racial Imperialism The scholar argues that the event was a result of the racial imperialism championed by the Nazi Party in the country.
• Imperialism and Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa However, the level and speed of change of culture in Sub-Saharan societies increased massively after development of imperialism and settlement of Europeans in Sub-Saharan regions.
• New Imperialism’ Role in the World History On balance, it is possible to note that the new imperialism was concerned with the desire to get access to resources and new markets.
• Imperialism’ Impacts on Africa, Latin America and India The industrial revolution in Europe forced powerful states in the continent to acquire colonies in Africa with the aim of securing raw materials and cheap human labor.
• Imperialism in King Leopold II Document The charges laid against the government explicitly defines all the cruelties and unfairness done to the natives which is opposite of the expectations.
• Japan and Imperialism 1853-1945 by James Huffman The main topic in the reading is imperialism, which the author believes motivated Japan to economic and political development. The author applies a variety of data to present the concept of imperialism in Japan’s history.
• New Imperialism and Politics 1850 and 1914 One of the characteristics of the new imperialism was that Britain was no longer a major economic and political power in the world politics due to the emergence of other powers such as the United […]
• Contribution of Marxism and Imperialism in Shaping the Modern International Political System Therefore, the postulated concepts of class struggles, materialism, and the surfacing of a capitalistic world market incredibly provide a point of alignment of the Marxism concepts and theories of international relations.
• Critical Analysis of Dissertation: “Imperialism and the modern world – wars and revolutions or democratic peace?” Moreover, it explores the changing world systems after the Second World War and the interest on the concept of democratic peace as captured in the abstract.
• Imperialism History and Legacy Moreover, the scramble for Africa by colonial masters began, and this led to the Berlin Conference of 1888. Consequently, massive migration from the colonies into Europe occurred, and this was a key factor to the […]
• Imperialism Effect on the Nations Others define it as the spread of the western economy to the rest of the world. The civilized states in the west took it to themselves to spread the civilization to the rest of the […]
• How New Imperialism Was Shaped In 1994, Rwandan population was made up of three ethnic group namely the Hutus who were the majority, the Tutsi who were relatively few and the Twa who were insignificant due to their number, the […]
• To What Extent Are Liberal Theories of Humanitarian Intervention Complicit With Imperialism? In this, traditional theories such as Liberal Internationalism, which forms the basis of discussion in this essay, have also undergone a revival; particularly since the end of the Cold War, when with the failure of […]
• History of American Imperialism The dichotomy in the politics of America, which involves way in which the nation operate has greatly influenced other nations. In addition, American was involved in operational factors which were seen as crucial on the […]
• US Imperialism in Afghanistan S-Afghanistan war; the cause of the Al-Qaida attacks on the U. S and its allies and motive of the subsequent military intervention by the U.S.in Afghanistan.
• The Perils of Imperialism: Through the Lens of History To start with, it is essential to keep in mind that the imperialist tendencies especially in the Western globalized environment, affects a state on not only political, but also economical and socio-cultural levels, therefore, changing […]
• Why Were Some Countries More Successful in Responding to the Challenge of European Imperialism Than Others? Despite the high imperialism of the European nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, some nations in the three regions were successful in evading colonial imperialism due to their well established systems and strategies.
• Imperialism in the Interaction of World Cultures With all the colonization that the European nations such as Germany, Portugal and Spain associated themselves with in the region, came the synchronization of their cultures.
• Marx’s Anticipation of the Nationalism and Imperialism of the Second Half of the 19th Century The process of civilization is nothing other than a typical and complete adoption or duplication of the injurious culture of the west.
• Influence of Imperialism on World Cultures A depiction of the dangers of these extremes was the central character of the fictional novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz”.
• History of the Imperialism Era in 1848 to 1914 In this paper, however, the term imperialism is used to refer to the era from the year 1848 to 1914 when the power of Europe was extended over several nations of the world.
• Understanding the Influence of Imperialism on World Cultures through Literature and Arts As Spaniards continued expanding their territory in the Latin American countries, they influenced the natives’ way of life leading to most of the Latin Americans abandoning their culture and adopting the Hispanic culture.
• Importance of American Imperialism to the Economy and Society The economic influence of USA is primarily necessitated by the internationalization of systems of production, circulation and investment, the interpenetration of private capital and the structure of the nation.
• American Cultural Imperialism in the Film Industry Is Beneficial to the Canadian Society Cultural imperialism on the other hand is considered as the situation where the western countries dominate the media worldwide and in the process exert a lot of influences on the cultures of the developing nations […]
• Imperialism or National Protection: Is it Part of the Definition of the United States of America? The purpose of the Address to the Nation Announcing Allied Military Action in the Persian Gulf was threefold: one, to announce the commencement of military actions against Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam […]
• Western Imperialism Dynamics This is a stereotype that Puccini had created in the eyes of the Western world in reference to women from the Far East.
• American Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century From the early years of 19th century up to the civil war, Northern American boarders were to be expanded according to the plan and debates.
• The Influence of American Imperialism on Our Economy and American Society since the End of the 19th Century The United States of America was not involved in the scramble, the American imperialism only started later in 1898 during the Spanish American war where the United States of America saw the opportunity to gain […]
• Imperialism or National Protection: What is the Definition of the United States of America? Truman’s speech points to one of the core tenets of the self image of the United States; colloquially, the United States defines itself as the world’s dad, in the traditional sense.
• 19th Century American Imperialism Due to the inexperience of America in the concept of global domination, there were great challenges occasioned by the nation’s inability to decide whether or not to use the military to secure the interest of […]
• Imperialism and Globalization In spite of the fact that Haiti is already past the threatening state of affairs that it experienced at the times of imperialism, it still survives the aftereffects left by the reign of the latter.
• Why Did the US Become Imperialistic?
• What Were the Effects of Roman Imperialism?
• Why Did Korea Fall Victim to Japanese Imperialism?
• Why Was Imperialism Inevitable in the United States?
• Does Imperialism Work?
• What Is the Primary Purpose of Imperialism?
• How Important Was the Boer War in Changing Attitudes in Britain to Imperialism?
• How Did Imperialism Cause World War I?
• What Are Three Examples of Imperialism?
• What Are Some Examples of Imperialism Today?
• What Was the Most Important Cause of War, Imperialism, or Nationalism?
• How Western and Japanese Imperialism Affected China Happened?
• Was Imperialism Good for Europe?
• How Did Imperialism Affect China?
• Was American Imperialism Morally Justifiable?
• How Important Was President Theodore Roosevelt to the Development of American Imperialism?
• How Western Imperialism Affects China and Japan?
• What Attracted European Imperialism to Africa & Asia in the Late Nineteenth Century?
• What Were the Three Reasons for Imperialism?
• How Did Industrialization Lead To Imperialism?
• Why Was Imperialism Effective?
• How Far Was Imperialism the Cause of the First Opium Wars in China?
• How Popular Was the Policy of Imperialism in England?
• What Is Imperialism Called Today?
• What Do Women Want When Women Want Imperialism?
• How British Imperialism Led to the Rebellion in India?
• Was the Mexican American War an Exercise in American Imperialism?
• Why Was Imperialism Good for America?
• What Was the Impact of Imperialism on Subject Populations?
• What Was the Driving Force Behind European Imperialism?
• Slavery Ideas
• Social Class Research Ideas
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IvyPanda. (2024, February 25). 141 Imperialism Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/imperialism-essay-topics/

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• New Visions Social Studies Curriculum
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• Getting Started: Baseline Assessments
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Getting Started: Instructional Routines

• Unit 9.1: Global 1 Introduction
• Unit 9.2: The First Civilizations

Unit 9.3: Classical Civilizations

• Unit 9.4: Political Powers and Achievements
• Unit 9.5: Social and Cultural Growth and Conflict
• Unit 9.6: Ottoman and Ming Pre-1600
• Unit 9.7: Transformation of Western Europe and Russia
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• Unit 10.0: Global 2 Introduction

Unit 10.1: The World in 1750 C.E.

• Unit 10.2: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Nationalism
• Unit 10.3: Industrial Revolution

Unit 10.4: Imperialism

• Unit 10.5: World Wars
• Unit 10.6: Cold War Era
• Unit 10.7: Decolonization and Nationalism
• Unit 10.8: Cultural Traditions and Modernization
• Unit 10.9: Globalization and the Changing Environment
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• Unit 11.1: Colonial Foundations
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• Resources: Regents Prep: Global 2 Exam
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Imperialism

Western European interactions with Africa and Asia shifted from limited regional contacts along the coast to greater influence and connections throughout these regions. Competing industrialized states sought to control and transport raw materials and create new markets across the world.

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Global History II

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Review sheets for ALL of the topics in the Global II curriculum and concept mapping activities to organize that information. Students contextualize the event, discuss its significance and think about related enduring issues.

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Global History I

End of Unit Assessment: New York State Enduring Issues Essay Rubric Separated By Category

• Supplemental Writing and Regents Prep Resources

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary See 7 items Hide 7 items

These resources introduce students to the concepts and vocabulary they will encounter in the unit.

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: Vocabulary Opener

Students will recall prior knowledge of, define, and use key vocabulary words in the unit.

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: SQ 1. What is imperialism? What do images from the period tell you about imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries?

Students will describe the motivations behind 19th century imperialism.

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: Visual Exploration of Imperialism (Image Set #1)

Students will make inferences about imperialism using primary and secondary source images.

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: Visual Exploration of Imperialism (Image Set #2)

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: SQ 2. What was the geographic context for imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries?

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: SQ 3. Why did imperialism expand in the 19th and 20th century?

Unit Introduction and Vocabulary: Graphic Organizer: How did the colonizers gain, consolidate, and maintain power in their colonies?

Imperialism in India See 2 items Hide 2 items

Through these resources, students will explore the causes and effects of imperialism in India from multiple perspectives.

Imperialism in India: SQ 4. How did the British gain, consolidate, and maintain power in India?

Students will describe the motivations behind British imperialism in India.

Imperialism in India: SQ 5. What were the causes and effects of the Sepoy Rebellion?

Students will explain the causes and effects of the Sepoy Rebellion.

Imperialism in China See 3 items Hide 3 items

Through these resources, students will explore the causes and effects of imperialism in China from multiple perspectives.

Imperialism in China: SQ 6. How did British and Chinese points of view concerning trade between the two nations differ? How were they similar?

Imperialism in China: SQ 7. How did Europeans, the Japanese, and the United States gain, consolidate, and maintain power in China?

Students will describe the motivations behind imperialism in China.

Imperialism in China: SQ 8. What were the causes and effects of the Boxer Rebellion?

Imperialism in Africa See 2 items Hide 2 items

Through these resources, students will explore the causes and effects of imperialism in South Africa from multiple perspectives.

Imperialism in Africa: SQ 10. How did Europeans and people of European descent gain, consolidate, and maintain power in South Africa?

Students will describe the motivations behind British imperialism in Southern Africa. They will describe how European control of Africa changed between 1850 and 1914.

Imperialism in Africa: Imperialism in the Congo - Remote Instruction

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences? See 6 items Hide 6 items

SQ 14. To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?

Through these resources, students will explore points of view of imperialism from the 19th and 20th centuries and for each, analyze the author's purpose, audience, and the effect of the audience on the text. 

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Pre-Inquiry Quiz

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Teacher Planning Materials

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Staging the Inquiry

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Evaluating the Documents

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Synthesis Writing

Inquiry- To what extent did people in the 19th and 20th centuries express different points of view about the impacts of imperialism? How did these authors present their points of view to their audiences?: Imperialism Inquiry- Socratic Seminar

These resources provide students with an opportunity to synthesize what they learned in the unit before completing the End of Unit Assessment. See 2 items Hide 2 items

Unit Synthesis Tasks: Unit Closer

Students will argue for or against claims about world history using evidence from this and previous units.

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• Jeremy Corbyn wants more nice things, fewer nasty ones

The former Labour leader, and poet, goes canvassing

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J eremy Corbyn is a good man. You can tell because he has a beard and sandals and he writes poetry. His writings brim with goodness. In his manifesto he preaches “compassion”, “peace”, “equality”, “democracy” and other nice abstract nouns. But he has a stern side: he does not like “injustice”, “cruel” things or “greed”. He is stalwart: such feelings have made him again run for election to be the MP for “the people of Islington North”, though presumably not for the greedy ones.

Mr Corbyn used to stand not just for abstract nouns but also—though his manifesto falls a little quiet on this point—for the Labour Party, which he led between 2015 and 2020. In that time he presided over not only Labour’s worst election defeat by number of seats since 1935 but also an alleged rise in antisemitism , which critics felt smacked less of “equality” and “compassion” than of rather nastier things. Under his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, Labour first banned him from being a candidate and later booted him out of the party. In this election, Mr Corbyn is offering himself as an independent. He is also offering “hope”, for hope is “very precious”. Which is a little piece of poetry in itself.

George Orwell wrote that at one point all socialist thought was Utopian. You can see the sunlit uplands gleaming in Mr Corbyn’s prose. But for most Britons the far-leftie who might have been prime minister feels dystopian, a token of quite how unhinged British politics became in recent years. Other reminders lurk. Liz Truss is still standing for election; Boris Johnson still writes a weekly newspaper column. There is nothing in the rules to stop them, save perhaps a sense of embarrassment. As Pericles wrote, unwritten rules bring “undeniable shame to the transgressors”.

But then Pericles hadn’t encountered Mr Corbyn. And so, on a brisk June day, a small gaggle of supporters has gathered in north London to canvas for him. There are elderly men with grey beards and fleeces, and elderly women with low heels and high principles. When Mr Corbyn arrives, they clap. Jeremy, one says, has a “good heart”.

As he rarely hesitates to make clear. A recent poetry anthology he edited is dedicated “to all those suffering from miscarriages of justice” (you might have thought they’d suffered enough). In it, he promises that there is “a poet in all of us”. The anthology offers verses on war, imperialism and racism, before brightening up for a poem titled “Death of a Financier”. It ends with a poem by Mr Corbyn himself about refugees in Calais (“The setting sun gleams on the Hotel de Ville…”).

His goodness is also evident in the things for which he campaigns, such as “our NHS ”, “our schools” and “our ticket offices”. A politician of the possessive pronoun, he speaks of “our” this and “our” that a lot. (“The rich” are not embraced in this way; they possess enough already.) He is campaigning for democracy, which brings “inclusivity” and “co-operation”. Though when The Economist arrives, his reaction—“Could you stand back, please?” and “Can you leave it then?”—doesn’t feel that inclusive. The whole of the press, says a canvasser, is against Mr Corbyn. Which is unfathomable. As he is a good man. ■

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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”

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