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This chapter shows that Hobson's conversion into a radical critic of imperialism and of imperial expansion was even more prolonged than his transformation into a New Liberal. It also shows how his critique of imperialism was an important moment in a long-standing but evolving radical discourse. It was not until 1898 that Hobson successfully merged his radical stance on domestic issues with his growing hostility to imperial expansion. In ‘Free Trade and Foreign Policy’, he brought his theory of underconsumption and oversaving together with his new aversion to imperialism when he claimed that oversaving led to foreign investment and that the need to find more outlets for the latter was the key to understanding modern imperial expansion. His chief concern in 1898 was the scramble for China rather than the storm brewing in South Africa.

The reasons why, prior to modern times, no single system of political power ever succeeded in bringing all of the Indian continent and its peoples under the rule of a single imperium can be found within cultural, social, religious, and political complexities and dynamics of the continent itself. Between hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnically distinct respectable castes, intermarriage or interdining had not been acceptable. Intricate mosaics and networks of segmented and tightly stratified social structure and political power made the task of bringing all of India under one umbrella so difficult to achieve that processes of disintegration and fragmentation tended to undermine processes of political integration and unification. This chapter focuses on how and why such obstacles to political integration were overcome. It explains how fissiparous forces, tendencies, and traditions were gradually reversed, and how this was done by means and methods, manpower and money, that were a hybrid of indigenous and foreign influences.

The two ‘paramount’ reasons for ‘the transformation of the earth’ in the modern period have been ‘the explosive increase of European population and its movement overseas, and the rise of the modern capitalist economy and its evolution into industrialism’. Both these phenomena peaked during the second half of the nineteenth century, and both were closely linked to British Imperial expansion in the periphery. In the periphery, the suppliers of Britain can be divided into two broad categories, determined by their suitability for colonization by European organisms, technology, values, and production methods. The economic expansion of the periphery in the nineteenth century Imperial system was largely driven by the resource needs of European industrial economies. Today, it is Asian capitalism, rather than that of industrial Europe and North America, that shows the developing countries of the world their future, and that shows up the limitations of the economic expansion outside Europe wrought by nineteenth century imperialism.

This chapter examines how the Democratic opponents of imperial expansion prevented the emergence of an empire trap in the Philippines and occupied Cuba. The McKinley administration annexed the Philippines for strategic reasons, but anti-imperialists used their blocking power in the Senate to restrict American investment in the islands deliberately, in order to prevent the emergence of a domestic interest group favoring the islands' retention as U.S. territory. Similar laws were passed for Cuba as long as a U.S. occupation government remained. The anti-imperialists failed to grant the Philippines immediate independence, but they did succeed in retarding U.S. investment. As a result, no “Philippine lobby” ever emerged to support the permanent retention of the archipelago.

This chapter explores the forty-five-year period after the Crimean War when great powers of all stripes fell into an intense competition for formal political control over third-party territories. The competition greatly increased the level of tension in the system, even if most of the struggles stopped short of a direct great power war. Most significantly, of course, France, Britain, and Germany dove into a scramble for colonial territory after 1880 that drew most of Africa and large parts of Asia into the European orbit. On two particular occasions—the Austro-Prussian “Seven Weeks' War” of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—large-scale war between two great powers did break out. The purpose of the chapter is to uncover to what extent and in what manner economic interdependence shaped the struggles and wars of this almost-half-century period.

Technological changes, whatever their origins, have often been turned to imperial purposes. In line with this, this chapter argues that various technologies, especially when combined, enhanced the state's abilities to expand and dominate. They also affected the timing of the Imperial state's expansion, and featured significantly in the dynamics of commercial and industrial capitalism. In both the formal and informal British Empire, in temperate and tropical colonies, their transfer gave Imperial agents more scope for intervention. Technologies empowered the metropole but also, to some degree, strengthened the periphery. They also led diverse peoples to pursue the same material ends by employing similar techniques. Indigenous acquisition of expatriate tools might strengthen autonomy, but more often it paved the way for more pervasive alien influence. The intensified or ‘new’ imperialism has been seen as a product of a particular stage of finance capital, the rise of ethnic antagonisms fuelled by racist beliefs, and the geopolitical priorities of the ‘official mind’.

This chapter aims to provide a historical sketch of select major lineages in contemporary western imperialism. Contemporary western imperialism is the product of the 500 years of complex interactions between European and Euro-American imperial expansion and non-European responses. Contemporary imperialism is often studied under different headings such as neo-colonialism, open-door colonialism, post-colonialism, informal imperialism, empire, and so on. This historical sketch is limited to the aspects of contemporary imperialism collated under the heading of informal imperialism. It begins with a summary of the defining characteristics of contemporary informal imperialism. The succeeding sections describe the major historical lineages of these characteristics. The final section summarizes contemporary imperialism with the aim of a better understanding of its origins and ancestry.

This chapter provides a discussion on trade, economy, the fiscal state, and the expansion of the British Empire from the late 16th century to the early 18th century. In particular, it explores the connections between economic growth and Imperial expansion. It focuses on British domestic resources, latent and evolving, which made possible the acquisition of territory overseas and the enforcement of contracts required for long-term commercial relations with the Americas, Asia, Africa, and eventually, Australasia. It investigates from whom, from what, and from where in the economy the outward thrust to venture outside the realm and beyond Europe originated. It asks what structural and political conditions sustained the momentum of the thrust through major wars and minor conflicts with European powers between 1689 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which marked the final defeat of Iberian, Dutch, and above all French pretensions to contain British imperialism and commerce with Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

The consolidation of political economy as a distinct branch of the science of politics was simultaneous with the expansion and diversification of the overseas British Empire. This new political economy was often regarded as distant from the enterprise of imperial expansion. Political economists criticized the mercantile system of restricted colonial trades and monopoly corporations. This chapter discusses the political economy in relation to the imperial politics in India. It takes into focus the problems of imperial politics in India, the first of which was that the East India Company’s growing empire barely fitted into the notions of a British ‘empire of liberty’ which was perceived to be ‘commercial, Protestant, maritime, and free’; and the second was the British ignorance of and lack of sympathy for local customs and manners. In the chapter, the British theorists James Steuart and Adam Smith are closely examined. Both addressed the emerging empire of British India as a dilemma in political economy. Their thinking on Indian affairs posed challenges to the Company rule in India, but at the same time offered theoretical and conceptual resources for the unpopular Company government.

This chapter provides a discussion on knowledge and the British Empire. The alliance between philosophy and Empire was not merely a meeting of utility and opportunity. By the late 17th century, the pursuit of knowledge, commerce and colonies, religious piety, and a nascent patriotism were tightly bound together. The idea that knowledge might be the basis of more efficient statecraft found corresponding encouragement. The more intimate involvement of knowledge and British power after 1750 created important opportunities for scientific professionals. The chapter also describes how Imperial expansion significantly shaped Britain’s domestic intellectual life. The direct impact of expansion is clear on some branches of knowledge. It remains possible to construct Britain’s intellectual relations with its 18th-century Empire as the story of ‘expansion’.

The year 1899 was the pinnacle of Imperialism as a belief-system in Britain. Britain's continual Imperial expansion, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had led the British to believe in themselves and their Imperial role with unshakeable self-confidence and pride. It was also marked off by a series of small colonial military campaigns, in which the British armed forces were almost uniformly victorious. The detailed history of the six-day campaign is given, but it is desirable to preface it with a brief account of the British Imperialist belief-system which underpinned it. The British Imperialism in the late nineteenth century is first introduced. The chapter then describes Hong Kong in the age of Imperialism.

This chapter discusses the efforts to transform the political economy of England's imperial expansion during the Commonwealth (1649–1653). The architects of the Commonwealth's new imperial political economy were principally drawn from the worlds of unregulated Atlantic trading and East Indian interloping. In alliance with elements of the landed elite and middling social strata in London, these new merchant groupings helped to shift England's centralized territorial state away from an essentially extractive relationship with overseas commercial and colonial expansion—whereby the state attempted to “arbitrarily” raise revenues from such expansion—toward a new relationship in which the state was fully committed to providing the public infrastructure and military protection necessary for the unlimited flow of English trade, shipping, and investment across the globe.

This chapter analyzes Momotarō (peach boy), Japan's most famous folktale, and Momotarō's transformation in the early twentieth century into an allegory for Japanese expansion toward the South Seas. To overcome the dearth of overseas adventurers in Japanese history, advocates of imperial expansion championed the mobilization of this folklore hero to spark the interest of Japanese youth in the acquisition of overseas colonies. Nitobe Inazō saw Momotarō as a pedagogical tool that could fire the imagination of Japan's insular youth and spur them on to colonize the South Seas. Other writers believed that Momotarō was, at best, a flawed model for Japanese colonialism, and even blamed the failures of Japanese colonial policy on his harmful influence. In 1925, Akutagawa published a satire of Momotarō in which the peach boy is portrayed as a cruel invader who brutally attacks a group of humanized ogres living peacefully on an island paradise in the South Seas. At the end of this story, young ogres counterattack and fight to win the independence of their homeland. At the intersection of folklore, propaganda, and parody, Momotarō emerges as a contested site for debating the Japanese imperial project and for defining self and other in the age of empire.

This chapter focuses on the conservative reaction to the emergence of radical Whiggism in the 1750s and 1760s —termed the New Toryism—that developed during the 1760s and early 1770s. What was the character of the New Toryism? How and why did it transform British overseas expansion as a whole, from the colonies of North America and the West Indies to the trading settlements of South Asia? Before examining in detail the rise and development of the New Toryism during the early reign of King George III and the shift it led to in Britain's imperial expansion, it first settles accounts with the Namierite interpretation that has remained prominent for over six decades in the historiography on the politics of empire during the 1760s and 1770s.

This chapter gives a summary of the history of Wari studies and the current state of knowledge on the Wari Empire, and also summarizes the archaeological evidence for Wari presence or influence in various parts of the ancient Andes. Three archaeological populations are the focus of this study, and the chapter describes the cultural context for each of them. These include the site of Conchopata in the imperial heartland and the sites of Beringa and La Real in the Majes Valley in southern Peru.