Political Theories for Students

BIOGRAPHY:

King Shaka Zulu

King Shaka Senzangakhona laid the basis of the Zulu Empire in the early nineteenth century by protracted warfare and conquest. By use of force and often fear, Shaka gained control over a number of other Zulu clans and expanded his territory systematically. His warriors raided Zulu and then other villages and often burnt them down; captured or killed women and children; put young men into the army; and killed rival chiefs.

Shaka, born to a Zulu chief in 1787, joined the Zulu army and became its highest commander. He gained supremacy over the Zulu clans, enforcing his power with brutality. Zulu territory was then expanded by force, and Shaka created the most powerful kingdom in southern Africa through constant battle and ferocity. Shaka was assassinated by his half–brother in 1828.

The image created of him by contemporary Europeans was of a brutal savage, and during the colonial period white historians justified their control over the Zulus by using that image to condemn the independent African states they had conquered. Other African tribes also described Shaka as a ruthless tyrant and oppressor.

But for modern Zulus, Shaka is a national legend. He was a brave and inventive warrior who dominated local political opponents by ferocity and ruthlessness. He defeated other tribal chiefs to build a unified Zulu kingdom, with advanced centers of administration and regimental barracks and discipline. He recruited young men into the national army directly under his control. While he was undoubtedly a ruthless leader who used terror, he did imposed a whole new state superstructure over his kingdom which grew rich on cattle captured during almost constant military activity.

Shaka is revered every year at his gravesite by Zulu nationalists. They have revived him as a symbol of pre–European Zulu greatness. His is the more violent rewriting of history in a post–colonial mode.

empowerment. This was maintained until apartheid was abolished in South Africa in 1994.

European Modern Imperialism

Imperialism is now most popularly used to describe the expansion of Europe from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This expansion was truly exceptional because it created worldwide imperial systems, which were often larger, more populous, and more diverse than preceding ones. But they were not exceptional in purpose or design.

The imperialism of Europe created the modern and contemporary world. It was based on: technological advantages which were progressively extended through a social system which encouraged scientific advances; the correspondingly superior military power of the European states; the more productive economies of the European peoples which their societies encouraged; the larger populations which, for a while, these processes generated in Europe; and the better organized political and administrative forms the states of Europe devised which enabled them to channel superior resources to expansion. At different times the Europeans excused and supported these activities by suitable ideologies including, at first, varieties of Christian doctrine and later by a Darwinian social and scientific outlook.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Europe broke into a myriad of political organizations loosely described as “feudalism.” While this political anarchy resolved itself into better order, the secular authority of the Holy Roman Empire and the spiritual authority of the Pope, operating through the Universal Church, were at least theoretically acknowledged. But during the Dark and Medieval Ages, from the time of Charlemagne (742) to the first voyage to America in 1492, Christendom was confined to Europe by the Mongols, Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the Atlantic Ocean. The power of various European states ebbed and waned, often creating small imperial systems: the Holy Roman Empire, the Norman lands, and the Plantegenet English empire. But limited feudal, dynastic states were the norm.

The Christian Crusades were mounted into the Levant against Islam in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but repelled by the Arabs and the Ottomans. The Europeans then embarked on a period of quite brilliant expansion to the west and south, which took them to imperial mastery of much of the world. This was not driven by a more rapacious culture, or by a more avaricious economic system. What marked out the modern Europeans was their greater capacity, deriving from their better developed and more advanced economic, military, and political systems. This higher

level of development was achieved by the combination of commercial capitalism and the intra–European competitive state system.

These processes generated an internal revolution in Europe. Each state adopted the most advanced system the other states produced which led to a continuing process of technological progress, which an empire, like China, found difficult to generate. Then in 1492, Columbus broke Europe out of its geographic confines by connecting it to the wider world into which European power penetrated for the next five centuries.

The Advance of European Imperial Power

European imperial power advanced into the world in phases. During the sixteenth century the two Iberian states created the initial structure of the Atlantic economy. Under the Papal Treaty of 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the world between them approximately at longitude 60 degrees (an imaginary line which would cut through modern–day Newfoundland, the western Atlantic, and Brazil), with Spain taking that to the west, Portugal that to the east.

Spain Spain had recently evicted the Muslims and developed the finest infantry in Europe. After Cortés’ conquests in Mexico in the early–sixteenth century, the Spanish used large and impressive galleons to transport booty from the New World back to the Old. When the Habsburg House of Austria joined that of Spain, it added artillery to its murderous armory. Its ferocious Catholicism, hardened by the fight with Islam and sharpened by the Inquisition, served as a fine imperial ideology to excuse the pursuit of riches and justify conquest. The diseases the Spaniards carried, often recently imported from Asia during the Plague, killed more Amerindians than the formidable steel weapons, cavalry, and religious zeal which they had never before encountered. Some estimates had their population falling from around fifty million down to two million.

The Spanish created an empire that stretched from contemporary California and Florida to Tierra del Fuego, the islands that make up the southern tip of South America. They then explored the Pacific Ocean, which became for three centuries a Spanish “lake” across which Spanish merchant fleets transported booty from the Philippines. During most of this time, Spain was governed by Hapsburgs as a part of one of the largest European dynastic domains.

Portugal Portugal was smaller, but also better placed and less distracted by European ambitions. The

Papal deal had given it what became Brazil and the rest of the world to the east. Portuguese captains then undertook remarkable voyages which brought them to Africa and Asia on numerous and profitable voyages of discovery and enrichment. The Portuguese met Spanish power in Southeast Asia, at longitude 120 degrees, where Spain took the Philippines and Portugal Malacca and what became Timor. But Portugal was more limited in military power and was confined by size and then current technology to naval trading stations, and a chain of Portuguese ports circled the globe from Brazil to Japan.

For a time the crowns of Portugal and Spain were united by dynastic succession and the Habsburgs ruled the most extensive empire the world had known and on which the sun truly never set, embracing as it did territories in Europe, America, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia. But within two centuries it became exhausted by the efforts of defending it.

In Asia, European power was at first limited to trading stations (often fortified) established along the coast after 1511 and the early phase of the Age of Vasco da Gama. Portugal was restricted to trading stations in southern Africa, Goa, Malacca, Macao, Japan, the Spice Islands, and Timor. These fortifications often gave the Portuguese a capacity to intervene in local politics but not for the imposition of extensive imperial rule on a heavily populated continent. During the seventeenth century the Iberian states began to face rivals in their quest for world imperial dominion from the Protestant Netherlands and Britain and Catholic but nationalist France.

The Netherlands In 1648 the Netherlands emerged from the Thirty Years War independent of the Habsburgs and became, arguably, the first liberal capitalist state, and soon set about using their naval power to acquire colonies in New York, Cape Town, and the East Indies. They did this in competition with the British, against whom they fought and lost several wars, relinquishing New York and Cape Town in the process. Nonetheless, they held onto colonies, including the Netherlands East Indies until 1949, and during those three centuries exploited them remorselessly and effectively, transferring great wealth to the small and wealthy European state.

Britain and France The British began their imperial trajectory in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), a late medieval warlord of immense capacities. England was consolidated as a state and successfully defended against the Spanish Armada in 1588. It then began the conquest of North America,

where it established a series of colonial settlements. These became the thirteen colonies, profitable to the British as trading partners monopolized by British merchant marine.

The French also joined in the imperial conquest of North America by claiming the Hudson Valley corridor to the Great Lakes, and then moving into the Mississippi Valley with a view to joining Canada to New Orleans in the Gulf. This was an area immensely rich in timber, pelts, and fertile land for colonial settlement. Several wars between the British and French necessarily ensued, but were inconclusive before 1756.

The Seven Years War—the first genuinely world war—was fought between the British and French empires in 1756–1763, and waged for profitable imperial possessions in North America, the Caribbean, India, and east Asia. This war ended in a British victory and the French were evicted from Canada—and from India. The thirteen British colonies now had little need for British protection and declared their independence in 1776, which led to war.

The resulting United States of America now became the first serious version of the modern settler colonial state, liberal in government but imperial towards other territory despite its anti–imperial ideology. It set about acquiring more territory owned by others in a series of purchases (Louisiana and Alaska), seizures (Texas), and colonizations that pushed the frontier to the Pacific coast. The combination of resource rich territory and industrious population made the U.S. an outstanding example of the benefits to be derived from imperial expansion and settlement.

The British had temporarily ended the ambitions of the French outside Europe, but they re–directed their attentions. After the revolution of 1789, the French created an empire in Europe under the direction of the military genius, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. He revolutionized the map of Europe through a series of military campaigns that saw him effectively undefeated in the field from 1798 to 1813. This made France the imperial ruler of the richest continent on earth, but unable to expand outside it after the defeat of the French fleet by Britain’s Lord Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805. The French control of Europe was then ended by their defeat in Russia in 1812–1813, in Spain in 1814, at the Battle of the Nations in 1814, and finally and decisively, by the Duke of Wellington overwhelming Napoleon’s forces at Waterloo in 1815. Napoleonic rule, however, greatly enriched France.

The British were now the masters of the world outside Europe. They undertook the first attempt to create a global commercial system in place of discrete

imperial aggrandizements. With mastery of the world’s oceans after 1805, a small but capable and mobile army, a rapidly industrializing economy soon producing nearly forty percent of world output, and with a financial system based in London, the British now attempted to open the world to free trade and commerce. Between 1815 and 1870 the British used their power not to enlarge their already extensive colonies, but to open the world to commerce. After 1870 a number of other states emerged as rival powers and undertook imperial expansion designed to take territories into their own exclusive zones in traditional imperialist fashion. These included a revived France under Napoleon III, a newly unified Germany led by Otto von Bismarck, the post–Civil War United States, and, in east Asia, the Russians and the Japanese.

Asia’s experience During this process Asia was opened to European power. At first, this involved exposing reluctant states to commerce, a procedure started by the British in the 1840 Opium War with decaying imperial China, and extended by the U.S. in Japan in 1853. But as the European states became more powerful, the trading stations around the coast of Asia were not sufficient to provide access to the increasing quantities of raw materials and foodstuffs and larger markets that the Europeans believed Asia potentially presented. The Europeans undertook the conquest of Asia proper.

The Russians spread across the great Eurasian steppe and its large population and military technology, including gunpowder, took its toll. Under a series of aggressive rulers, including Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, they seized territory from the nomadic tribes and then the Chinese state from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and expanded as far as Alaska, which they later sold to the U.S. In the nineteenth century they annexed a number of mostly Muslim republics in Central Asia.

In the 1870s the French began the conquest of the Indochina states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Japanese, newly modernized and understanding the benefits of colonial expansion, defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 and constructed an empire in east Asia that was to continue to expand until 1943. The United States seized the Philippines from Spain in the war of 1898. And by the 1870s even the British had returned to imperial expansion and, in quick succession, expanded their direct rule across the whole of India, Burma, the states of Malaya, and the north Borneo colonies. The Dutch also accelerated their conquest of the entire East Indies.

The Europeans then began carving up China. The Middle Kingdom was unable to resist the attacks of

the imperial powers by the late nineteenth century. Russia seized territory to the north; and Japan to the east. The British, Germans, and French established spheres of influence with “Treaty Ports” and extra– territorial rights. And finally, when patriotic Chinese resisted, the U.S. organized a joint force to put down the Boxer Rebellion. In 1911, the dynastic state finally collapsed, to be replaced in theory by a republic, but in fact by a civil war which did not end until 1949.

Africa At the same time, the Europeans completed their conquest of Africa. Africa was first integrated into the Atlantic economy by the provision of slaves. Slavery had existed in Africa since pre–Roman times and had been maintained by the Arabs. Slave–based plantation economies were well known to the Mediterranean world and were introduced to the Canary Islands. Slavery was then brought to America. The American natives often did not serve this function well and African slaves were imported. During the three centuries of the slave trade, tens of millions of Africans were transported to the Americas and their use was integral to the establishment of imperial economies for the production of sugar, then cotton.

The Portuguese consolidated their hold on Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea–Bissau. The Spanish retained Spanish Sahara. The French established a Second Empire, adjacent to France, in North Africa as far south as the Equator. Late in the century, the British pursued a railway and corridor from the Cape to Cairo and acquired a string of possessions from the South African colonies to Egypt. The late–coming Germans took some colonial remains in South West Africa, Tanganyika, and German Somalia. The rush was so indecent that the Congress of Berlin was convened in 1884–1885 to provide order to the onslaught and draw some clear boundaries. Even then, Italy later joined the scramble and acquired Libya in 1909 and Ethiopia, indecently late, in 1935. By that time no independent states existed in Africa, although most powers were having trouble making a profit from African colonies except where precious metals were found. Even then, as in South Africa, the British found the European Boer settlers a problem to contend with in war.

Decline of Imperial Systems

This competitive expansion of the European– based empires, contributed to the tensions that led to war in 1914, but the real causes were in Europe. Nonetheless, the defeat of the Central Powers led to them losing their imperial systems. In Europe, this created modern national states in the place of the German and Austro–Hungarian dynastic creations.

But losing a war is not necessarily the only way to lose an empire. For a good example of the problems that widespread colonization can cause, one need look no further than Great Britain. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was the most powerful nation on earth. Their empire extended to all parts of the world. But the difficult war fought against the Boers hurt British prestige. Decades later, victory in World War I had nearly bankrupted the country. It became harder and harder to justify spending money on strange lands thousands of miles away from home. Moreover, Indian troops had fought for Britain on the assumption that they would be granted independence, which did not happen. The Indian people grew agitated, and feelings of betrayal and nationalism surged. A generation later, Britain tapped all of her resources once again to win World War II. The people were weary of talk about the glory of empire, and wanted the government to concentrate on the needs of its citizens at home. “Conquering these new areas cost money, as did setting up the governments to run them,” wrote William W. Lace in The British Empire: The End of Colonialism. By 1945, Britain no longer had the money or the will for imperialism. Britain’s prize for winning both world wars would be the loss of its empire and the loss of its status as the most powerful nation on earth.

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I led to the creation of a modern Turkish national state and a re–division of the Middle East. Persia (Iran) also became a nation–state. Under the League of Nations system of mandates, the British got Palestine, Trans–Jordan, Iraq, and Gulf states, and the Saudi Arabian regime came under British protection. These were added to the neighboring Egypt and the Sudan to control the route to India. The French got Syria and the Lebanon with its large Christian community dating from the Crusaders. These moves were in part designed to give the Europeans access to oil reserves rapidly emerging as the world’s most valuable commodity.

Defeated in 1918, Germany was reorganized for military expansion under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1939. It then pursued the same imperial aims once more under the Nazi regime from 1939 to 1945. This involved German imperial domination of Europe from France to the Urals to the benefit of the German state and people. This was briefly achieved by aggressive war in the early 1940s.

The Soviet Union

But the last great European empire was that of the revolutionary Soviet regime led by Vladimir Lenin, which replaced tsarist rule in Russia. The Soviet

Union’s imperial system was created in three layers. After 1917 Lenin took over most of the Russian imperial state, crushing secessionist nationalist movements after the Bolsheviks seized Moscow and St. Petersburg, particularly in Ukraine and Georgia but also in Central Asia. In a deal with Hitler in 1939 the Soviets then annexed territory in Eastern Europe, including the states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as much of Poland. After 1945 they directly annexed the rest of Poland and also established puppet, semi–colonial regimes in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania. This was the inner colonial territory. Then in the 1970s, during the retreat of U.S. power, they were able to acquire client regimes in Indo China, Cuba, several African states, and parts of the Middle East.

But this empire was not profitable to the Soviet state. Indeed, by the 1980s it was a severe drain on its resources. The cost of this imperial system was greatly increased by the policies of the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982, Leonard Brezhnev. Maintenance of the satellite states took up one–quarter of the Soviet economy by 1980. This cost included large subsidies to communist Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, cheap energy sales to the east European puppet regimes, and grants and aid to the many Third World regimes that had come under Soviet patronage. In addition, the Soviets maintained a defense budget to compete with the U.S.–but with an economy perhaps ten percent as large. In the late 1980s, this whole imperial edifice, created with great ideological zeal and at considerable material cost, was dismantled by the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL RESPONSE

The last phase in the expansion of the imperial power of the European states after 1870 was so spectacular that it sparked a major controversy about the reasons for it. A number of explanations were offered at that time, and subsequently by historians.

The most obvious was that they conquered other countries because they had the power to do so. This theory of “the pursuit of power” was advanced by Hans J. Morgenthau in his textbook on international relations, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. This pursuit of power had been common behavior by states since the Neolithic revolution. The disparity in power between the Europeans and others was for long so great that it made imperial conquest very cheap. The “lust for power” inherent in the state, particularly its military forces, pro-

vided a culture within which conquest could be justified by the security and strategic interests of the state. Even if conquest was distant, annexation could be justified in terms of denying resources to rival states. Democrat critics often pointed to the aristocratic nature of the ruling classes of nineteenth and early twentieth century European states and the believed predilection for war, chivalry and battle endemic to that class. This was, however, a difficult argument to later adduce for non–aristocratic states like the U.S. or Australia.

Other authors produced culture–based arguments. Some of these were centered on the culture of Christendom in Europe, which, it believed, had some responsibility to civilize primitive cultures and bring them within the bounds of Christian civilization. This rarely, however, looks more than a ex post facto justification for state policy undertaken for more practical and usually profitable reasons. It is unlikely that Cortés, for example, was more inspired by the conversion of souls than by the pursuit of booty. Other writers, less charitably again, believed that the arms manufactures drove states to expand their ambitions in order to fill profitable arms production contracts. This, again, proved more difficult to demonstrate than assert.

Capitalism

More commonly blamed, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was the European system of production itself, now known as capitalism. Among such critics were both liberals, like John Hobson in his book Imperialism: A Study and marxists, like Vladimir Lenin in his polemic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Hobson, an opponent of the British pursuit of the Boer War, wrote in 1900 against the European settler states in southern Africa. He argued that the capitalist countries of Europe were by the end of the nineteenth century dominated politically by the owners of capital. These capitalists could not find sufficient profitable outlets for their investments. As a result, they successfully urged the governments to pursue overseas and colonial expansion so that they could invest safely in these new colonies and make a profit. In the Boer War British capital was after the rich opportunities offered by gold and diamond mining in the Boer republics. To deal with this problem, Hobson argued, income should be redistributed to the poor in Britain, so that capitalists would be able to find profitable outlets and markets at home.

Lenin published his pamphlet in 1917 as part of his general program of seeking the revolutionary overthrow of the Russian Tsarist regime. He wanted to link

the First World War to capitalism in order to garner support from the numerous Russian opponents of the war for his revolutionary cause. Taking much of his argument from Hobson, he said that under “monopoly capitalism” the states of Europe were driven by large financial cartels pushing each country to seek imperial conquest in order to gain profitable investment opportunities. In the process of competing for these colonies, they had gone to war with each other. The only way to stop that war was to overthrow capitalism.

These arguments were ill–founded. Most investments from the capitalist countries did not go to their colonies but to other independent and wealthy capitalist states. Imperialism and war had existed as part of the human political condition since the Neolithic revolution. The First World War had its origins almost entirely in European politics. And when Lenin did replace tsarism with a revolutionary state it proved to be among the most expansionary and war–like in the world.

Benefits of Imperialism

A common view is that one positive aspect of imperialism is that new ideas and superior technologies are introduced into the conquered lands. Some feel, however, that this is an arrogant, Eurocentric viewpoint, that any positive qualities of colonialism are far outweighed by the disease, slavery, suspicion, ill feelings, and oppression often brought to new lands. Yet more than a few historians do point to specific positive qualities of imperialism, all while acknowledging the negative. As William Prescott wrote of the Aztecs in his 1837 work Conquest of Mexico:

How can a nation where human sacrifices prevail, and especially combined with cannibalism, further the march of civilization? The influence of the Aztecs introduced their gloomy superstition into lands before unacquainted with it, or where, at least, it was not established in any great strength.

Prescott did not feel that this alone justified the Spanish conquest and acknowledges the atrocities that occurred during battle, but also stated that not every result was bad for humanity, and that Cortés and his soldiers were, in many ways, simply a product of their time. In addition, it should be remembered that the destruction of the Aztec Empire may not have been possible without the surrounding Native American tribes who allied themselves with the Spaniards.

The Mongol conquest of China is often linked with the opening of a massive trade route that spread ideas and discoveries to groups of people who had before not even known of each other’s existence. This

certainly was a positive aspect. The Mongol occupation also probably helped to strengthen Chinese ethnic pride. However, it is unlikely that the Chinese benefited more, in the long run, from Mongol control than from earlier native rule.

For most of human history, philosophers have accepted that imperial expansion and conquest are a necessary part of organized political societies and their interaction with one another. In classical Greece, the martial skills and dispositions were cultivated alongside those of the intellect to produce a rounded citizen. Pericles’ speech over the Athenian dead in Thucydides makes a virtue of dying for democratic Athens. Alexander the Great was raised in the imperial tradition and ranks high among Greek heroes for pursuing conquest by force throughout his short life. The Romans made heroes of their conquerors and Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul may be read as propaganda advertising his qualifications for even higher office. This tradition continued into Christian Europe. Indeed, the greatest of the Renaissance political philosophers, Machiavelli, devotes considerable space to advising The Prince on how to deal with a conquered province.

Imperial behavior applied equally to states of differing ideological hues: the Islamic Ottoman Turks; the Christian Charles V and Philip II, dynastic rulers of the extensive Hapsburg dominions; the Bourbon absolutist monarchy in France; commercial and liberal Britain; Revolutionary France under the Directorate and Napoleon, both in pursuit of the conquest of Europe; Napoleon III and the new French empire in Africa; Kaiser Wilhelm and the Nazis in pursuit of German military imperialism into eastern Europe; Teddy Roosevelt and the “New Imperialism” of republican America; and the egalitarian settlers of Australia and New Zealand in their pursuit of the domination of the southwest Pacific.

In this pursuit of imperial expansion, societies had many and diverse proponents. Charles Darwin’s account of The Evolution of the Species, with its implied doctrine of the survival of the fittest species, was readily turned into “Social Darwinism” in justification for the conquest of the socially backward by the technologically advanced. Marx argued that European colonialism of stagnant Asia would prod what he called the “Asiatic Mode of Production” out of its lethargy and into the world of capitalist progress.

Critics

Again, this is not to say that the imperialist impulse has lacked critics. Throughout history, the commercial and agricultural classes may have preferred

what the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, extolled as Perpetual Peace. Kant argued that a society of rational republican states would be peaceable. But other impulses beat in the human heart and the expansionist ambitions of a Genghis Khan or Catherine the Great would offer periodic reminder of the aphorism: “If you seek peace, prepare for war.” Nonetheless, the final period of European expansion coincided with the evolution of liberal and representative governments whose spokesmen had more interest in commercial and cultural exchange than imperial conquest. From them, evolved the contemporary critics of imperialism who dominate Western considerations of the phenomenon in the early twenty–first century.

Liberals have decried imperial expansion since Richard Cobden and his biographer, John Hobson, in International Man criticized European colonialism in the nineteenth century. In this, they merely followed American liberal and anti–imperial sentiment that originated in the American Revolutionary War. Ignoring its own record of colonial expansion, the U.S. then embarked on Great Power status in 1917 with a full–blown, anti–imperial ideology. During the second part of the twentieth century American power was then deployed successfully to dismantle the European colonial structures. In this pursuit, it was motivated partly by liberal ideology and partly by a desire to access the closed markets and other commercial opportunities of the colonial empires, as David Mosler and Bob Catley described in their book, Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World. The Marxist school has, since Lenin’s 1917 polemic, persistently criticized what it claims to be the uniquely capitalist form of imperialism. Among its recent proponents has been Harry Magdoff in The Age of Imperialism. Its force has been, understandably, diminished by the long period of expansion undertaken by the Soviet state, only to be followed by its collapse. The unworkability of Soviet economics as an alternative to market forms has contributed to the demise of the Marxist school.

For a period in the 1970s, the Marxist school was supplanted by “Dependency Theory,” of whom Andre Gunder Frank, who wrote On Capitalist Underdevelopment in 1975, was the best–known author. This theory held that during the era of colonialism the Europeans had created dependent economies in the Third World which, because of their structural dependence on the world market, would always remain poor and underdeveloped. This argument was taken up by many Third World intellectuals and regimes but was progressively abandoned by the 1990s. This was because its adherents had created such murderous regimes whenever they had come to power, notably in Pol Pot’s

Khmer Republic; because many Third World states adopting liberal and market economics did indeed develop; and because its postulates were increasingly seen as excuses by incompetent Third World regimes for their own failures.

The Current Status of Imperialism

Contemporary critics of imperialism tend to be more cultural in form. They often derive their argument from people like Franz Fanon, a black Francophone who depicted Third World citizens as The Wretched of the Earth, subjugated by rapacious Europeans, whose very psychology could not survive healthily in its suborned condition without a violent resistance. Mahatma Ghandi pursued a pacifist form of this argument in his support for traditional Indian cultural modes. The Arab American Edward Said, in Orientalism, developed a similar perspective deriving from the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. This position, often termed “post–colonial theory,” argues that the non–European world is persistently misrepresented and demonized by Western politicians and intellectuals, thereby justifying the political domination over it, which Europeans pursue. This argument ignores the waves of imperial expansion and contraction—many of them by non–Europeans—that have gone into the making of the modern world. It is, nonetheless, widely felt in parts of the Third World.

Yet the European empires did retreat. The European retreat from the Americas started with the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was then extended during the Napoleonic Wars when most Spanish colonies in the Americas declared their independence at the behest of Simon Bolivar and with the encouragement of the British and protection of the British fleet. The emancipation of the Americas then proceeded through the nineteenth century with slave revolts in Haiti, secession in Brazil, and agreed self–government in Canada.

After the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was dismantled by the Europeans. The British and French assumed League of Nations mandates in the region, but those states, including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel and Palestine, quickly acquired their independence. As U.S. power replaced that of the European colonialists by the 1970s, so the structure of power in the region assumed classical geopolitical new dimensions, together with some new attempts at imperial expansion, including the abortive Iraqi annexation of Kuwait in 1991.

The emancipation of Asia began with the dismantling of the German Empire after defeat in 1918. Australia, New Zealand and Japan got mandated ter-

ritories in the process. Then in 1945 the Japanese Empire was also emancipated. In 1946, the U.S. granted independence to the Philippines. Two years later the British began their evacuation of Asia with the independence of the Indian Raj into four major successor states. In 1957 and 1963 the British left their southeast Asian possessions, most of them forming the Federation of Malaysia, and finally, in 1997, Hong Kong. China asserted its sovereignty under a communist regime in 1949, the same year in which the Dutch were evicted from Indonesia by a combination of nationalist war and U.S. diplomatic pressure. In 1956 the French left Indo China, after waging an unsuccessful war to maintain their colonial possessions. European imperialism in Asia was largely finished.

The Europeans’ exit from Africa was similarly rapid. Italy lost its colonies after its defeat in 1943. The French tried to maintain their empire but desisted after their defeat in the Algerian Civil War in 1958. The British, as in Asia, were keener de–colonizers and started the process in Ghana in 1957. It was then ex- tended—albeit not without difficulty—throughout their African possessions in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, the short–lived Central African Federation, Uganda, and Zimbabwe/Rhodesia. In 1960, Belgium left the Congo. The Portuguese hung on their ancient colonies in Angola, Guinea–Bissau, and Mozambique until a 1974 anti–colonial military coup in Lisbon. In South Africa and South West Africa/Namibia the apartheid regimes ended in 1994. Africa had gone back to the Africans.

The Pacific Ocean territories were, by and large, the last to be emancipated. New Zealand left Samoa in 1962 and the British vacated Fiji in 1970. The Australians granted independence to Papua/New Guinea in 1975 and the British quickly thereafter vacated Melanesia. But the French still retain New Caledonia and Tahiti and the U.S. American Samoa. But these remained among the few exceptions to the generalization that the Europeans had, with the exception of the settler states, vacated their imperial conquests in the wider world.

Why did imperialist Europe retreat? Most of this retreat occurred at a time when the dominant powers of the international system, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, were opposed to the kind of classic imperialism which the Europeans practiced. These superpowers supported anti–colonial movements against European power and put considerable pressure on the imperial powers to retreat.

The colonized people also became more difficult to rule as the ideas and techniques, particularly

weaponry, spread more widely among them. Local and traditional rulers of colonial territories believed they could as well govern their people as Europeans. As these processes occurred, so the cost of governing colonies rose.

At the same time the anti–colonial ideas so deeply rooted in the socialists and liberal political movement in Europe spread among the increasingly enfranchised lower classes, so the willingness to bear the rising financial and casualty costs of imposing imperial rule fell. In Britain, for example, the first seriously anti– imperialist government was the Labour government of 1945 to 1951. The French abandoned Indo China when the electorate rejected the cost after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

By 1960 it had become clear to most European regimes that it was actually less profitable, if not unprofitable, to be imperialist. This realization dawned on the Soviets in the 1980s. Some imperial states then preserved the policy for other reasons: the political pressure of settlers (Britain); archaic calculations by military or fascist regimes (Portugal); or a geo–strate- gic calculation, for example, to have somewhere to test nuclear weapons (France).

At the beginning of the twenty–first century it is most commonly believed that the appropriate and most desirable form of political organization is the nation state. This idea was first forcefully pursued by liberals like the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) in his Fourteen Points of 1917. It has been taken up by the Charter of the United Nations that enshrines this doctrine.

Why Has There Been No Total World Empire?

Until the modern era, the level of technology would not support a global empire. The Habsburgs possessed a globe–encompassing domain, but probably ruled no more subjects than contemporary China and found it impossible to sustain. The British were supreme for perhaps thirty years, but even then had trouble in the Crimean War of 1854 to 1856. Today, the United States is the only remaining superpower, but is still vulnerable, as evidenced by the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001.

No power has been able to imperialize the modern state system, although a succession have tried, as Paul Kennedy described in 1987 in Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: the Habsburgs, Bourbon France, Pitt’s England, Napoleonic France, nineteenth–cen- tury Britain, Germany under the Kaiser and the Nazis, the Soviets, and now, arguably, the United States. This

is because of the operation of countervailing tendencies. The operation of the Balance of Power leads other countries to unite against the aspiring dominator. Powers that are too ambitious, find themselves exposed to “Imperial Overstretch.” The tendency for “combined and uneven development,” leads other states to match eventually the innovations of the most powerful. And the technology for making global dominance a serious possibility is not yet available.

Conclusion

Imperialism usually starts with military conquest; it then uses this opportunity to install an administration or government, which organizes a transfer of resources from the colony to the metropolitan state. At the simplest level, this may be achieved by looting, as with Genghis Khan, or with bullion transfer, as with the Habsburgs, or with tribute to the Chinese empire. The more sophisticated means are systemic, like Rome or Britain, and involve colonies and colonial administrations who are made to trade profitably only within the empire. This may be expanded by investments in appropriate commodities like mines, plantations, or factories. Settlements may be used to get suitable labor to extract wealth, as in the Thirteen Colonies, in Australia or New Zealand, or in South Africa. If empire is not profitable, by the exchange of goods or by resource transfer, it will be sooner or later abandoned.

But the search for a single motive for imperialism may be fruitless. It stems from well springs deep in the human personality, and from impulses deeply buried in political societies.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

•Was Gibbon’s description of the Roman Empire reasonable?

•Why did the Chinese state outlast the Roman Empire, despite Rome’s superior military advantage over its conquered territories?

•Was Islamic imperialism during the caliphates purely motivated by religious ideology?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources

Blacker, Irwin R., ed. Prescott’s Histories: The Rise and Decline of the Spanish Empire. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. London: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

De Hartog, Leo. Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World. Leo De Hartog, 1999.

Kennedy, Paul. Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,. New York: Random House, 1987.

Lace, William W. The British Empire: The End of Colonialism. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2000.

Mosler, David, and Bob Catley. Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World, Praeger, 2000.

Further Readings

Elvin, Mark. Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford University Press, 1973. An interpretation of Chinese history which emphasizes the high–level of Chinese achievement by the sixteenth century.

Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

Knopf, 1993. A classic history of the expansion and collapse of the Roman Empire, which attributes its failure to the adoption of the Christian religion.

Kennedy, Paul. Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987. A description of the manner in which different states have tried to dominate the European international system since 1500, and an explanation for the failure of each from the Austrian Hapsburgs to the Soviet communists.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, Knopf, 1992. This book is an attempt by a former Italian government official to provide advice to any aspiring imperial ruler, or Prince, about how to gain and then keep political power.

Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, McGraw–Hill, 1985. This is the classic modern statement of how nations become involved in the struggle with one another for power, influence, and empire—no matter what ideology they espouse.

SEE ALSO

Capitalism, Marxism

OVERVIEW

Liberalism is not a precise ideology. It does not have clear system of beliefs or a set of texts to which its adherents must subscribe. It is rather a set of attitudes, including particularly an emphasis on the recognition of the rights of the individual and tolerance, which permits considerable diversity of views among liberals. It can be described but not prescribed.

Liberalism is a term that was first used in England the early nineteenth century. It is now used in much of the world to indicate a political system characterized by freedom of association, the rule of law, and the rejection of arbitrary authority. Liberalism also provides for individual freedom, equality before the law, possession of private property, clear constitutional limits on governmental power, and representative and democratic political decision making. Many of the richest societies are liberal—including the major Anglophone countries of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—and, with some qualifications, most of the countries of the European Union.

The term “liberal” has a somewhat different usage in the U.S. to most of Europe and elsewhere in the English–speaking world. In the U.S., liberal is often used in a way that elsewhere would mean leftist, or one who supports the expansion of the power of the state or government. In Europe, this is reserved for the terms socialist, social democrat, or leftist, and liberal there usually means some one who does not support the expansion or use of the power of the state in political or economic affairs.

Liberalism

WHO CONTROLS GOVERNMENT? Individuals supported

by the people

HOW IS GOVERNMENT PUT INTO POWER? Popular vote

of the majority

WHAT ROLES DO THE PEOPLE HAVE? Vote; Bring about

social change

WHO CONTROLS PRODUCTION OF GOODS? Private

citizens

WHO CONTROLS DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS? Private

citizens

MAJOR FIGURES John Stuart Mill; William Gladstone

HISTORICAL EXAMPLE Great Britain, 1870–1900