Imperialism: A Study

Contents

1. Preface 3 min 4

   Hobson presents the book as an attempt to give precision to a word on everyone’s lips, drawing mainly on British experience since about 1870. Part I traces the economic origins of imperialism with statistics, Part II its claims to a civilising mission and its effects on subject peoples and on the imperial nations themselves. He calls the work a study in “social pathology,” addressed to readers who want to direct political forces, and thanks the magazines that first printed several chapters.

2. Nationalism and Imperialism 23 min 9

   Hobson distinguishes nationalism, colonialism and imperialism. Nationalism, as Mill defined it, is a people bound by common sympathies and history; genuine colonialism carries a nation’s people and institutions to thinly settled lands, as in Canada and Australasia; imperialism is rule over unassimilable alien peoples. He traces the older ideal of a single universal empire, the eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and its eclipse by nineteenth-century nationalism. The new imperialism perverts nationalism into a struggle of competing empires, provokes resentful nationalism among its victims, and breeds a cynical Realpolitik.

3. I.1 The Measure of Imperialism 17 min 14

   Lists of territory annexed since 1870 give the term imperialism a concrete measure. Britain added about 4,750,000 square miles and 88 million people in a generation, most of it after 1884; France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Russia and now the United States joined the competition. Using the Colonial Office’s own categories, Hobson shows that none of the new British territories received representative government: almost all are tropical lands densely peopled by non-Europeans, ruled by a small white minority. Politically, he concludes, the new imperialism is an expansion of autocracy.

4. I.2 The Commercial Value of Imperialism 21 min 10

   Hobson tests the claim that empire pays through trade. External trade yields only a small part of the national income, since only the profit on it, not its whole value, is gain, and home demand could absorb what is now exported. Since 1870 foreign trade has grown more slowly than national income, the Empire’s share of British trade has not risen, and the colonies depend less and less on Britain. Trade with the tropical possessions acquired since 1870 is the smallest, least progressive and most precarious of all, consisting largely of cheap textiles, spirits and gunpowder.

5. I.3 Imperialism as an Outlet for Population 8 min 3

   Hobson rejects the argument that Britain needs new territory for its surplus population. The country is not over-populated, its rate of growth is falling, and emigration has declined since 1884. Most emigrants go to the United States, a minority to the self-governing colonies, and almost none to the tropical lands annexed since 1870, which offer a few official, missionary and trading posts but no real field for settlement.

6. I.4 Economic Parasites of Imperialism 33 min 16

   If imperialism is bad business for the nation, why is it pursued? Because it is good business for particular interests: armaments makers, shipbuilders, exporters to new markets, the services and the professional classes seeking posts for their sons. Above all it serves investors, whose income from abroad far exceeds the profits of foreign trade, and the great financial houses, which profit from loans, company promotion and fluctuations in values. Finance, controlling much of the press, steers the patriotic energies of others, making these interests “parasites upon patriotism.”

7. I.5 Imperialism Based on Protection 10 min 4

   Comparing rising spending on armaments with stagnant colonial trade, Hobson calls the new imperialism a huge business blunder. Free Trade teaches that Britain gains from markets developed by other nations through roundabout trade and its carrying trade, even if their colonies are closed by tariffs, so she could leave further expansion to France, Germany and Russia. Imperialism forgets this because it rests logically on Protection: each market must be seized and kept for the mother country.

8. I.6 The Economic Taproot of Imperialism 45 min 13

   The economic “taproot” of imperialism is oversaving. Concentration of wealth, seen most clearly in the American trusts, gives the rich more income than they can spend; their savings swell productive capacity beyond what consumers can buy, so goods and capital press for foreign outlets and their owners use the state to secure them. The cause is maldistribution of income, not industrial progress. Raising wages and taxing unearned incomes for public spending would expand home demand, making trade unionism and socialism the natural enemies of imperialism.

9. I.7 Imperialist Finance 33 min 8

   Imperialism shapes public finance. National expenditure grew faster than trade or income, three-quarters of it going to war, armaments and war debts, while concessions to landowners, the Church and the drink trade bought support. Imperialist interests prefer indirect taxes, which hide the cost from voters; Britain’s income tax and death duties were exceptions born of Free Trade politics. Hobson predicts a return to Protection, disguised as military necessity or imperial federation, and growing public debts, which also serve financiers as outlets for idle capital.

10. II.1 The Political Significance of Imperialism 1 h 21 min 35

    Hobson tests the claim that the British Empire spreads free self-government and finds it false: only about one subject in thirty-seven, mostly in the white settler colonies, governs itself, while Crown colonies, protectorates, India and Egypt are ruled autocratically. The new imperialism has enlarged British despotism. He then traces its reactions on home politics: incessant small wars, militarism and an arms race that drains revenue; the use of native mercenary armies; the blocking of social reform; the collapse of Liberalism; the concentration of power in an inner Cabinet; and the return of men trained in autocracy who corrupt public life at home.

11. II.2 The Scientific Defence of Imperialism 1 h 29 min 30

    Hobson examines the “scientific” defence of imperialism: the social Darwinism of Karl Pearson, Demolins, Giddings and Kidd, which holds that races and nations must struggle and the “socially efficient” must rule. He argues that progress has always meant suspending cruder struggles within a group so that competition can move to higher planes, and that the same logic points to international federation. Rational control of population and intensive agriculture remove any natural necessity of expansion. He accepts eugenics within nations, and ends by warning that a European federation could itself become a parasitic empire living on “lower races”.

12. II.3 Moral and Sentimental Factors 54 min 29

    Why does a policy serving narrow interests win sincere public support? Hobson answers with self-deception, not hypocrisy. Genuine missionary and humanitarian feeling is harnessed by business and politics, as with Leopold’s Congo, Rhodes, missions in China and the Sudan campaign. Euphemistic “masked words”, a national habit of holding contradictory ideas, and primitive instincts of hunting and fighting, degraded into the spectator’s passion of Jingoism, do the rest. The church, the press, the schools and the universities, dependent on wealthy patrons, are turned into instruments of the interested minority.

13. II.4 Imperialism and the Lower Races 2 h 12 min 54

    Hobson's longest chapter asks when rule over “lower races” could be legitimate. He accepts some interference in principle on three conditions: it must serve the world's good, benefit the governed, and be sanctioned by an international body. No imperial power meets the third. History shows a different root: from ancient slave-raiding to modern hut and labour taxes, land confiscation, the Glen Grey Act and the Rand's planned “locations”, empire exists to compel native labour for white profit. Basutoland is the rare “sane” exception. An appendix documents the Transvaal mine-owners' labour policy.

14. II.5 Imperialism in Asia 1 h 22 min 38

    Asia is the real test of Western imperialism. In India, Britain's best work (peace, law, an honest civil service) has not ended chronic famine. It has ruined native crafts and village self-government, and it rests on force rather than consent. China shows the new imperialism plainly: competing empires driven by finance rather than trade. Hobson foresees its “break-up” by international capital, a West of rentiers living on Chinese labour, or China turning on its civilisers as an industrial rival. Forcible “civilisation” destroys what Asia could teach.

15. II.6 Imperial Federation 54 min 15

    Can Britain federate with its self-governing colonies? Their drift has been toward independence, and the new tropical empire makes federation less attractive. They would share the costs and dangers of expansion they did not choose and could not control. Preferential tariffs would cost Britain its better foreign trade, and Canada's preference has proved hollow. Encouraging colonial imperialisms in South Africa and Australasia would endanger Britain. Hobson predicts a looser tie, close to Jefferson's idea of separate states under a common crown.

16. II.7 The Outcome 27 min 11

    Imperialism is not inevitable, but it serves classes who use the state for private gain. Hobson proposes that investors and adventurers abroad take their own risks, and that democracy take real control of foreign policy. He restates the economic taproot, defends strong nations as the basis of internationalism, and warns of a Western federation living parasitically on Asian tribute, like later imperial Rome. The book closes by calling imperialism a depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking interests.