Empire-building
· Empire is a much older and more diffuse concept than imperialism. In the 20th Century, trade-unions were said to have displayed empire-building behavior. Financial companies that emphatically enlarged their operations overseas were also called financial
To Romans, the imperator was originally a successful general who was accorded that laurel like a Purple Heart or a Silver Star. Even when imperium extended to all decision-making it was a legally well-defined, even democratic, concept, true to the Greek-inspired Roman spirit.
Only in the 18th Century with Montesquieu did empire begin to mean Asiatic despotism. Thereafter, empires were seen as bad entities; bad for human rights, bad for ethnic identities, bad for free trade.
In 1902 Hobson introduced the term imperialism into academic circles. He struggled to explain what it really was. According to him, whatever imperialism was, it was only a bureaucratic appendage to foreign policy, and not an economic system.
Imperialism was certainly not empire and not white-settler colonialism. The latter came at a moral cost. The British gentleman was burdened by the task of bringing civilization to backward peoples overseas. Imperialism had no such task.
The famous Austrian Marxist economist Hilferding provided another line of thought in 1910. Capitalism changed after 1880: it became monopolistic, and cartelization spread fast. Trusts and cartels ruled capitalism in the lead up to WWI. Imperialism was their doing.
The other strand of thought in the Marxism of the 1910s and 1920s was advocated by Rosa Luxemburg. According to her, demand was lacking, and imperialism was a response to the market question. New markets were
required to sell the ever-expanding products of capitalist firms.
Joseph Schumpeter later wrote that “A purely capitalist world therefore can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses.” In Schumpeter’s view, imperialism existed because there was a “feudal substance” in the international system. Imperialists weren’t capitalists; they were the remnants of aristocratic military ruling classes and redundant war machines.
Writing three-quarters of a century after Schumpeter, Deirdre McCloskey argued that imperialism was a costly business that was never profitable, even to the British Empire. The only people who profited were a bunch of state officials who had invested in land that was exploited. Imperialism was like a private equity venture. It paid off for a handful of people, but many others lost out. The current ideas about the world system hover between the two poles, perhaps even somewhere between these three focal points. Is the international order “feudally” run? Or is it the intentional doing of monopolies and pre-built financial empires? Is free trade the remedy against empires or not? Should globalization deepen in order to bring peace and prosperity?