Imperialism is a policy of extending a countrys power and influence through colonisation, use of military force, or other means.[2] Lewis Samuel Feuer identifies two major subtypes of imperialism; the first is the regressive imperialism identified with pure conquest, unequivocal exploitation, extermination or reductions of undesired peoples, and the settlement of desired peoples into such territories.[3] The second type identified by Feuer is progressive imperialism founded upon a cosmopolitan view of humanity, that promotes the spread of civilisation to allegedly backward societies to elevate living standards and culture in conquered territories, with the allowance of a colonised people to assimilate into the imperial society, an example being the British Empire which claimed to give their subjects a number of advantages.[4] The term as such primarily has been applied to Western political and economic dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some writers, such as Edward Said, use the term more broadly to describe any system of domination and subordination organised with an imperial centre and a periphery.[5] From a Marxist perspective, imperialism is a natural feature of a developed capitalist nation state as it matures into monopoly capitalism. In Lenins work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he observed that as capitalism matured in the Western world, economies shifted away from manufacturing towards banking, finance, and capital markets, as production was outsourced to the empires colonies. Lenin concluded that competition between empires and the unfettered drive to maximise profit would lead to wars between the empires themselves, such as the contemporary First World War, as well as continued future military interventions and occupations in the colonies to establish, expand, and exploit less developed markets for the monopolist corporations of the empires. It is mostly accepted that modern-day colonialism is an expression of imperialism and cannot exist without the latter. The extent to which informal imperialism with no formal colonies is properly described remains a controversial topic amongst historians.[6] Both colonisation and imperialism have been described by Tom Nairn and Paul James as early forms of globalization: Even if a particular empire does not have a global reach as we would define it today, empires by their nature still tend to contribute to processes of globalization because of the way that imperial power tends to generate counter-power at its edge-lands and send out reverberations far beyond the territories of their immediate control.[7] The word imperialism became common in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and was used with a negative connotation.[8] In Great Britain, the word had until then mostly been used to refer to the politics of Napoleon III in obtaining favourable public opinion in France through foreign military interventions.[
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 04:51:50 +0000
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