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Week 8: Imperialism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “A retrograde step fraught with grave perils to the cause of civilization”
    - - Overproducing goods because of the impetous to keep investing capital in the existing market - Hobson thinks colonies are a good way to get rid of this oversupply
        
        “The struggle for markets, the greater eagerness of producers to sell than of consumers to buy, is the crowning proof of a false economy of distribution. Imperialism is the fruit of this false economy; ‘social reform’ is its remedy.”
      - But Hobson does not necessarily see an end to imperialism --> he is arguing for policies that bring about the end of imperialism
        
        Capitalism doesn't need imperialism to thrive
    - - Capitalists:
        
        Seek foreign markets
        
        Interested in trade furnished by imperialist policy
        
        Or interested in military and civil expenditure
        
        Finance pulls the strings
- - - - 'Drain Theory' - India's poverty derives from one-sided drain of wealth by British rule, with its public dent and use of gold
      - Unlike Luxemburg or Lenin, not looking for overthrow of imperialism, is operating as an imperial loyalist who has some kind of national conscience and is looking for reform to improve the governance of the colonies and improve the standard of living of Indians
      - Reforms:
        
        Reform societies
        
        Public debates as MP
        
        Pamphlets and news articles
        
        Disseminated in wide manner
  - - - Essays on Indian Economics (1899)
        
        Guiding question: Why has India failed to become prosperous?
        
        Believes it is from the over-reliance on agriculture, rather than the development of industry
        
        Ways to develop:
        
        Role of law: British law is too reliant on custom rather than contract
        
        Advocate of protectionism
        
        Pro-industrialisation
        
        Tenure reform and credit to tillers
        
        More agrarian
        No more British rule
        
        Worth noting that across the era of the British imperial rule, the Indian economy grows at 0%
        
        Falls into Malthusian trap that the rest of the industrialised world escapes
  - - - Idea of a Developmental State - later manifestation
        
        Policies trying to raise level of output and economic complexity industrialisation ASAP
        
        INC tries to do this when it gains power in 1947 but isn't successful
        
        Afterlives
        Prebisch and Singer, 1949
        
        Work of figures like Hobson and others, prefigures some of the writings that are done in the mid 20th century, in the formulation of dependency theory
        
        Dependency: idea that with a world economy, there is a core and a periphery and resources flow from the periphery of the poor and underdeveloped state to the core wealthy states
        
        Semi-periphery - have a third category of state called the semi-periphery which is industrialised but doesn’t have sophisticated technology and doesn’t control finances in the world
- - - - French Colonies - 1848 year of revolution, slaves freed
        
        Russia - empancipation of 1861
  - - - E.g. Sierra Leone, abolished slavery in 1807, entraped former slaves into debt contracts, promised entitlements but taken away
- - - - 1907: Resolution at International Socialist Congress written with Lenin
        
        The working class should use the opportunity presented by war, when it arises, to overthrow the capitalist system
        
        Grassroots approach to revolutionary struggle
    - - Not some much progressive taxation and raising the wage, it is a wholesale transformation of political economy of the capitalist state into a socialist state that is necessary (more radical than Hobson)
  - - - Idea of new phase of capitalism with two key ideas:
        1) Territorial division of the world among great capitalist powers into a set of formal and informal colonies and a sphere of influence
        2) Rivalries between capitalist powers engenders WW1
- - - - Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, and Japan
        
        Capitalist socieites are consumer societies, they need raw materials to meet their needs
- - - - Consequence: rivalry --> creates instability between powers who are competing