“Imperialism”… We’ve all heard it. But what is it?

Something very old, yet also something very new. At its most basic, domination of one society by another goes back as far as states – although not as far as humanity, being pretty much unknown in indigenous societies. But the depth of today’s imperialism is relatively new. The historic pre-capitalist empires, such as the Roman Empire, the Aztec Empire and the Chinese Empire, had a logic of “tribute extraction”, where subject-peoples were required to pay a tribute of money, soldiers or resources to the imperial capital. They were usually allowed to keep their local rulers, economies and ways of life. For this reason, “imperialism” as a term is usually reserved for the type of empire which arose with capitalism and modern society.

There were actually two waves of modern empire-building, the first in the sixteenth century when Spain conquered much of the Americas and white settler-colonies were formed in other places like what’s now the USA, Canada and Australia, and the second in the nineteenth century when European countries colonised most of Asia and Africa. In the first stage, indigenous peoples in the target colonies were mostly wiped out, with around 90% of the population killed throughout the Americas. Although some of the losses were from disease, a lot were caused by genocidal policies of attacking indigenous peoples and destroying their resources and environments. In the USA for example, indigenous people were driven from their lands to make way for cattle ranches and frontier farms. A policy was put in place to exterminate buffalo, the main source of food for the Native Americans of the Great Plains, and a series of brutal wars were waged against recalcitrant peoples. Black Africans were captured as slaves and shipped to America to work on plantations. Today the old settler-colonies in North America and elsewhere are established as part of the northern or First World. South and Central America, and the Caribbean, occupy a more ambiguous position in today’s world. The first wave of colonialism, which corresponds with the initial emergence of modernity in Europe, is often ignored in accounts of colonialism, partly because its motives were rather different from later phases.

What is more often thought of as classical imperialism was the colonisation of Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century. By this time, Europe – having accumulated wealth through plunder and foreign trade – had begun to industrialise massively, and on doing so, has gained an advantage over the rest of the world in terms of weapons. Taking advantage of this temporary situation, European states, with Britain and France in the lead, started invading and subjugating the previously independent societies of the rest of the world. The colonisers behaved with incredible brutality in establishing and maintaining colonial rule. The Germans killed hundreds of thousands of people in Namibia, the Belgians were known for cutting off hands in the Congo, and Britain is remembered for a litany of atrocities including the Amritsar massacre, where hundreds of anti-colonial protesters were trapped in a square and gunned down, and the forced resettlement of tens of thousands of people in Kenya and Malaya. This time, however, the goal was not to exterminate local populations entirely. Only a small layer of administrators and soldiers ever migrated from Europe to the new colonies (hence they always relied heavily on colonial subjects, from the same colony or a different one, to maintain control). Rather, this new empire was all about economics. India was initially colonised by the British East India Company, a private company whose existence was all about the “bottom line”. Britain banned clothesmaking and salt production in India, hence creating a massive market for its own exports. Later, Britain attacked China to force the Chinese rulers to accept opium imports from British colonies.

The colonial world came about by means of military force – not at all a matter of cultural superiority, indeed, a great historical low-point for humanity. But this success went to the heads of many Europeans. Colonialism was associated with the emergence of racist ideas, the idea of European “civilisation” as inherently “superior” to all others, the idea different “races” of humans, a European “destiny” to rule the world and so on. The colonies were deemed inferior places, to be reshaped in the image of the coloniser. They became sites for experimentation with technologies of control, violence and subordination.

Most of the colonised countries became independent following protests in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. India led the way in 1947, granted independence by a war-weary Britain in a great victory for the massive non-violent Satyagraha protest movement. Algeria and Vietnam soon followed, expelling the French in guerrilla wars. Decolonisation dragged on until 1975, when the Portuguese were finally forced out of Africa, and even later in a few cases (such as Zimbabwe). Even today there are a scattering of “dependencies” and “overseas provinces” of Britain, France, America and other countries, such as Diego Garcia, French Guiana, Puerto Rico, and New Caledonia/Kanaky. In these places, anti-colonial struggles continue.

It is often argued, however, that while colonialism ended with decolonisation, imperialism did not. Imperialism carried on in myriad new forms, sometimes termed “neo-colonialism”, “economic imperialism”, “cultural imperialism” and so on. In addition, military interventions in militarily weak Southern countries have been a constant feature of western foreign policies from decolonisation to the present day. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are only the latest in a long series of invasions – in Guatemala, Panama, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Lebanon, Grenada and so on.

Theories of imperialism

The most influential theory of imperialism is the economic model first formulated by the liberal author Hobson, but made famous by the socialists Lenin, Luxemburg, Kautsky and Hilferding. According to this theory, imperialism arises from contradictions within capitalism. In particular, because it produces more than it can sell, capitalism produces a surplus which it needs to sell, or put to work in production (a situation known as overproduction or underconsumption). Having exhausted the options available within its existing hotbeds, it seeks new markets and productive resources abroad. This often involves what David Harvey has termed “accumulation by dispossession”. Local people have to be driven off their land and robbed of their tools and possessions so that both the people (as workers) and the land and objects (as productive resources) can be put to work by the capitalists. Hence for instance, in India, Britain found markets for surplus textiles, and products such as tea which could be marketed “at home”. Capitalism is thus viewed as paradoxically needing war and devastation. According to this theory, as long as there’s capitalism, there will be war and imperialism. (War also contributes to ending underconsumption by putting resources to work making weapons, and destroying some of the stock of surplus resources during the war itself).

Imperialism does not, however, mean that colonies are remade in exactly the image of the coloniser. Rather, they are demonised as inferior or “underdeveloped”, as fundamentally lacking whatever it is which makes the dominant society superior. According to anti-colonial psychologists Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, the colonised subject is burdened with an impossible double demand – on the one hand the imperative to “develop”, to become like the coloniser, and on the other hand an assertion of her or his inability to do so, a refusal ever to recognise that such “development” has happened. The colonial subject who identifies with the coloniser and learns “white” or “European” habits ends up as a reject in both worlds.

In economic terms, a parallel phenomenon is what is known as “dependency”, or “combined and uneven development”. According to a series of scholars such as Prebisch, Baran and Sweezy, Cardoso, Frank, Wallerstein and Arrighi, western economic actions in colonies and post-colonies have taken the form of gearing the colonial economy to production for the colonising society. This happens on unequal terms of trade – western societies sell items they produce above their value because of a monopoly on the technology or knowledge needed for their production, and pay less than the value of the primary commodities assigned to the dependent societies of the South. According to this approach, different societies are not independent entities connected by external relations; rather, the internal dynamics of Southern societies have been altered at a deep level by the North, creating a single, interconnected world with unjust internal relations. This is supplemented by “cultural imperialism”, in which western society is upheld as a global ideal and western consumer images (McDonalds, Mickey Mouse) exported as bearers of capitalist culture.

The North makes it very difficult for dependent societies to break out of their dependency. In Andre Gunder Frank’s classic analysis of United Fruit in Guatemala, it is shown that Guatemalan “development” is driven by the needs of the company – roads, ports and so on are put in place to serve the fruit trade, with United Fruit’s agents in America acting as sellers. Hence, when Guatemala kicked out United Fruit, they were left with a highly skewed economy lacking the means to do anything else. Dependency theorists have suggested various approaches for breaking out of dependency. These include “delinking”, or withdrawing from the world economy; “import substitution”, meaning diversifying local production to meet local needs, producing things which are currently imported from the west; “appropriate technology”, or the deployment of lighter, more labour-intensive technologies to ensure wider distribution of resources and less dependent relations in the South; and a “new international economic order”, involving a redressing of global inequalities. Ideas of fair trade (paying the costs of production rather than the market price), sustainable development (concentrating on ecological and economic persistence over time instead of rapid economic growth) and human development (stressing issues like healthcare, infant mortality and life expectancy instead of economic growth) have also come partly from this approach.

Today it is often debated whether classical imperial relations still hold. For some theorists, ideas like humanitarian intervention, failed states, development, globalisation and neoliberalism are continuations of older patterns of imperialist control. Marxist authors such as David Harvey and Alex Callinicos argue for a basic continuity with classical imperialism. There is still rivalry between imperialist powers. Others such as Wood, Panitch and Gindin argue that imperialism is now largely an economic phenomenon, not relying so much on state power. There is now a single imperialism based on the American economic system. Other theorists argue that a new stage of capitalist control has been reached. William Robinson has argued that a transnational capitalist class now controls the entire world directly, while Hardt and Negri argue that imperialism has been superseded by capitalist “Empire” in which capitalist control is directly exercised everywhere, with the old unevenness smoothed out. Still others argue for a discontinuity between neoliberalism and the latest forms of American empire. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has argued that there is a disjunction between neoliberalism and American empire, viewing the latter as an aggressive attempt to compensate for the problems of the former. Arrighi has recently argued that American economic influence has unravelled, and America is using its one remaining asset – military force – to try to turn back the tide of history, which is pushing economic power towards East Asia.

The economic approach is not the only one. An alternative put forward by some historians blames aristocratic pursuit of prestige for colonialism, arguing that racist ideas are outgrowths of classist ideas of “breeding”, and that colonialism served as a safety-valve for junior members of the aristocracy, and upwardly-mobile “commoners”, to lord it over subject-populations abroad. Schumpeter analyses imperialism as an “objectless expansion” by a “warrior” class within society, which manufactures reasons to perpetuate its existence. Virilio argues further that the logic of colonialism, the dominance by the occupying army over the subject population, is now internalised back into the coloniser societies, as dominance by a military way of seeing and a kind of deep state apparatus. In international relations, it is often assumed that imperialism is a way to strengthen a state’s geopolitical position. This might for instance consist in grabbing and monopolising scarce resources such as oil, uranium and clean water. Military interventions are often highly selective, and sites of resource extraction, such as the Niger Delta, the Gulf oilfields, the uranium-rich areas of the Sahara, and Papua’s Freeport, are crucial sites of contestation.

More recently, increasing emphasis has been placed on the epistemological (knowledge) aspects of colonialism. According to postcolonial theorists such as Spivak, Bhabha, Shiva and Escobar, imperialism did not simply take over societies, but also dismissed and devalued entire systems of knowledge, identity, science, belief and narrative. It assumed that the “modern”, western way of seeing was universally valid, and imposed this way of seeing across the entire world. In doing this, it denied voice to other peoples and agents. Obviously this kind of imperialism is still very much alive today. Hence for instance, Vandana Shiva writes of the preponderance of capitalist monoculture as a threat to other ways of life, and Edward Saïd exposes the prevalence of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes, with related ideas of cultural inferiority. Postcolonial theorists argue that the contact with other peoples and the self-definition through exclusion of colonised “others” is central to the way the West or North has constructed its identity. The modern world is also necessarily the colonial world, or the “modern/colonial world system” as Walter Mignolo terms today’s world. Hence, today’s world is very much a product of colonialism and has not escaped it. In a famous quote from Salman Rushdie, “the British don’t know their own history because it was made somewhere else”.

Against capitalist monoculture, postcolonial theorists often counterpose global dialogue, listening to other voices and revaluing other epistemologies (systems of knowledge), including indigenous epistemologies and “border thinking” arising from points of contact between different discourses. Some postcolonial theorists such as Shiva and Escobar argue against “development”, instead calling for an emphasis on local alternatives. Followers of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire emphasise the importance of resisting “submersion” in the dominant categories, instead learning to “speak one’s own word”. Authors such as Badie, Chatterjee, Mbembe and Hecht and Simone question the universality of the western state-form, arguing instead for everyday practices. Reflexivity – thinking critically about one’s own assumptions, and not taking them for granted – is emphasised by authors such as Spivak. Postcolonial theory effectively calls for a decolonisation of culture and the mind, as well as of spaces and economies.

The legacy of imperialism

In addition to the persistence of imperial wars, economic imperialism and epistemological dominance, imperialism has effects running through the whole of the social life of the contemporary world. The modern-colonial world has created a world which is globalised, and yet highly uneven and uncertain of itself. Identities have been torn apart by violence, and reappear in mutilated forms, either as creative hybridities and reflexive subjectivities or as aggressive “predatory” identities. Colonial domination left a legacy of questionable boundaries along lines of historical convenience, cutting some populations in half and fusing others into illogical meta-states. It also left a social structure in which the military was extremely strong, laying the foundation for coups, corruption and human rights abuses across the world.

Migration is widely demonised in the west as a supposed symptom of social breakdown and invasion from the “outside”. In fact migration is built into the modern-colonial world. The problems of the South, the attractions of the former colonial power and the uneven distribution of economic resources are all products of colonial history. Colonialism left British and other western citizens scattered across the planet. Caribbean people were encouraged to view Britain as the “motherland”, and actively solicited by the government to migrate to fill labour shortages in the 1950s. But the racist attitudes encouraged by colonialism have also not abated. In many places, policing practices such as stop-and-search reproduce colonial forms of dominance within societies, creating a kind of internal colonialism. In other parts of the world, colonial powers played on existing ethnic divisions (such as Hutu and Tutsi, Sinhala and Tamil) or created new ones (such as African and Asian in Uganda or Guyana) as a way to control discontented locals through a middleman. This exacerbated what might formerly have been benign differences into the hatreds sometimes expressed in ethnic cleansing today.

People who call themselves anti-imperialist are typically opponents primarily of western states and their allies. But today, imperialism has become increasingly complex. Firstly there is the phenomenon of proxy war, where local groups seek the aid of, or are used by, external powers to serve their local interests. Often the proxy is not particularly imperialistic in itself, but simply ends up in a bad alliance. Secondly, there’s the ambiguity of whether societies like the Soviet Union and China can be “imperialist”. Some Marxists deny this, but it is undeniable that these states have subordinated other societies (Chechnya, Georgia, Xinjiang, Tibet) in recognisably imperialistic ways.

Thirdly, there’s the problem of Southern, post-colonial states which themselves invade neighbours or refuse to let parts of their territory secede – Iraq with the Kurds; Indonesia in East Timor, Papua, Aceh; Morocco in Western Sahara; Sudan in the South; India in the northeast and in Kashmir, and so on. Is this to be considered imperialism or not? It seems undeniable that postcolonial states inherited from the coloniser a lot of the colonial mindset, including western ideas of territorial integrity and nationality. So basically, the postcolonial state acts as a continuation of the colonial state in suppressing “insurgency”. But sometimes the issue is complicated because a second power, western or non-western, is backing the rebels. Morocco for instance often accuses the Sahrawi resistance group Polisario of being an agent of foreign powers (it has been documented as operating out of Algeria). At the limit, one comes up against cases such as Darfur – a local conflict between two groups (nomadic herders and farmers), complicated once over by the Sudanese regime’s war against rebels and the alleged involvement of Chad, and once more by the west’s hostility to Sudan and geopolitical ambitions in the region. It becomes almost impossible to tell, without crudifying, who is the coloniser and who is the colonised.

Another legacy of imperialism is the ongoing subordination of indigenous peoples. This takes diverse forms, from continued denial of political recognition to the devaluing of knowledge-systems and the theft of land. In America and Canada, there are large areas of unceded territory which was never taken over by the respective states, but which they now claim as their territory. In West Papua, the Niger Delta and Chiapas, indigenous peoples are in open rebellion against dominant states complicit in neoliberalism. The indigenous challenge is not just about local autonomy, however. It makes demands on people elsewhere to think otherwise. The revaluing of indigenous knowledges is also about learning other ways of seeing, relating in more inclusive and networked ways to the whole of existence (animals, plants, rivers, spirits), questioning industrialism and the western ideas which have been established as global standards.

Finally, there is also the question of whether colonialism has been ended, or rather, generalised to the entire world. On Virilio’s account, the security state is a kind of internal colonialism in which the colonial apparatus is applied backwards, onto the imperial society itself. An article titled “The Parting of the Ways” has shown one example of this in practice – the policing of anti-capitalist protests in London stemming from Metropolitan Police absorption of Peter Kitson’s counterinsurgency guide, written about the Malayan anti-colonial insurgency. Virilio has also claimed that our way of seeing is deeply marked by the military, colonial gaze – seeing as if through a camera or gunsight, instrumentalising problems like a military planner, mapping and counting like a colonial administrator. The fantasy of war against barbarian “others”, a product of colonial reason, is still a staple both of fiction and of politics. The “war on terror” is the most visible of its contemporary manifestations.

To conclude, imperialism is everywhere around us today – not only in the obvious places, in the Iraqi quagmire and the Foreign Office, but in less obvious ones too – in repressive policing and the security state, in stereotypes about black people and Muslims, in immigration “controls” and deportations, in the dominance of instrumental reason and the devaluing of nature, in a western “standard of living” built on unfair trade and global dependency. But if imperialism is everywhere, then so is the struggle against it. The struggle is therefore not just about decolonising Iraq, but also about decolonising our society, our minds, and our ways of seeing.

Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at Lincoln University. His publications include Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey; 1997), a study of the US/UK press coverage of the 1991 Gulf conflict. This excerpt is taken from his blog on Media Lens.

Masses of information from the media constantly bombard us yet, paradoxically, often the most important goes uncovered. Take for instance, Africa. A country like Sudan suddenly comes under the spotlight. Reports of rape, massacre and corruption in the Darfur region reinforce all the stereotypes about the “dark continent” of savage aliens. And then, just as quickly, Sudan will fall from view. However, while thousands of refugees from the Darfur conflict have fled to Chad, just to the west of Sudan, this country remains largely off the British and American media map.

And so one of the most remarkable contemporary human rights campaigns goes largely unreported in the UK as the Belgium courts seek to try the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré for crimes of genocide during his rule from 1982 to 1990 – even in the face of the Belgium Parliament’s decision to repeal its landmark “universal human rights jurisdiction” statute. Following threats from the United States in June 2003 that Belgium risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters, the 1993 historic law, which allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad, was repealed. Yet a new law, adopted in August 2003, allowed for the continuation of the case against Habré – much to the delight of human rights campaigners. And finally last month, Senegal, where Habré has been under house arrest, arrested the former dictator to face an extradition request from Belgium over the genocide charges.

Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, Chad gained its independence in 1960 and since then has been gripped by civil war. In a rare instance of coverage on 21 May 1992, the London-based Guardian carried four short paragraphs reporting how 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Habré. A justice ministry report concluded that Habré had committed genocide against the Chadian people. Five years ago, in a case inspired by the one against Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet, several human rights organisations, led by Human Rights Watch, filed a suit against Habré in Senegal (his refuge since 1990). They argued that he could be tried anywhere for crimes against humanity and that former heads of state were not immune. However, on 21 March 2001, the Senegal Court of Cassation threw out the case. And so, human rights campaigners turned their attention to Belgium where one of the victims of Habré’s torture now lives. Extraordinary events, but all of them hidden behind a virtual wall of silence in the West.

Yet also hidden is the massive, secret war waged by the United States and Britain from bases in Chad against Libya. British involvement in a 1996 plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Colonel Mu’ammar Gadafi, as alleged by the maverick M15 officer David Shayler, was reported as an isolated event. Yet it is best seen as part of a wide-ranging and longstanding strategy of the US and UK secret states to remove Gadafi. Grabbing power by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, Gadafi (who, intriguingly, had followed a military training course in England in 1966) soon became the target of covert operations by the French, Americans, Israelis and British. Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of M16, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in an embarrassing flop. Nine years later, the head of the French secret service, Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was quickly suppressed. Then, in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Habré, with the backing of the CIA and French troops, overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame), in his semi-official history of the CIA, reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that, throughout the decade, Libya ranked as high as the Soviet Union as the bête noir of the White House.

A report from Amnesty International, Chad: The Habré Legacy, records massive military and financial support for the dictator by the US Congress. It adds: “None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by AI covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations.” US official records indicate that funds for the Chad-based covert war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, gave $7million to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). However, a plan to assassinate Gadafi and seize power on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan. Frustrated in its covert attempts to topple Gadafi, the US government’s strategy suddenly shifted. For 11 minutes in the early morning of 14 April 1986, 30 US air force and navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid code-named El Dorado Canyon. The US/UK mainstream media were ecstatic. Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan president – dubbed a “mad dog” by Reagan. In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi’s home killing Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months – while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped. Reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media after the 1986 assault. But away from the glare of publicity, the CIA launched its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And as concerns grew in M16 that Gadafi was aiming to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya. Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habré in a secret operation and install Idriss Déby as the new President of Chad. The French government had tired of Habré’s genocidal policies while George Bush senior’s administration decided not to frustrate France in exchange for co-operation in its attack on Iraq. Yet, even under Déby, abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.

Recently, relations between the US, UK and Libya have thawed, with Gadafi pledging support for the “war against terrorism” and agreeing to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing, for which a Libyan intelligence agent was jailed. But significantly, at his trial in November 2003, David Shayler was denied the right (under the European Convention of Human Rights) to speak out about the 1996 anti-Gadafi plot. Since it is obvious there are a lot of shady secrets from the years of the dirty war to conceal, such a decision by the court must have come as a relief to the government. And a report in the Guardian of 15 March 2004 said US troops were arriving in several African countries, including Chad, as the Pentagon warned that the region ran the risk of becoming an al-Qaeda recruiting ground. Giles Tremlett reported (“US sends special forces into North Africa”): “…US navy P-3 Orion aircraft guided Chad troops during a two-day battle on the border with Niger last week in which 43 suspected members of Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat were killed.” Oil reserves in North and West Africa are drawing increasing attention from the US. West Africa supplies the US with 15 per cent of its oil while the US National Intelligence Council has projected the figure will grow to 25 per cent by 2015.