overwhelming majority of British subjects’ (p. 114). They enjoyed none of
the important political rights of British citizens, received no training in the
arts of free British institutions, and exercised no political privileges. The
most important fact of Empire for Hobson was that:
we have taken upon ourselves in these little islands the responsibility of
governing huge aggregations of lower races in all parts of the world by
methods which are antithetical to the methods of government which we
most value for ourselves. (p. 117)He also challenged the view that imperialism was part of a necessary strug-
gle for survival among the races so that only the most ‘socially efficient’
would flourish, exposing this way of thinking as no more than the ethical
fallacy of assuming that the power to do something constitutes a right or
even a duty to do it. Anticipating controversies that were to surface again in
the sociology of development, Hobson warned that ‘the notion that civiliza-
tion is a single beaten track, upon which every nation must march, and that
social efficiency, or extent of civilization, can be measured by the respective
distances that the nations have gone, is a mischievous delusion’ (p. 188).
In colonies the progress of local people was sacrificed to social order,
both being subservient to the ‘quick development’ of profitable trade or ‘the
mere lust of territorial aggrandizement’. The missionaries used political
intrigue and armed force in their competition for converts. The scientific
knowledge possessed by the imperial powers was seldom used for ‘light and
leading’ in relations with indigenous peoples. Slavery had given way to
indentured and forced labour and other ways of compelling people to sub-
stitute wage labour for traditional life on the land, such as the confiscation
of land and livestock, taxation, and the establishment of ‘native locations’,
all designed to supply cheap labour for farms, mines and the military. In
India, in which Hobson regarded the British presence as in many respects
beneficial, a century of British rule had proved incapable of warding off
starvation, had forcibly destroyed much Indian art and industry, and had
subverted ancient village institutions.
Taken together these ‘classical’ explanations of imperialism saw the
monopolistic aspect of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth
century as producing cartels and trusts needing protected markets in which
to invest and having the power to control markets and the terms of trade
between the European powers and their new dependencies. So part of
the explanation of imperialism was in terms of ‘push’ factors. In addition
there were the conditions in pre-capitalist societies which acted as a magnet
pulling capital from the developed economies – cheap labour, cheap
30 Understanding Third World Politics