motivated by the transformation from competitive into monopoly capitalism
(Cohen, B. J., 1973, pp. 23–31; Brewer, 1980, ch. 1; Magdoff, 1982).
The most systematic attempts to explain imperialism focused on the
expansionism of Western European capitalist powers in the late nineteenth
century, and were derived from a combination of largely but by no means
entirely Marxist thinking. Marx himself wrote about imperialism, particu-
larly in relation to India, in Das Capital. The English writer Hobson, not
a Marxist but nevertheless radical, presented his ideas in Imperialism:
a Study, published in 1902. This book had a great influence on Lenin,
despite the fact that he regarded Hobson as a ‘bourgeois social reformer’
and ‘social liberal’. Rosa Luxemburg analysed imperialism in her book The
Accumulation of Capital(1913). Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of
Capitalismwas published in 1917. He was also influenced by the Austrian
Marxist Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capitalpublished in Vienna in 1910;
and by the leading Bolshevik Bukharin, whose Imperialism and the World
Economy(written in 1915) was also based on Hilferding’s work (Brewer,
1980, p. 79).
These writers emphasized different aspects of the relationship between the
development of capitalism and imperialism. Marx’s own analysis of the cap-
italist mode of production saw capitalism as producing an international divi-
sion of labour. Capitalism also gave rise to a world market for commodities
produced by that division. The world was at the same time divided into
nation-states whose ruling classes protected their own national interests. So
there was an obvious contradiction, as capitalism developed, between the
internationally unifying tendencies of these new economic forces and the
competitive nature of nation-states. That contradiction was expressed in eco-
nomic rivalries and imperial expansion in pre-capitalist societies. As capital-
ist enterprises in the advanced countries sought to expand their markets and
maintain their levels of profit, they came into conflict with each other as they
sought control of new outlets for investment, sources of raw materials and
markets (Kemp, 1972, pp. 22–6). Marx placed great emphasis on the need
for what were increasingly monopolistic enterprises to reduce the costs of
raw materials such as the primary products that could be obtained from the
tropical dependencies, and the need to export capital by building ports and
railways in areas that had to be opened up to trade.
Marx examined the effects of colonization on the colonized peoples in a
fragmentary way, and was mainly concerned with Ireland and India. His
treatment of the two was not always consistent (Leys, 1975, pp. 6–7). In
Ireland, Marx believed colonialism had caused the expulsion of the peas-
antry through the establishment of capitalist agriculture and migration.
Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism 25