Ireland’s function was to supply raw materials, cheap labour, a market for
manufactured goods and land for safe investment.
The effect on India of British industrial capitalism was a flooding of its
markets with British textiles and the destruction of Indian handicraft textile
production. State power was needed to make Asiatic society less resistant to
penetration by trade. The destruction of the Indian village, in which land
was held not privately but through membership of the community led to the
zamandarisystem of large landed estates, and the ryotwarisystem of taxa-
tion which treated cultivators as individual proprietors or tenants.
The progressive features of imperialism in India included the creation of
a labour force of dispossessed peasants, the accumulation of capital from
trade and usury, industrial development supported by the building of rail-
ways, political unity supported by the electric telegraph, the seeds of self-
determination supported by a British-trained army, reconstruction
supported by a free press, and the emergence of an educated middle class
‘endowed with the requirements of government and imbued with European
science’ (Marx, 1969, p. 133). Imperialism was thus creating the conditions
for industrial capitalism and a modern nation-state (Brewer, 1980, p. 58). It
would produce the same consequences as it had for the colonizers – the
development of society’s productive forces, and misery and degradation for
its workers.
In his later writings Marx emphasized the destructive aspects of imperi-
alism: enforcing dependence on agriculture to supply the needs of the
industrial world; draining capital from the colonies; and failing to complete
the institution of private property (Carnoy, 1984, pp. 174–5). Earlier he had
overestimated the strength of the forces making for change. Industry, trans-
portation and communications were not having the impact he thought on
caste and communalism, and were not to do so for many years. Nor was
agrarian capitalism providing the foundation for industrial capitalism
(Kiernan, 1974, pp. 180–91).
To some Marxists it seemed that national markets within the Western cap-
italist countries were unable to absorb the goods which capitalist enterprises
were producing or the savings which needed to be invested. Markets had to
be found elsewhere – hence the importance of colonies for trade and invest-
ment as well as for raw materials.
To Kautsky and Lenin the First World War appeared to be a culmination of
those tendencies that Marx had identified much earlier. Lenin was concerned
to explain the international forces that brought about the First World War, and
so systematized and popularized the Marxist theory of imperialism in his tract
of 1916. He repeated what Marx had said about capitalism reaching a stage of
26 Understanding Third World Politics