rural industries and small-scale commodity producers in North America and
South Africa.
Capitalism’s need for new investment opportunities was a factor which
Hobson had already stressed. Markets were too small to make further invest-
ment in productive capacity profitable within Europe. Hobson showed that
contemporary imperialism acquired for Britain tropical and sub-tropical
regions with which there was only an insignificant amount of trade. He also
dismissed the prevalent belief among the proponents of imperialism that
colonial expansion was necessary to accommodate a surplus of population.
He saw the new wave of imperialism as being bad business for the nation but
good business for certain classes and professions that benefited from the mil-
itarism involved. Arguing largely from the South African case, Hobson
claimed that the greatest impulse for imperialism related to investment and
what he called the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of capital (Hobson, 1902, p. 51). The
period of ‘energetic imperialism’ was shown to coincide with a remarkable
growth in the earnings from foreign investments.
However, Hobson’s was not an entirely economistic interpretation of
imperialism. He was well aware of ideological forces which provided the
energy behind imperialism, which investors then manipulated and guided.
Politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, traders and missionaries generated the
patriotic forces and enthusiasm for imperialism, but the final determination
of where that energy was directed lay with the power of finance controlling
public opinion through an obedient press, educational system and church.
Hobson’s solution was radical reform at home which would increase levels
of private and public consumption, expand home markets and remove the
need for foreign ones. ‘It is not industrial progress that demands the open-
ing up of new markets and areas of investment, but mal-distribution of con-
suming power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital
within the country’ (p. 85).
Hobson was also concerned to contest the statements by the protagonists
of imperialism about the beneficial consequences of British rule in her
dependent territories. Contemporary justifications for imperialism claimed
that the subjects of the Empire enjoyed benefits which it was the duty of the
British to bestow. Hobson dismissed this motive for imperialism as a mere
dressing-up of the ‘spirit of naked dominance’, pointing out that the ‘chival-
rous spirit of Imperialism’ never promoted any Western nation to ‘assail a
powerful State, however tyrannous, or to assist a weak state reputed to be
poor’ (p. 200). No power of self-government had been bestowed upon the
vast majority of the population of the Empire. ‘Political freedom, and civil
freedom, so far as it rests upon the other, are simply non-existent for the
Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism 29