Draft:Economic imperialism

• [1] The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism
• [2] What Is Economic Imperialism? (Schweinitz, 1981)
• [3] Some remarks on ‘economic imperialism’ and international political economy (Hodgson, 1994)
• [4] Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Woolf, 1998)
• [5] Economic Imperialism Revisited: Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe and Africa (Austen, 1975)
• [6] Economics Imperialism and Economic Imperialism: Two Sides of the Same Coin (Ambrosino et al, 2023)
• [7] The Economics of Modern Imperialism (Carchedi & Roberts, 2021)

• [8]: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism: J. A. Hobson and Economic Imperialism
• [9]:The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism: Nigeria: Modern Economic Imperialism (c. 1980 to Present)

Definition and contexts

Economic imperialism is defined as the "foreign control of assets and decisions, including where such control exists in fact but not in law", involving informal and postcolonial as well as formal and colonial contexts, and "implies the unrequited transfer of capital, labour, or natural resources from one nation or country to another". Scholars have identified five modes of economic imperialism: colonialism, internal colonialism, settler colonialism, investment imperialism, and unequal exchange.

Colonialism

Main article: Colonialism

Colonialism is a system of domination characterised by the control of another territory, natural resources, and people by a foreign group. It is most often applied to the domination of European societies over non-European ones via conquest and settlement from the Age of Discovery in the 15th century to decolonisation in the 20th century, however historical examples also include Europeans colonising other Europeans and non-Europeans colonising other non-Europeans. While colonialism sometimes indirectly led to development dependent on the autonomy/independence of the colonised population and their position in the international division of labour, it was overall harmful due to its role in the history of genocides, famine, and war, and evidenced by the poles of contemporary global inequality. Regions that were relatively rich in 1500 and were subsequently colonised became relatively poor.

Early industrial societies exported their unemployment (caused by technical change and displacement of small producers) to their colonies, either through settler migration, or through enforcing free trade and flooding colonial markets with goods produced in the metropole (causing unemployment in the colony). An example of this was the deindustrialisation of India under British rule. Natural resources from colonies also fuelled the metropole's industrial development, and the nature of colonial trade meant colonies were effectively paid for their exports out of their tax revenue, effectively eliminating their export surpluses. This all served to drain wealth from the colonies.

Internal colonialism

Main article: Internal colonialism

Internal colonialism is the uneven effects of economic development on a regional basis, otherwise known as "uneven development", as a result of the exploitation of minority groups within a wider society which leads to political and economic inequalities between regions within a state. It is "‘a geographically-based pattern of subordination of a differentiated population, located within the dominant power or country". Internal colonies provide the metropole with accessible and disposable cheap labour, land, and natural resources.

Historical examples identified by scholars have included the United States and African Americans and Chicanos, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and the Soviet Union and Ukraine.

Settler colonialism

Main article: Settler colonialism

Settler colonialism is "a specific mode of domination where a community of exogenous settlers permanently displace to a new locale, eliminate or displace indigenous populations and sovereignties, and constitute an autonomous political body". It involves "land confiscation, the expulsion of the indigenous population, and the dispossession of its wealth and property". Settler colonies have also tended to subject indigenous populations to dual labour markets and economic exploitation more often associated with internal colonialism. They typically can develop independently through "accumulation by dispossession".

Investment imperialism

Investment imperialism refers to the exporting of capital, in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and loans, as economic imperialism. Both John Hobson and Vladimir Lenin saw the export of capital as resulting from economic inequality, which caused a savings glut (excessive wealth) among the rich and underconsumption among the poor. This underconsumption, combined with domestic competition, caused a lack of domestic opportunity for high-return investment, incentivising investment in foreign markets. This investment can build pressure for political or military intervention due to the desire to protect high returns. The Hobson-Lenin thesis has historically received criticism, however scholars have acknowledged this as deriving from a misinterpretation.

In contradiction to this, Britain and France reimported capital from earlier investments, draining capital from foreign markets. For Britain, property income derived from overseas outweighed the outflow of capital for most of the 19th century, most of which went to settler colonies. In underdeveloped countries, labour and natural resources were cheap enough to not necessitate FDI. Likewise, the United States toady is dependent on the inflow of capital from foreign markets. While British colonial investment in Africa did not produce superprofits, exploitation of labour ensured profitability, and exporting capital released pressure on its diminishing marginal returns in the metropole (ie. less profitable domestic alternatives), therefore improving the metropole's economic growth. While FDI is hypothetically conducive to diffusing technology and increasing living standards globally, in practice after an initial growth spurt, if unregulated, it leads to monopolies and net outflow of capital for dependent countries.

Unequal exchange

Main article: Unequal exchange

Unequal exchange refers to exploitation in international trade, where one country contributes more labour or ecological resources than it receives in exchange. This derives from higher wage rates in some countries which encourages capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive production, resulting in the "unequal exchange of labour time in monetarily equivalent trade between low-wage and high-wage countries in the world economy", where workers in one country can buy proportionately more of another country's output with one hour of their labour.

In developed countries, real wages rose from the late 19th century following the success of the trade union movement and high demand for labour, with the implementation of mass democracy building political pressure to maintain this. On the contrary, underdeveloped countries saw deindustrialisation, disarticulation, and labour market segmentation in their dual economies, which resulted in low wages.