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Impact of Imperialism – Eric Hobsbawm
From The Age of Empire (1987) pp. 73-83
This still leaves us with the questions about the impact of western (and from the 1890 Japanese) expansion on
the rest of the world, and about the significance of the 'imperial' aspects of imperialism for the metropolitan
countries.
The first of these questions can be answered more quickly than the second. The economic impact of imperialism
was significant, but, of course, the most significant thing about it was that it was profoundly unequal, for the
relationship between metropoles and dependencies was highly asymmetrical. The impact of the first on the
second was dramatic and decisive, even without actual occupation, whereas the impact of the second on the first
might be negligible, and was hardly ever a matter of life or death. Cuba stood or fell by the price of sugar and the
willingness of the USA to import it, but even quite small 'developed' countries - say Sweden - would not have
been seriously inconvenienced if all Caribbean sugar had suddenly disappeared from the market, because they
did not depend exclusively on that area for sugar. Virtually all the imports and exports of any region in subSaharan Africa came from or went to a handful of western metropoles, but metropolitan trade with Africa, Asia
and Oceania, while increasing modestly between 1870 and 1914, remained quite marginal. About 80 per cent of
European trade throughout the nineteenth century, both exports and imports, was with other developed countries,
and the same is true of European foreign investments.15 Insofar as these were directed overseas, they went
mostly to a handful of rapidly developing economies mainly populated by settlers of European descent - Canada,
Australia, South Africa, Argentina, etc. - as well as, of course, to the USA. In this sense the age of imperialism
looks very different when seen from Nicaragua or Malaya than it does from the point of view of Germany or
France.
Among the metropolitan countries imperialism was obviously of greatest importance to Britain, since the
economic supremacy of that country had always hinged on her special relationship with the overseas markets
and sources of primary products. In fact it is arguable that at no time since the industrial revolution had the
manufactures of the United Kingdom been particularly competitive on the markets of industrializing economies,
except perhaps during the golden decades of 1850-70. To preserve as much as possible of its privileged access to
the non-European world was therefore a matter of life and death for the British economy.' 6 In the late nineteenth
century it was remarkably successful in doing so, incidentally expanding the area officially or actually under the
British monarchy to a quarter of the surface of the globe (which British atlases proudly coloured red). If we
include the so-called 'informal empire' of independent states which were in effect satellite economies of Britain,
perhaps one-third of the globe was British in an economic, and indeed cultural, sense. For Britain exported even
the peculiar shape of her post-boxes to Portugal, and so quintessentially British an institution as Harrods
department store to Buenos Aires. But by 1914 much of this zone of indirect influence, especially in Latin
America, was already being infiltrated by other powers.
However, not a great deal of this successful defensive operation had much to do with the 'new' imperialist
expansion, except that biggest of bonanzas, the diamonds and gold of South Africa. This generated a crop of
(largely German) instant millionaires - the Wernhers, Beits, Ecksteins, et al. - most of whom were equally
instantly incorporated into British high society, never more receptive to first-generation money if it was splashed
around in sufficiently large quantities. It also led to the greatest of colonial conflicts, the South African War of
1899-1902, which eliminated the resistance of two small local republics of white peasant settlers.
Most of Britain's overseas success was due to the more systematic exploitation of Britain's already existing
possessions or of the country's special position as the major importer from, and investor in, such areas as South
America. Except for India, Egypt and South Africa, most British economic activity was in countries which were
virtually independent, like the white 'dominions', or areas like the USA and Latin America, where British state
action was not, or could not be, effectively deployed. For in spite of the cries of pain emanating from the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders (established during the Great Depression) when faced with the well-known
Latin practice of suspending debt-payment or paying in devalued currency, the government did not effectively
back its investors in Latin America, because it could not. The Great Depression was a crucial test in this respect,
because, like later world depressions (including the one of the 19705 and 19805) it led to a major international
debt crisis, which put the banks of the metropolis at serious risk. The most the British government could do was
to arrange for the great house of Baring to be saved from insolvency in the 'Baring crisis' of 1890, when that
bank had, as banks will, ventured too freely into the whirlpools of defaulting Argentinian finance. If it backed
investors with diplomacy offeree, as it increasingly did after 1905, it was to support them against entrepreneurs
of other countries backed by their own governments, rather than against the larger governments of the dependent
world.*
In fact, taking the good years with the bad, British capitalists did rather well out of their informal or 'free' empire.
Almost half of all Britain's long-term publicly issued capital in 1914 was in Canada, Australia and Latin
America. More than half of all British savings were invested abroad after 1900.
1
Of course Britain took her share of the newly colonialized regions of the world, and, given British strength and
experience, it was a larger and probably more valuable share than that of anyone else. If France occupied most of
West Africa, the four British colonies in this area controlled 'the denser African populations, the larger
productive capacities, and the preponderance of trade'. 17 Yet the British object was not expansion but defence
against others encroaching upon territories hitherto, like most of the overseas world, dominated by British trade
and British capital.
Did other powers benefit proportionately from their colonial expansion? It is impossible to say, since formal
colonization was only one aspect of global economic expansion and competition, and, in the case of the two
major industrial powers, Germany and the USA, not a major aspect of it. Moreover, as we have already seen, for
no country other than Britain (with the possible exception of the Netherlands) was a special relationship with the nonindustrial world economically crucial. Ail we can say with fair confidence is this. First, the drive for colonies seems to
have been proportionately stronger in economically less dynamic metropolitan countries, where it served to some
extent as a potential compensation for their economic and political inferiority to their rivals - and, in the case of
France, her demographic and military inferiority. Second, in all cases there were particular economic groups -notably
those associated with overseas trade and industries using overseas raw materials - pressing strongly for colonial
expansion, which they naturally justified by the prospects of national advantage. Third, while some of these groups did
rather well out of such expansion - the Compagnie Francaise de 1'Afrique Occidentaie paid dividends of 26 per cent in
I9I318 - most of the actual new colonies attracted little capital and their economic results were disappointing.* In short,
the new colonialism was a by-product of an era of economic-political rivalry between competing national economies,
intensified by protectionism. However, insofar as the metropolitan trade with the colonies almost invariably increased
as a percentage of its total trade, that protectionism was modestly successful.
Yet the Age of Empire was not only an economic and political but a cultural phenomenon. The conquest of the globe
by its 'developed1 minority transformed images, ideas and aspirations, both by force and institutions, by example and
by social transformation. In the dependent countries this hardly affected anyone except the indigenous eiites, though of
course it must be remembered that in some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, it was imperialism itself, or the
associated phenomenon of Christian missions, which created the possibility of new social elites based on education in
the western manner. The division between 'francophone' and 'anglophone' African states today exactly mirrors the
distribution of the French and British colonial empires.t Except in Africa and Oceania, where Christian missions
sometimes secured mass conversions to the western religion, the great mass of the colonial populations hardly changed
their ways of Hie if they could help it. And, to the chagrin of the more unbending missionaries, what indigenous
peoples adopted was not so much the faith imported from the west as those elements in it which made sense to them in
terms of their ownsystem of beliefs and institutions, or demands. Just like the sports brought to Pacific islanders by
enthusiastic British colonial administrators (so often selected from among the more muscular products of the middle
class), colonial religion often looked as unexpected to the western observer as Sarnoan cricket. This was so even where
the faithful nominally followed the orthodoxies of their denomination. But they were also apt to develop their own
versions of the faith, notably in South Africa - the one region in Africa where really massive conversions took place where an 'Ethiopian movement' seceded from the missions as early as 1892 in order to establish a form of Christianity
less identified with the whites.
What imperialism brought to the elites or potential elites of the dependent world was therefore essentially
'westernization'. It had, of course, begun to do so long before then. For all governments and elites of countries faced
with dependency or conquest it had been clear for several decades that they had to westernize or go under (see The Age
of Capital, chapters 7, 8, n). And, indeed, the ideologies which inspired such elites in the era of imperialism dated back
to the years between the French Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century, as when they took the form of the
positivism of August Comte (1798-1857), a modernizing doctrine which inspired the governments of Brazil, Mexico
and the early Turkish Revolution (see pp. 284, 290 below). Elite resistance to the west remained westernizing even
when it opposed wholesale westernization on grounds of religion, morality, ideology or political pragmatism. The
saintly Mahatma Gandhi, wearing loincloth and bearing a spindle (to discourage industrialization), was not only supported and financed by the owners of mechanized cotton-factories in Ahmedabad* but was himself a western-educated
lawyer visibly influenced by western-derived ideology. He is quite incomprehensible if we see in him only a Hindu
traditionalist.
In fact, Gandhi illustrates the specific impact of the era of imperialism rather well. Born into a relatively modest caste
of traders and moneylenders not previously much associated with the westernized elite which administered India under
British superiors, he nevertheless acquired a professional and political education in England. By the late i88os this was
so accepted an option for ambitious young men from his country that Gandhi himself began to write a guide-book to
English life for prospective students of modest circumstances such as himself. Written in superb English, it advised
them on everything from the journey by p & o steamer to London and how to find lodgings, to ways of meeting the
diet requirements of the pious Hindu and how to get used to the surprising western habit of shaving oneself
rather than having it done by a barber.111 Gandhi clearly saw himself neither as an unconditional assimilator nor
as an unconditional opponent of things British. As many pioneers of colonial liberation have done since, during
their temporary stay in the rnetropole, he choose to move in western circles which were ideologically congenial in his case those of British vegetarians, who may safely be taken as being in favour of other 'progressive' causes
also.
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Gandhi learned his characteristic technique of mobilizing traditionalist masses for non-traditionaiist purposes by
means of passive resistance, in an environment created by the 'new imperialism'. It was, as one might expect, a
fusion of western and eastern elements for he made no secret of his intellectual debt to John Ruskin and Tolstoi.
(Before the i88os the fertilization of Indian political flowers by pollen carried from Russia would have been
inconceivable, but by the first decade of the new century it was already common among Indian, as it was to be
among Chinese and Japanese radicals.) South Africa, the boom country of diamonds and gold, attracted a large
community of modest immigrants from India, and racial discrimination in this novel setting created one of the
few situations in which the non-elite Indians were ready for modern political mobilization. Gandhi gained his
political experience and won his political spurs as the champion of Indian rights in South Africa. He could hardly
as yet have done the same in India itself, where he eventually returned - but only after the outbreak of the 1914
war - to become the key figure in the Indian national movement.
In short, the Age of Empire created both the conditions which formed anti-imperialist leaders and the conditions
which, as we shall see (chapter 12 below), began to give their voices resonance. But, of course, it is an
anachronism and a misunderstanding to present the history of the peoples and regions brought under the
domination and influence of the western metropoles primarily in terms of resistance to the west. It is an
anachronism because, with exceptions to be noted below, the era of significant anti-imperial movements begins
for most regions at the earliest with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and a misunderstanding,
because it reads the text of modern nationalism -independence, the self-determination of peoples, the formation
of territorial states, etc. (see chapter 6 below) - into a historical record which did not yet, and could not yet,
contain it. In fact, it was the westernized elites which first made contact with such ideas through their visits to
the west and through the educational institutions formed by the west, for that is where they came from. Young
Indian students returning from
Britain might bring with them the slogans of Mazzini and Garibaldi, but as yet few of the inhabitants of the
Pandjab, let alone of regions like the Sudan, would have the slightest idea of what they could mean.
The most powerful cultural legacy of imperialism was, therefore, an education in western ways for minorities of
various kinds: for the favoured few who became literate and therefore discovered, with or without the assistance
of Christian conversion, the high road ofambition which wore the white collar of the clergyman, teacher,
bureaucrat or office worker. In some regions it also included those who acquired new ways as soldiers and
policemen of the new ruiers, wearing their clothes, adopting their peculiar ideas of time, place and domestic
arrangement. These, of course, were the minorities of potential movers and shakers, which is why the era of
colonialism, brief even by the measure of a single human life, has left such lasting effects. For it is a surprising
fact that in most parts of Africa the entire experience of colonialism from original occupation to the formation of
independent states, fits within a single lifetime - say that of Sir Winston Churchill (1874 1965).
What of the opposite effect of the dependent world on the dominant? Exoticism had been a by-product of
European expansion since the sixteenth century, though philosophical observers in the age of Enlightenment had
more often than not treated the strange countries beyond Europe and European settlers as a sort of moral
barometer of European civilization. Where they were plainly civilized, they could illustrate the institutional
deficiencies of the west, as in Montesquieu's Persian Letters; where they were not, they were apt to be treated as
noble savages whose natural arid admirable comportment illustrated the corruption of civilized society. The
novelty of the nineteenth century was that non-Europeans and their societies were increasingly, and generally,
treated as inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile. They were fit subjects for conquest, or at
least for conversion to the values of the only real civilization, that represented by traders, missionaries and
bodies of armed men full of firearms and fire-water. And in a sense the values of traditional non-western
societies increasingly became irrelevant to their survival in an age when force and military technology alone
counted. Did the sophistication of imperial Peking prevent the western barbarians from burning and looting the
Summer Palace more than once? Did the elegance of elite culture in the declining Mughal capital, so beautifully
portrayed in Satyajit Ray's The Chessplayers, hold up the advancing British? For the average European, such
people became objects of contempt. The only non-Europeans they took to were fighters, preferably those who
could be recruited into their own colonial armies (Sikhs, Gurkhas, Berber mountaineers, Afghans, Beduin). The
Ottoman Empire earned a grudging respect, becauseeven in decline it had an infantry which could resist European
armies. Japan came to be treated as an equal when it began to win wars.
And yet the very density of the network of global communication, the very accessibility of foreign lands, directly or
indirectly, intensified the confrontation and the intermingling of the western and the exotic worlds. Those who knew
and reflected on both were few, though in the imperialist period their number was increased by writers who
deliberately chose to make themselves intermediaries between them: writers or intellectuals by vocation and by
profession mariners (like Pierre Lot! and, greatest of them, Joseph Conrad), soldiers and administrators (like the
orientalist Louis Massignon) or colonial journalists (like Rudyard Kipling). But increasingly the exotic became part of
everyday education, as in the enormously successful boys' novels of Karl May (1842--1912), whose imaginary
German hero ranged through the Wild West and the Islamic east, with excursions into black Africa and Latin America;
in the thrillers, whose villains now included inscrutable and all-powerful orientals like Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu; in
the pulp-magazine school stories for British boys, which now included a rich Hindu speaking the baroque BabuEnglish of the expected stereotype. It could even become an occasional but expected part of everyday experience, as in
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, with its equally exotic cowboys and Indians, which conquered Europe from 1887 on,
or in the increasingly elaborate 'colonial villages' or exhibits in the great International Expositions. These glimpses of
strange worlds were not documentary, whatever their intention. They were ideological, generally reinforcing the sense
of superiority of the 'civilized' over the 'primitive'. They were imperialist only because, as the novels ofjoseph Conrad
show, the centra! link between the worlds of the exotic and the everyday was the formal or informal penetration of the
Third World by the west. When colloquial language, mainly via various forms of slang, notably that of colonial
armies, absorbed words from the actual imperial experience, they often reflected a negative view of its subjects. Italian
workers called strike-breakers crumiri (after a North African tribe) and Italian politicians called the regiments of docile
southern voters marched into elections by local patrons ascari (colonial native troops). Caciques, the Indian chieftains
of Spain's American empire, had become a synonym for any political boss; caids (North African indigenous chiefs)
provided the term for leaders of criminal gangs in France.
Yet there was a more positive side to this exoticism. Intellectually minded administrators and soldiers - businessmen
were less interested in such matters - pondered deeply on the differences between their own societies and those they
ruled. They produced both bodies of impressive
scholarship about them, especially in the Indian empire, and theoretical reflections which transformed western social
sciences. Much of this work was the by-product of colonial rule or intended to assist it, and most of it unquestionably
rested on a firm and confident sense of the superiority of western knowledge to any other, except perhaps in the realm
of religion, where the superiority of e.g. Methodism to Buddhism was not obvious to impartial observers. Imperialism
brought a notable rise in the western interest in, and sometimes the western conversion to, forms of spirituality derived
from the orient, or claiming to be so derived.20 Yet, in spite of post-colonial criticism, this body of western scholarship
cannot be dismissed simply as a supercilious depreciation of non-European cultures. At the very least the best of it
took them seriously, as something to be respected and from which to derive instruction. In the field of art, and
especially the visual arts, western avant gardes treated non-western cultures entirely as equals. They were indeed
largely inspired by them in this period. This is true not only of arts believed to represent sophisticated civilizations,
however exotic (like the Japanese, whose influence on French painters was marked), but of those regarded as
'primitive', and notably those of Africa and Oceania. No doubt their 'primitivism' was their main attraction, but it is
undeniable that the avant-garde generations of the early twentieth century taught Europeans to see such works as art often as great art - in its own right, irrespective of its origin.
One final aspect of imperialism must be briefly mentioned: its impact on the ruling and middle classes of the
metropolitan countries themselves. In one sense imperialism dramatized the triumph of these classes and the societies
created in their image as nothing else could possibly have done. A handful of countries, mainly in north-western
Europe, dominated the globe. Some imperialists, to the resentment of the Latins not to mention the Slavs, even liked to
stress the peculiar conquering merits of those of Teutonic and especially Anglo-Saxon origins who, whatever their
rivalries, were said to have an affinity to each other which still echoes through Hitler's grudging respect for Britain. A
handful of men of the upper and middle class within these countries -officers, administrators, businessmen, engineers exercised that domination effectively. Around 1890 a little over 6000 British officials governed almost 300 million
Indians with the help of a little over 70,000 European soldiers, the rank-and-file of whom were, like the much more
numerous indigenous troops, mercenaries who took orders, and who indeed were disproportionately drawn from that
older reservoir of native colonial fighters, the Irish. The case is extreme, but by no means untypical. Could there be a
more extraordinary proof of absolute superiority? The number of people directly involved in empire was thus
relatively small - but their symbolic significance was enormous. When the writer Rudyard Kipling, the bard of
the Indian empire, was believed to be dying of pneumonia in 1899, not only the British and the Americans
grieved - Kipling had just addressed a poem on 'The White Man's Burden' to the USA on its responsibilities in
the Philippines - but the Emperor of Germany sent a telegram.21
Yet imperial triumph raised both problems and uncertainties. It raised problems insofar as the contradiction
between the rule of metropolitan ruling classes over their empires and their own peoples became increasingly
insoluble. Within the metropoles, as we shall see, the politics of democratic electoralism increasingly, and as it
seemed inevitably, prevailed or were destined to prevail. Within the colonial empires autocracy ruled, based on
the combination of physical coercion and passive submission to a superiority so great as to appear unchallengeable and therefore legitimate. Soldiers and self-disciplined 'proconsuls', isolated men with absolute powers over
territories the size of kingdoms, ruled over continents, while at home the ignorant and inferior masses were
rampant. Was there not a lesson - a lesson in the sense of Nietzsche's Will to Power - to be learned here?
Imperialism also raised uncertainties. In the first place it confronted a small minority of whites - for even the
majority of that race belonged to those destined to inferiority, as the new discipline of eugenics unceasingly
warned (see chapter 10 below) - with the masses of the black, the brown, perhaps above all the yellow, that
'yellow peril' against which the Emperor William n called for the union and defence of the west. 22 Could world
empires, so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the
passivity of the many, could they last? Kipling, the greatest - perhaps the only - poet of imperialism welcomed
the great moment of demagogic imperial pride, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with a prophetic
reminder of the impermanence of empires:
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with
Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget.23
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Pomp planned the building of an enormous new imperial capital for India in New Delhi. Was Clemenceau the
only sceptical observer who would foresee that it would be the latest of a long series of ruins of imperial
capitals? And was the vulnerability of global rule so
much greater than the vulnerability of domestic rule over the white masses?
The uncertainty was double-edged. For if empire (and the rule of the ruling classes) was vulnerable to its
subjects, though perhaps not yet, not immediately, was it not more immediately vulnerable to the erosion from
within of the will to rule, the willingness to wage the Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest? Would
not the very wealth and luxury which power and enterprise had brought weaken the fibres of those muscles
whose constant efforts were necessary to maintain it? Did not empire lead to parasitism at the centre and to the
eventual triumph of the barbarians?
Nowhere did such questions sound a more doom-laden echo than in the greatest and most vulnerable of all
empires, the one which in size and glory surpassed all empires of the past, and yet in other respects was on the
verge of decline. But even the hard-working and energetic Germans saw imperialism as going hand in hand with
that 'rentier state' which could not but lead to decay. Let J. A. Hobson give word to these fears: if China were to
be partitioned, the greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already
exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts
of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East,
with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a large body of personal servants and
workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main
arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and manufactures flowing in as tribute from Africa
and Asia.24
The bourgeoisie's belle epoque would thus disarm it. The charming, harmless Eloi of H. G. Wells' novel, living
lives of play in the sun, would be at the mercy of the dark Morlocks on whom they depended, and against whom
they were helpless.25 'Europe', wrote the German economist Schulze-Gaevernitz, '... will shift the burden of
physical toil, first agriculture and mining, then the more arduous toil in industry - on to the coloured races, and
itself be content with the role of rentier, and in this way, perhaps, pave the way for the economic and later, the
political emancipation of the coloured races.'26
Such were the bad dreams which disturbed the sleep of the belle epoque. In them the nightmares of empire
merged with the fears of democracy.
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