Racism, capitalism and empire. posted by Richard Seymour

Update! I'm reposting this in an expanded version with sources where they need to be and some critical engagement with a few authors and a bit more empirical material and fewer spelling mistakes and a better organised argument.

Periodisation of the Scramble for Africa, says Wesseling (HL Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa 1880-1914, 1996), is no innocent business, and often revolves around attempts to locate motivations of individual statesmen in decisions that supposedly set the whole process off. Yet, at some point, matters did decisively change. After all, the British had been happily pursuing its Free Trade empire, which was preferable to the burden of protectorates or colonies. Successive Prime Ministers since Castlereagh had opposed formal British rule. As Macaulay put it "To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages". This represented what had been a decisive shift - whereas previously Britain had extended itself in colonising the Americas, Australia and parts of Asia, and whereas it had a great deal of 'influence' in West Africa around the slave trade, it subsequently made a decisive break - in 1807, for instance, banning the use of its ships to ferry slaves and later in 1833 extending the ban to all its colonies while maintaining a largely ineffectual blockade. Jurisdiction had been defined in vague terms, allowing for a great deal of ad hoc annexation and jurisdictional innovation. (China Mieville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, 2005, chapter six). Following the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had finished off its former rival for maritime supremacy – it’s position was “unassailable” (Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 1969, chapter twelve; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The Rise of International Law 1871-1960, Cambridge University Press, 2004, chapter 2). The US was busily 'winning the West' against Sioux, Apache and other Indian tribes, and Russia was conquering the Khazaks, Uzbeks and Turkmen - that is, pursuing the overland imperial expansion more common to history (the predominantly overseas expansion of North-west Europe is a decided historical novelty). (D Abernethy, Patterns of Global Domination, 2000). In 1865, a Select Committee had decided that it would be better to restore the colonies to local rule. (Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, 1993, chapter one).

Yet, from the late 1870s, both Britain and France made a sharp turn toward military enclosure (filling up the 'empty map'). From then on, intellectuals offering an alternative to colonization were either treated as nuisances or (after 1917), harrassed, spied on and eventually exiled. There was certainly no room for literate Africans in the running of states - except as clerks or policemen. (Ibid). At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, the partitioning of Africa had been enacted on paper, using all the diplomatic techniques developed by absolutist states (particularly by France under Louis Quatorze) to negotiate their respective 'rights' - the discourse was decidedly cast in legal terms rather than pure power politics. (D Abernethy, Patterns of Global Domination, 2000, chapter five; Mieville, op cit, chapter six). Partition only started to come into effect properly from the 1890s, and it was imposed through a series of wars that were by no means new, but were certainly greater in scope than ever before. As before, colonial expansion syncopated the rhythms of natural disaster and epidemic disease - according to Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts), the great incidence of drought was frequently used by colonial powers to impose their rule. In South Africa, the chief ally of the Portuguese and British against militarily independent societies was a great drought. Disraeli's designs for a single British hegemony over the southern cone of Africa made use of a great drought in 1877, while famines were ruthlessly used to wipe out the Mahdis. By the same token, the colonial creation of export-led economies was often at the expense of grazing and agrarian subsistence farming, which exacerbated crises. The wars themselves were extremely brutal - Germany's suppression of the Herero people in 1904 wiped out about three quarters of the people, while Britain's war against the white population of Boers involved scorched earth campaigns in which villages were razed and cattle destroyed (Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, 2005, introduction) - although it didn't quite match the ferocity of the campaign to destroy the Zulu kingdom in which, according to Michael Lieven, "Genocide came close to being official policy". (Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso, 2002, chapter three). The ongoing systematic violence continued for several decades - the 'pacification' of Morocco began in 1912 and wasn't complete until well into the 1930s. And of course, the imperial Metropoles were eventually obliged, in some cases after extremely brutal repression (Wesseling, op cit; Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, 2005) to withdraw politically from Africa, having implanted their national capital investments and forced the creation of nation-states.

This has to be placed in the context of overseas expansion that followed the loss of the Americas. The overwhelming tendency was for colonial powers to leave the colonial white overlords to continue to conquer the New World, while colonising the Old World themselves. It is true that the bulk of territorial acquisition took place after the 1870s, (8.6 million square miles were acquired by European powers between 1878 and 1913), but about 5 million square miles had already been taken in the period 1824-70. Some of these advances had been made in Africa in its northern, southern and western extremities, and had been pushing inland in all these territories and even in those which they did not formally rule, with railroad expansion (see Hanna Batatu on the merchant class in Iraq and its dependency on the British commercial ascendancy, for instance). It must also be placed in the context of the unprecedented Hundred Years Peace, in which old colonial powers did not fight one another (albeit Germany did get into the odd scrap when it emerged, and won against Denmark, Austria and France - becoming the main beneficiary of the second industrial revolution in the process and becoming the main European growth centre). It has been suggested that this was a displacement of internal European rivalries and that once the territory was used up and divided, the old rivalries were restored - ironically, Abernethy offers this as a critique of Lenin, but it happens to be one of Lenin's crucial observations. (Abernethy, op cit; VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1939, chapter ten).

This details some of the arc of what happened and perhaps explains some of the timing of individual attacks - but the question again is why the change? Given Abernethy’s criticisms, it is worth scrutinising what Lenin says about the Scramble for Africa: "When the colonies of the European powers, for instance, comprised only one-tenth of the territory of Africa (as was the case in 1876), colonial policy was able to develop—by methods other than those of monopoly—by the ‘free grabbing’ of territories, so to speak. But when nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, there was inevitably ushered in the era of monopoly possession of colonies and, consequently, of particularly intense struggle for the division and the re-division of the world." He appears to give the impression that monopolisation of capital is the result, rather than the cause, of colonialism, although of course his position throughout the pamphlet is famously that the concentration of capital leads to monopolies, these to finance capital, and it is the merging of finance-capital with the state and the growing importance of its export, that brings about imperialism in the capitalist sense. There are some problems with this picture, but before getting into that, I’ll offer some background that in my view confirms Lenin’s basic diagnosis.

Britain's free trade position hadn't stopped other states from pursuing protectionist policies, particularly when their indigenous economies were weak or nascent. The development of national economies reduced the dependence of the US and European states on Britain, so that between 1860 and 1870, Britain had 54% of its investments in Europe and the US, while by 1911-13, it had only 25% of its investments in these continents. The City of London remained the trading and financial centre of the world, but that had obviously diminished due to protectionist policies, and was to deteriorate further after the First World War. (Hobsbawm, op cit, chapter seven). Britain’s position had started to wane in the 1870s – its share of industrial production falling from 32% in 1870 to 14% in 1913. The US’s share rose in the same period from 23 to 38%. (Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000, MR Press, 2002, chapter four).

Periodisation, as I say, is not innocent, but we can perhaps locate the big shift in 1873, which saw the beginning of a wave of profound crises: the stock exchange in Vienna crashed, followed by bank failures in Austria and Germany; Germany's successful war with France in 1870-1 had involved it in mass construction of railroads and ships, but this resulted in such drastic price rises in cast iron that the construction industry began to contract dramatically - so that the production of cast iron had dropped by 21% in 1874; the US, a big source of British profits, experienced a slump caused by the scarcity of materials and labour during the railroad boom, which caused banks and railroad companies to fail and a panic on the stock market; UK exports fell by some 25% between 1872 and 1875; a stock exchange crash in Lyon in 1882 was followed by a US "railroad panic" in 1884, and this in itself was coterminous with the growing protectionism and cartelisation of the depression-ridden German economy; the Baring Bank had to be saved from ruin in 1890 by the Bank of England, following a series of political and economic crises in Argentina, where it operated; and in the same year, the McKinley protective tariff was introduced, which coincided with the proliferation of large trusts in the US. (Ibid). These crises coincided with a growing working class, and its increasing weight as a political force. In Britain, the working class grew from 5.7 million in 1881 to 8.6 million in 1911 with the number of organised workers doubling from 1.1 million to 2.2 million between 1976 and 1900, while in Germany the number of workers grew from 5.6 million in 1895 to 8.4 million in 1919. Despite anti-socialist laws in Germany, the social-democrats clandestine action had started to pay off by 1884, with them receiving some 550,000 votes. In the United States, an intense period of strikes had taken place throughout the crisis – more than three thousand strikes took place between 1881 and 1885. (Ibid).

At the same time, diamond pipes had been discovered in South Africa, and gold would be discovered there too. Explorers had traversed Africa and established that the place was ripe for exploitation. The French government, in particular, was paying attention. Having lost its maritime power, it sought to recover its imperial losses through territorial acquisition. In 1883, Sir Percy Anderson, the head of the Foreign Office's African bureau, worried that "Action seems to be forced on us ... Protectorates are unwelcome burdens, but in this case it is ... a choice between British protectorates, which would be unwelcome, and French protectorates, which would be fatal." The monopolisation and concentration of capital, and its fusion with the state, was such that when the scramble was over, more than 75% of British territory south of the Sahara was acquired by chartered companies - often, grudgingly, undertaking administrative duties. (Mieville, op cit).

Another aspect of the division of Africa was the creation of nation-states. Even during this period of a 'liberal' foreign policy, the British relied to some extent on the support of a layer of Christianised intellectuals, some of whom were 'recaptives' - that is, had been found crushed as 'stowaways' into ships, destined for slavery, and sent to Freetown by the British authorities. These intellectuals had been educated by Christian missionaries and were overwhelmingly pro-colonial: consequently, they were regarded, quite reasonably, as apologists who had placed themselves outside of the community. But they had hoped that the British were serious when they spoke of some form of self-rule, and that they would benefit from the ideological imperative to 'de-traditionalise' African society, since it was assumed that those 'civilised' by the imperialists would be able to implement nation-statization against 'traditional' rulers who were cast as reactionaries, backward, clinging to fetishistic practises as opposed to good religion. Whatever the merits of the monarchs, they were not opposed to modernisation as such - they simply felt the imposition of a nation-state system was perverse and detrimental to African society, and at any rate they felt the 'modernisers' would make a hash of it. It may seem ironic that the main form of resistance to empire would later become a kind of colonial nationalism imbricated with various Marxist hybrids, but the apparently irresistible virtues of nation-states being granted recognition as sovereign states in an international system had considerably more weight than the canting rhetoric of liberals in the metropole, like Lord Acton insisting that nationalism would "sacrifice liberty and prosperity to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the state". the absence of a sovereign states-system in Africa represented an area which capital had not colonised. Sovereign states are, as Justin Rosenberg has it, the political expression of capitalist social relations, in that the extrusion of the means of violence from the relations of exploitation under capitalism involves the creation of separate private and public spheres. A private 'economic' sphere and a public 'political' sphere in which capitalist class power gives up the means of extra-economic coercion, allowing the state to guarantee its rights, its access, the social-property relations which ensure its dominion. The state does not 'withdraw' from civil society, as it is usually called, but it does differentiate economic and political functions sharply. Private enterprise runs the economy, while the government underpins the legal basis - and indeed, the state can lose some of its sovereignty by becoming involved in direct economic transactions inasmuch as by nationalising industries, it makes economic struggle a political struggle - the Thatcher regime in Britain was about replacing the politicisation of the economy with a strong state which reduced the power of unions and under-girded capitalist class power. (Davidson, op cit; Justin Rosenberg, Empire of Civil Society, Verso, 1994).

I have made a case for a version of the Leninist theory of imperialism, yet some criticisms of his method merit consideration. First of all, Wesseling offers a number of explanations which are not all by any means inconsistent with the Leninist account. First of all, there was initially no resistance, since the division of Africa was a ‘paper affair’ with its provisions only being enforced from the 1890s onward. And while Europeans had to compete with the US, Japan and Russia for a share of China, the diplomatic manoeuvring of European powers was uninterrupted by the US and Russia, who were busily pursuing the more traditional overland development. (Abernethy provides this part of the explanation, in fact). Motivations for the division are, for Wesseling, diverse and not entirely consistent. Citing Robinson and Gallagher, he differs with the view offered by Hobson and Lenin that capitalists promoted the division – at least for Britain, part of the motive was supplied by the need to ensure access to the East. As they themselves explain, most of the business and political classes were hostile to formal colonization, while public opinion tended to restrain imperial adventure, albeit some business and ‘imperialist’ lobbies – a distinction without a difference in my view – and the government ended up relying on private corporations. British efforts concentrated on east Africa and the Upper Nile, where direct bounty was less abundantly available – the reason was that “In all regions north of Rhodesia, the broad imperative which decided which territory to reserve and which to renounce, was the safety of routes to the east”, because “Britain’s strength depended upon the possession of India and preponderance in the East almost as much as it did upon the British isles”. The main driving force behind the advance into tropical Africa was the collapse of the Khedivial regime in Egypt, and the desire to secure the route through the Suez Canal. (Wesseling, op cit; Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher (& Alice Denny), Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, 1961, chapter XV.)

Wesseling goes on to add that this motivation could only explain Britain’s conduct, and that only partially. Other motives would have included economic, financial, political and ideological drives (such as national ambition, and the ‘white man’s burden’). A few obvious retorts: why did political motives require this strategy? Why did ‘national ambition’ take the form of imperialism and not, say, levelling economic and political power? In what sense were British interests in the East not to do with those of capitalists? In what meaningful sense are financial motives not capitalist? Why would the ‘white man’s burden’ be a meaningful or necessary ideological appeal if not for the capitalist interests coyly adverted to? Wesseling frequently uses nebulous formulations – explaining why the Dutch didn’t defend their interests in the Congo, he explains that “Dutch foreign interests in general” prevailed but goes on to explain that “there is no such thing as the national interest”, only “various part-interests” interpreted and weighed by the state. Given this, what ‘part-interests’ can be said to have determined the Dutch government’s decision in this case? Wesseling explains that Britain considered the Sudan worthy of a clash with France, but did not simply abandon other ‘interests’ (“empire on the cheap”, good relations with France) – a penumbral plurality of ‘interests’ are adduced, but not connected to the social structure in which they surely reside. He adds: “we can only conclude, therefore, that … various motives played a part” with one motive then “another being paramount at any one time” - an explanation so vacuous that it manages to avoid explanation. (Wesseling, op cit).

The final attempt at an explanation is that whatever the subjective views of statesmen, they were “merely unconscious tools of what Hegel has called the ‘cunning of reason’” since it was “inevitable” that Africa would be drawn into the “European system of international relations”: now why might that be? According to Wesseling, Africans had only “eluded” the system for so long because America had been more suited to emigration and colonization, and Asia to commercial exploitation and trade. Africa became important once the rest of the world had already been divided and improved medical knowledge made it easier for Europeans to live and fight in Africa, while Europe’s military supremacy made conquest much cheaper. What’s more, Britain – having lost its supremacy – saw the second industrial revolution benefit rivals, while Italy and Germany, the new arrivals, were eager for their place in the sun. The politics of imperialism was therefore a “synthesis of social, economic and ‘purely’ political factors”. There are several problems with this account. The “European system of international relations” had not entailed nation-states for some time – instead, the imperial periphery had been composed of zones of influence with shifting frontiers rather than fixed borders (much as in Europe until the rise of absolutist sovereigns and the later formation of capitalist nation-states). Most of the imperial periphery had been subsumed under the sovereignty of European powers only in a juridical sense, while the social structure of the international sphere was characterised by mobility that undermined the notion of discrete societies. (Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, Verso, 2003; Tarek Barkawi & Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations’, Millenium: journal of international studies, 2002, vol. 31, Number 1; Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Verso, 2000, esp chapter 7; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800, Verso, 1997). As I suggest above, the rise of modern nation-states needs to be rooted in an analysis of the rise of capitalism and its geopolitically mediated spread throughout the world. The integration of the imperial periphery into this system can only be considered ‘inevitable’ given the emergence of a capitalist social structure. The strict sense in which Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ is applicable is discussed by Mieville – the British had been entirely unwilling to submit to the logic of colonial ‘nation-states’, preferring informal annexation, and had ensured that the protectorates which it formed were exempt under the agreements ensuing from the Berlin Conference. Yet the logic of legality, of positive law, imposed itself – mercantile companies with private armies had been able to impose rule in their territories in the 16th and 17th centuries, but these were capitalist monopolies and proved incapable of and unwilling to impose rule. This is why protectorates had become the chief form of rule – since capitalist rule involves precisely removing the means of violence from the axis of exploitation, capitalist enterprises were wholly unused to direct political rule, and relied on the growing formalisation and legalisation of political power. (Mieville, op cit). The Italians and Germans seeking their spot in the sun doesn’t explain much, for as late as the 1870s, the Bismarck was still rejecting proposals to set up colonies. It too tried initially to avoid direct responsibility for territory – what Bismarck called the “French system” – and had relied on a tobacco merchant acquiring what would become German South-West Africa on its behalf. (Koskenniemi, op cit). Again and again, Wesseling either loses the specific in the general (as in ‘interests’, the ‘official mind’ and so on), or loses the general in the specific (a disarray of facts that are important but show no sign of being coherently organised).

There have also been a number of criticisms of the Leninist account from sympathetic marxist authors. One of the claims of Gindin and Panitch in their book on Global Capitalism and American Empire is that Lenin elevated the conjunctural situation of inter-imperial rivalry in the early 20th Century to a principle of late capitalism. David Harvey adds that Arendt was right to “interpret the imperialism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism’ as Lenin depicted it”. (David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 2004; Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Global Capitalism and American Empire, 2003). Lenin, however, called his pamphlet "Imperialism: the Latest Stage of Capitalism", and that is certainly the phrase he uses in the pamphlet, along with "a special stage of capitalism" (see Lenin, op cit, chapter VII; ‘Notes from the Editors’, Monthly Review, January 2004, Volume 55, Number 8). It may seem that he is pathologising imperialism as something external to 'pure' capitalism, which is another charge Panitch and Gindin make, but a proper reading of the pamphlet, particularly the conclusion, reveals that Lenin in fact was fully aware that a) imperialism is something that had persisted not only in previous capitalist forms (he specifically says so) but has persisted in previous non-capitalist forms, and b) the 'stage' he is describing is indeed 'special', the 'latest' stage but by no means the last (depending on how optimistic one felt).

Nevertheless, the narrative Lenin provides would tend to suggest that there is a unilinear process of concentration, monopolisation, the internationalisation of finance capital and then its merging with the state. The trouble is that, for instance, the US was importing, not exporting, capital prior to 1914. (Mieville, op cit). Further, Gindin and Panitch have a point when they say that the main reason the British resorted to formal colonialism in Africa was that they could not rope the US and Europe under their Free Trade imperium. (Panitch & Gindin, op cit). These states insisted on pursuing their own protected growth strategies and were able to emerge as competing powers. So, the 'scramble for Africa' illustrates on the one hand a conjunctural period of capitalist centralisation, and on the other, the last wave of nation-statization and capitalisation. It also illustrates the racist underpinnings of capital accumulation and imperial expansion, since where the empire was successful it either subjected local non-white populations to superordinate powers that eventually wiped them out, or suppressed them (Australia, Canada, the US, South Africa). Noticeably, in no colonised state were meaningful democratic institutions introduced for a non-white population - white Afrikaaners, white Americans, white Australians etc etc. Only once these states ceased being colonial outposts due to struggles from below and within was this reversed. (Abernethy, op cit). In fact, the precise form of ‘sovereignty’ that was ‘given’ to various states under colonial tutelage or indeed achieved by the colonists was directly bounded up with a discourse of ‘civilisation’ – one shared by liberal and reactionary imperialists alike, and one moreover that was pervasive among international lawyers. Henry Wheaton, an attorney with the US Supreme Court, and a diplomat posted in Europe, explained that “the international law of the civilised, Christian nations of Europe and America, is one thing; and that which governs the intercourse of the Mohammedan nations of the East with each other, and with Christian, is another and very different thing” – European positive law was certainly not applicable to those whose civilisation was lacking. (Koskenniemi, op cit). As late as 1963, an American authority could explain that it would take generations to teach Africans “the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics”. (Davidson, op cit). One suspects that the residues of this now disavowed position informs much of the discourse not only on Africa, but also on other ‘uncivilized’ states that find themselves governed by upstarts.