Theories of Development : Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives (9781462519613) by Peet Richard; Hartwick Elaine

Author:Peet, Richard; Hartwick, Elaine [Richard Peet, Elaine Hartwick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462519613
Publisher: Guilford Pubn

IMPERIALISM

From the Marxist perspective, capitalism is a social form of development based on the extraction of surplus value from workers and competition among capitalists. Extraction may be internal to a social formation, as with the exploitation of the working class in the United States or Britain. Or, it might be external—between capitalists in one society, the United States, for instance, and the peasants and workers of other societies, like the border regions of Mexico. Marxist theories of imperialism specifically look at the second type of exploitation, capitalist society’s external spatial relations. Essentially there have been two main historical phases of Euro-American imperialism, although some Marxists believe we have entered a third phase of “neoimperialism.”

Lasting from the 15th to the 19th centuries, mercantilist imperialism saw the European conquest of most of the Americas and significant control over much of southern and southeast Asia. Conquest and control involved the plundering of ancient stockpiles of wealth from precapitalist civilizations, the establishment of unequal trading relations with dominated societies, and the production of bullion and exotic commodities, using coerced (often slave) labor in colonized societies. In Marx’s terms, mercantilist imperialism enabled the “primitive accumulation” (primitive in terms of “early” or “first”) of stocks of global wealth that were then invested as capital in the western European and North American industrial revolutions.

Mercantilism involved massive state control over society’s external relations to the point of declaring war on foreign competitors or heavily regulating trade and commerce to the advantage of the home country (see Chapter 2). Once the forces of production had developed and Britain, for example (as the leading mercantilist country), had a decided economic advantage in industrial production, mercantilist protection was dropped and “free trade” (between unequal partners) came to be relied on for continued global economic dominance (again, see Chapter 2). Mercantilist theory postulated that a country’s level of development depended on its accumulation of gold and silver—hence, external relations with other countries were managed to maximize bullion imports to (and minimize exports from) the home country, thereby building up the national treasury. Thus, mercantilism was the perfect prelude to industrial capitalism in that under mercantilist imperialism the world was raided for its wealth (bullion was the first capital) and slaves were forcibly abducted from western Africa to work in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States so that profits from slaving could be reinvested in industrialization even as they also produced essential inputs into industrialization, such as sugar and cotton. Finally, the most “successful” mercantilist countries and regions had Protestant majorities (Britain, the Netherlands, New England) or significant Protestant minorities (the Huguenots in France) who proved better able (had a more modern ideology, Calvinist rationality) to run production and trade than Catholic merchants—for example, the Brazilian sugar plantations were run by Dutch rather than Portuguese managers (see Chapter 4 on Weber). As was noted in the section on the English–Portuguese trade in Chapter 2, Britain was by far the main beneficiary from this first mercantilist phase of imperialism.

The wars of independence in

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