[lbo-talk] New Imperialism?

KJ kjinkhoo at gmail.com
Thu Mar 31 20:05:16 PST 2005


Re colonialism. I'm not sure it's useful to think of the colonial-imperial relationship in terms of one country and another. It's more usefully viewed as one between an emerging Euro region and other regions of the world, a relationship marked by networks of conquest, competition, conflict and cooperation within and between regions, and intersected by differing cycles of growth and decline. For instance, the flow of bullion to Spain and Portugal didn't stop there but went on to other centres of Europe. Malayan tin killed off the tin mines of Cornwall (?), but provided cheap tin to an industrialising Europe. So also, although the Brits fought the Opium Wars, the gains for it were shared by all with the MFN clause in the settlement imposed upon Beijing.

Moreover, what is covered by the term spans centuries that there's no one super-description for it, nor a single explanation that would cover that whole period. So also, the forms in which it was realised varied across that period and from place to place. Generally, indirect rule was a rather late innovation. In the earlier period, at least for the Indian Ocean/S China Sea region, Europeans were more like yet another set of participants in the trading networks, but, not being believers in free trade, quickly tried to become monopolists.

For Asia, I think it would be impossible to understand the impact of colonialism without looking at how it re-orientated the Indian Ocean-S China Sea trading network and the activities across the region that supported it. The demise, or re-orientation, of that trade, together with more deliberate acts of, in particular, the British, brought down the Indian textiles industry and other production and trade activities which supplied the region. Whether the destruction of Indian textiles was the (and not just a) pre-condition of the rise of Manchester cotton is, I gather, now a matter of some debate, but there's a correlation between the decline of one and the rise of the other -- a measure of that decline is registered in the words that are now English: muslin, chintz, calico, even nankins. Incidentally, seems that muslin is derived from Mosul, but I believe that by the 17th and 18th C, it was associated with India.

Trade or monopoly? We have what happened in the 1920s and 1930s. As English textiles could not compete against Japanese textiles, the imperial trading rules were instituted to shut out the latter. Thus, e.g., from having captured a majority of the Malayan market, Japanese textiles were shut out almost completely, partly with the assistance of a Chinese-led boycott of Japanese goods following the invasion of Manchuria.

Granted plunder isn't the whole story, but I think it's a big part of it. As for the term "plunder" -- should the opium trade be considered "plunder" or trade?

Anyway, pre-1800's, the flow of bullion was eastwards to China. Looking at some of the ship manifests even into the late 18th/early 19th century brings to mind da Gama's lamentations when he reached India. That flow was reversed with the opium trade. As late as the first decade of the 19th C, almost 30 million silver dollars (spanish real) flowed into China; by the third decade, about the same amount flowed out of China. The reason: Patna opium.

And the reason for that: In the 18th C, the excise on EIC tea amounted to a sixth of the crown's revenue. And it was the attempt by the EIC to get the crown to pass on the cost of doing business to consumers that set off the Boston tea party and American independence which, in turn, cut off the flow of Mexican silver, which inspired the opium scheme.

In a place like Malaya in the early 20th century, more than half of the colonial state's revenue came from the opium, arak (alcohol) and gambling monopoly, and this at a time when tin and rubber were raking it in for their investors. Indentured and semi-indentured workers ended up producing the tin and rubber, and financing the colonial state through their consumption.

For post-war Britain, the dollar earnings of British Malaya's tin and rubber exceeded Britain's (if I recall, indeed the rest of the empire's) own dollar earnings, and those dollar earnings were used to settle British debt to the US.

As for colonialism's aftermath in the contemporary world, and issues of geography vs institutions, it seems to me that Acemoglu, for all the problems that economists have with history, has put his finger on something worth developing further.

kj khoo



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list