To summarize - cross national and cross cultural exchange rather than primitive plunder seems to be the benefit of the colonial era, even though those benefits were distributed very unequally. Obviously, the North benefited more than South or even Far East, but the former benefited nonetheless. I do not think that the primitive plunder theory has any explanatory power in that development. Wojtek
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What's missing in the plunder-theory is an acknowledgment that to be effective, plundering requires socio-economic organization, and the different outcomes from Spain v. England amount to the English for whatever reason, established and invested in the colonial organization apparatus in order to plunder more effectively. The Spanish-Portuguese used the mission and planation system---an early form of agricultural industrialization where they could. For the English in the US that required importation of slaves as did the Caribbean for the French and Spanish.
The differences India and China was that both had existing social orders and colonial organization required a different kind of system to become profitable colonies---and their scales were much larger. Foreign penetration of China was probably marginal. As far as know, limited by the few things I've read, the Europeans tried to establish an overlord system, managing the existing social orders from above rather than create one from the ground up. In Africa the conditions were reversed such that ground-up colonial order had to be established by the Europeans and I assume it was resisted or neglected by local orders.
The figure of the Catholic Church comes into play here also in subjugating native peoples by re-ordering their customs and general spiritual orientation through missions and parishes attached to the military and civilian colonial bureaucracy.
The key difference between then and now is that most countries and regions have an existing power hierarchy and have already re-ordered (obliterated) their traditional cultures and customs---specifically to re-order their societies for the `modern work ethic'. Without that form of subjugation, it seems to me to be almost impossible to extract resources out of the land or the people.
Spain and Portugal in this historical context had not developed much of a capitalist system at home and still depended on semi-feudal estates, land owners and the nobility under rather shaky monarchs---more interested in conquest, plunder and spoils than developing all the necessary systematic colonial administration. England, France, Belgium, and Holland had well developed capitalist systems. The monarchies of England and France ran the colonial system as a centralized bureau under the monarchy. Whereas the Dutch (not a monarchy) had the most developed form with its guilds and companies.
The whole imperialism business is really complex and ultimately depends on its internal organizations and managerial elite to make it work as an efficient plundering apparatus---where the best plunder comes directly out of the sweat and muscle of well disciplined colonial workers---sun up to sun down, cradle to grave.
As these organizational systems were developed, I would argue they set the stage for the next system of the true industrial age. But the capitalists had to work out how to perform this transition. Here I think the textile industry illustrates the role of imperialism. The key regions for cotton for example were the US south, Egypt, and India. The creation of the raw cotton requires the organization of a planation system to get up to scale. Then the bulk has to be shipped to mills for processing. So one set of organizational systems runs the planations, another the transport, and yet another the mill system. Each of these depend on infrastructure development, but mostly on the power to organize human society on a large scale---compel them to work. The bottle neck for cotton was transportation, hence the key role of shipping and railroads.
The problem back then was shipping the bulky raw materials back to the seat of the empire. Hence the US early rise in textile mills in the northeast with cotton coming from the south. A kind of mini-imperialism... Which set the stage for later organizational needs of a more grand scale US imperialism by the turn of the 19-20thC (Spanish American War).
Nathan Newman asks Doug:
``...Did that additional surplus value just add additional fuel to an industrial revolution already burning, or was it a fundamental cause of its ignition?''
And answers:
``..Robert Fogel has argued that core innovations in division of labor and capital work organization were first pioneered in the West Indies. The capital from the sugar colonies were critical financers of the factories that helped break city guilds and speed the replacement of craft production with factory production...''
That sounds about right to me. There is a reciprocal relation. For example cane isn't good for much without being crushed, processed, and cooked into a form that can be crystallized into various grades of sugar. Along the way you get all kinds of things like molasses in various grades. You have to have seen (and smell) a cane or beet sugar refinery in order to appreciate what industrial agriculture really looks like. God awful stink, vast caldrons of ghastly green vats, huge conveyer systems to move bulk product. Fucking dangerous places.
But I would argue the key point is the ordering and organization of labor, conjoined with carefully controlled financial development. In short, organization of money and labor is the way capitalism becomes imperial.
So, the wealth comes from the organization of labor in colonial development. As such, it appears to be invisible because we expect a pile of gold in the Monarchy bank. Well that only happens if gold mining was the imperial adventure. For cotton or sugar, it simply disappears as a consumed product. And the capital left over is `freed' up to do more of the same in other places with other people and other products. This amounts to a vast extension of the wealth of the imperial seat---since they could not possibly have extracted that much from their own people's labor. There just were not enough of them. Besides cotton and sugar don't grow in England, France, Belgium or Holland---and none of these countries has enough room for the vast planation systems that were developed in the Americas.
Charles finishes with:
``...the idea is not that the exploitation of superprofits impoverishes the exploited nation. It is that the extraprofits give the imperialists extra money to play with in critical matters like buying off the labor lieutenants of capital and other leading sectors of the working class; buying off compradors within the colonial nations...''
That `extra' was the engine of further imperial development.
Wojtek wonders:
``...So the question arises why did not they realize that development potential before they were colonized? At the time of their colonization, most colonized societies were at the stone age..''
Some colonial societies were only organized at about the neolithic agricultural stage---basically none were true stone age people. The only possible candidates for this designation might be the US Native Americans who were not stone age, but less hierarchically neolithic than say the classic Pre-Columbian civilizations like the Aztecs. In any event they were exterminated because their internal social orders could not be transformed into a subjugated slave or planation worker class. There was no estate system to absorb them as a peasant class either.
On the other hand, the Pre-Colombians were `ready' to become a vast peasant class under a more centralized agricultural system (as they were under the Aztec elite), and of course the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic missionaries made sure they did just that. So the Mexicans had a system something like the Roman and Spanish estate system, with a central landowner, a parish system and organized peasant class. Much of Latin America followed this general arrangement. California was started on this road in the late 18thC but it had broken down by the time of the gold rush. However there are remnants of it as it set the stage for mass agri-business and small estate holders, where the same people, Mexican peasant class, come to harvest, i.e the farm workers...
I think I would make a distinction between the planation system and the estate system. The planation system led to `mono-cultures' like sugar or cotton, where as estates were more generalized with some farming, some live stock, some cash crop like a fruit orchard or a vineyard. Monolithic crop planations and their labor organization seems to set the stage for true industrialized agriculture, where the estate system seems not to lead in the same direction. The planation is not self-sufficient, whereas estates can be or were at some point. These are fundamentally different orders of labor.
Wojtek: ``...If culture plays any role at all, it is usually negative..''
I disagree. I think it is critical because culture reflects the order of labor, and it is the organization of work that makes Imperialism pay off. If the existing cultural system has to be completely atomized and re-ordered that requires much more heavy handed methods. If on the other hand there is already a highly hierarchical system in place with strongly defined orders of labor, then the job of exploitation is that much easier and cheaper. I think China and India are historical examples here, whereas the Americas were not. And more recently, the destruction of Iraq's hierarchical elite was a vast mistake for exactly this reason. It made Iraq worthless as an imperial venture. Now it is just a bloody and expensive mess.
``The biggest single advantage to the North is the ability to 'set the rules'...'' Paul
If the rules don't need to be changed that much, so much the better. So I agree.
CG