Critics of Empire
Bernard Porter says that today’s advocates of humanitarian intervention would do well to ponder what J. A. Hobson and Ramsay MacDonald had to say a century ago about the dangers of liberal imperialism.
In 1902 the radical economist and journalist John Atkinson Hobson published one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Imperialism: A Study was the first clear exposition of the idea that what lay behind the European empire-building of Hobson’s own time was a conspiracy of capitalists to seize the assets and markets of other, weaker countries for their own profit and against the public good. This became the orthodox belief of most anti-imperialists thereafter, and retains a prominent place in, for example, today’s critique of American ‘imperialism’ in the oil-rich Middle East. Actually, I may be wrong to say that the book was influential. Its central idea was; but very few of its aficionados appear to have read the book itself. If they did, they might get a surprise.
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