The most contentious of issues concerning European colonialism is economic imperialism. Perhaps the best approach is to go to Marx and Engels. These two authors, primarily Marx, a student of Hegel, thought they had discovered a fundamental pattern in history. It had to do with what they called modes of economic production. Modes of production involved relations of production and forces of production (there is a subtle difference). With a smattering of world history and a great deal of speculation, Marx/Engels decided that there had been in furthest antiquity a mode of production based on communal property. In time this mode of production engendered more efficient forces of production corresponding to different relations of productions and so a new mode of production was born. They called it slavery. Slavery in turn engendered new forces and relations of production within itself, which overthrew slavery and established serfdom or feudalism, and so the process went on.

Feudalism was undermined from within by industrialism, which represented the new forces of production corresponding to the relations of production between capitalists and workers. The object of capitalists was to exploit workers. In its thirst for profits, capitalism went through two processes: concentration and centralization (here too there was a subtle Germanic difference). Workers became so numerous that some were always unemployed and all were hungry and deprived. This inevitably would lead to a proletarian uprising which would overthrow the capitalists and take the existing forces of production, increase their efficiency, and use them for the good of all. The best that can be said of Marxism is that it was relatively enlightened by contrast with contemporary teratomorphs such as racism and social Darwinism.

According to Marxist/Engels theorization, the processes of historical change from one mode of production to another were universal laws--industrialism had to displace feudalism wherever it found it willy-nilly, just as feudalism had to overthrow slavery from within--and the predictable communist revolution had nothing to do with sympathies or fellow-feelings for the plight of workers but with the threshold of tolerance for capitalist abuses of the workers themselves. However, late-19th cent. history, with its division into a few powerful industrialized nations and the rest of the mostly colonialized and backward world, did not seem to bear out the Marx/Engels pattern. For one thing why hadn't capitalism developed in other cultures? For another why didn't capitalism displace other less efficient modes of production in most of the European dependencies? Environmental circumstances could account for the differences between cultures up to a point. But there were too many loose threads. Engels thought he could tie them up with what he called the Asiatic mode of production, but in the end the idea was discarded. And fundamentally, what could you do with facts that contradicted a law which said that capitalism could not tolerate the subsistence of less efficient modes of production anywhere in the globe? This was indeed a teaser.

Economic imperialism and dependency theory

Then J.A.Hobson came along with his economic imperialism theory, which claimed that the motivation for the European African grab was undiluted capitalist greed. Hobson was not hobbled by the Marxist doctrine that capitalist exploitation of workers was more profitable than economic arrangements based on slavery or serfdom. Lenin, who didn't give a farthing for consistency, thought he perceived in Hobson's thesis the perfect foil for critics of Marxism. Without any of Marx's tedious attention to minutiae, he went straight to the point and claimed, without any but the slipperiest foothold in the Marxist "canon", that colonialism simply oppressed and exploited with any means of production available. It didn't matter if what it found where it trod was "feudalism"--the name which Marxists later would apply indiscriminately to any society that was not industrialized--or on any level less developed than full-blown industrialization. Modes of production, in sum, could go hang! Other Marxists, in fact a majority of them, did not see it in such simplistic terms. After Lenin took power in Russia those that dissented from his view were condemned and the official "Marxist/Leninist" line became that the European colonialist empires represented the decadent phase of capitalism--never mind that they began when feudalism was still the predominant mode of production in Europe--and everything that Europe did in the rest of the world was purely and exclusively for the benefit of profiteers.

Lenin's capitalist imperialism thesis eventually was transformed into "dependency theory". Dependency theory made a pious, mostly in pectore avowal of all the inconsistencies and contradictions in Marxism/Leninism and went through a lot of contortions to explain this and explain that. The central concept it lit on was the center/periphery relation by which the universal rule of history became that political and economic cores always exploited peripheral areas for their benefit. This smacked of Marxism especially as dependency theorists also employed modified versions of mode-of-production gobbledyguk. The crucial gain was that all of history could be explained in materialist, economicist terms.

But history could not be manipulated the way dependency theorists pretended and many historians took the trouble of isolating specific dependency claims and refuting them with what statistics they could dig up. All in all, the pros and the cons in these debates were going around in circles: the dog could never bite its tail or the serpent swallow itself.

Filling vacuums of power

It is a matter of self-evidence that the individual European colonialist empires were not thrown together for the love of God, not to say of mankind. The profit motive can usually be found in one way or another in most imperialist enterprises, but it has to be nuanced. Ireland was a royal claim with papal blessing before it was economically brutalized. In the stirrings of the Portuguese colonialist project gain and religion were inextricable. Spain made a great show of its shock over the heathen cannibals of Mexico, but it proceeded to enslave all Amerindians except where there was no gain to be made. The Dutch made no bones about their commercial intentions. They never made a colonialist move that was not calculated to profit investors. The British colonial expansion, though usually conceived in terms of profit and loss, had its shadings as when it followed upon its own momentum or tracked the wanderings of missionaries.

Often in the debate over colonialist imperialism a plain truth is overlooked, perhaps because it is so plain it seems inadequate to explain so much history. It is that if Europe colonialized most of the world it did so because it could. If nature abhorrs a vacuum, political power cannot help but hate weakness. European empires were possible because it was the West that had the means to build them. This does not explain everything but without this understanding nothing else is explicable.

It must be added that political power was founded on technological advantages and perhaps the most meaningful thing about the European colonialist empires was that they signaled the beginning of the time when neither naked force nor lust for gold in themselves could account for historical events. It was the balance of forces and the quest for trade monopolies and captive markets that determined the fate of India and other great colonialist enterprises, but it was through specific advantages, mostly technological as time went on, that colonialist empires could grow and consolidate. It could be argued that invention itself obeyed the desire for gain, but this was so only after patent laws were invented.