Tuesday's Read: Theories of Imperialism

Etherington, Norman. Theories of Imperialism: War, Conquest, and Capital. (Barnes and Noble, 1984)
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I would not have chosen this particular book out of the very many that have been written on imperial theory - not chosen it, that is, had it not been for the specific recommendation of an instructor. It is rather old, and I feared that it may have been a dated text. Furthermore, I had not seen it referenced often in other works I had read on imperialism and colonialism, and as a student of the modern Middle East and an admitted theory wonk, I assumed that the lack of consistent referencing may have been an indication of outmoded, 1980s overly-postmodern conceptual frameworks.

Etherington's book is, however, a gem of a text that deserves to be revisited. He starts with a simple premise, based on his years of work as an instructor of imperial history in Africa: one cannot use "classic" theories of imperialism to explain nineteenth-century imperial history, because they are all based originally on articles written for economics journals at the turn of the century that seek to explain how imperialism functions in a capitalist system. Even the socialist articles were, Etherington found, ultimately premised on capitalist arguments from economics and policy journals. As he states in his preface, "theories of imperialism were intended to predict the future, not explain the past" (18).

Each chapter of Etherington's text is a deft review and explanation of the roots of different popular theories of imperialism - where and how they originated, and how they fail to account for nineteenth-century imperialism on the ground. In this sense, Etherington's book is an important contribution to understanding the origins of imperial theories as well as a reasoned call for historicism; the exigencies of time and circumstance should always be brought into the discussion. Furthermore, as a text written in the 1980s at the tail end of the Cold War, it is an interesting view into the then-ubiquitous bifurcated, dyadic ideological constructions that characterized and animated most academic discussion of polities and government: everything is ultimately viewed with an aim to establish whether it is capitalist or communist.