Over the years there has been a host of attempts to define imperialism. Economic exploitations, particularly since the rise of Marxism and thanks to Lenin’s influential book on imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, have long been central to intellectual and academic definitions of imperialism. There is a problem with this economic and geographic conception of imperialism, however. The focus on imperialism as a geographic and economic phenomenon, the exploitation of the conquered by the conqueror for economic benefits, is too limited. It is only one of the forms imperialism has taken root in the human community since the rise of human civilisations in the Near East, the Indus Valley, China, and in what is today Central and South America.
Imperialism is more than conquest and economic exploitation. It is also cultural, political, and demographic. Imperialism does have, of course, a geographic dimension. It has been and is the conquest of one territory by some entity, usually a city-state, a state, or a nation-state. I give you America’s conquest of and occupation of the American West, wherever that American West or the American frontier happened to be during the course of American history. Imperialism has also taken another form. There has been and is a form of imperialism in which the economy of one entity dominates the economy of another entity. I give you Trump’s use of the tariff as a heavy handed means for American economic domination in the world today and Trump's attempt to grab Venezuela's oil for American oil corporations. There has been and is political imperialism in which the political culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s attempt to spread American style “democracy” around the world particularly since World War II. There is cultural imperialism in which the culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s conception of itself as god or nature’s chosen land whose messianic and mission it is to spread the gospel of America across the globe. Needless to say, this American gospel has economic and political cultural dimensions, namely, the belief that Americanism, including the distinctive form of the American economy and the supposedly singular form of American democracy, is the best thing since that proverbial slice of sliced bread. And there is demographic imperialism in which the population of one entity is hegemonic over another. See the British in India or the Afrikaners in South Africa.
Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Bernard Porter’s Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), a book that compares and contrasts British imperialism, particularly the liberal British imperialism of the Victorian era with the American imperialism of the post-World War II era, gets that there are various forms of imperialism which sometimes if not often overlap making these various forms of imperialism Weberian ideal types. For Porter, both Victorian British imperialism and American post-WWII imperialism had geographic, if less so in the case of the United States, economic, if less so in the case of the British (once the Indies corporations became defunct), political, and cultural dimensions. It was in the cultural dimension area where the differences between the two were, so Porter claims, particularly evident.
For Porter both Victorian Britain and post-World War II America were imperial empires. Porter argues that there were a number of similarities and differences between these British and American empires. Both were cheerleaders of free trade though the British empire was less a cheerleader of free trade than the American. The English public school educated elite who staffed the colonies were not devotees of the gospel of free market capitalism, something that was kind of a countervailing force to those who saw empire as a way to spread the gospel and the reality of “free” market capitalism, argues Porter. The British empire was also, claims Porter, more paternalistic than the American.
Both empires, according to Porter, spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and of foreign investment. Both saw themselves as civilising and liberating forces bringing “enlightenment" and "democracy" to the areas they colonised. While the British elite, who did believe that the British way of life and its values were universal and absolute, tempered this civilising and liberalising force with a pinch of cultural relativism. The US elite, on the other hand, saw itself in a way Britain never did, namely, as chosen people of a chosen land who were messianic evangelists for a way of life that was universal and beyond space and time.
Both empires, claims Porter, had pedigrees that stretched to the past. British imperialism was born in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars while the US empire originated in westward expansion or manifest destiny. Both empires had an interest in oil, some might argue, particularly in the case of the US, that they were addicted to oil. Hence an interest in the Middle East and, in both cases, Iraq. Both empires fought wars in Afghanistan, a place that came to be known, because of the British failure in Afghanistan, as the graveyard of empires. The US, of course, had its own failure in Afghanistan and whether this will help lead to the fall of the American empire is an open question at the moment. Both empires felt the sting of guerrilla warfare. Both empires were overstretched militarily. Where the two empires differed in particular, according to Porter, was in their size. Britain was an empire. The US was and is, claims Porter, a superempire.
I found Porter’s Empire and Superempire excellent. I greatly enjoyed Porter’s coy and wry comments on the American empire many Americans refuse to recognise, about the US fighting wars against “enemies” it knows it can defeat easily only to find itself fighting guerrilla wars again and again, guerrilla wars it cannot win in the long run, about the US convincing itself that its invasions will be welcomed just like its forces were welcomed in Paris during World War II, and about the US hoping to cut and run as fast as it can after it invades other countries.
That said I think that Porter overemphasises the differences between the British empire and the American superempire. These differences seem less important when one looks at the two in demographic and technological terms. America is bigger than Britain demographically which means that the US is bigger than the UK in its economic, political, cultural, and imperial dimensions. If Britain was as demographically big as the US would they be more the same? I think so. Technology is also a factor in the seeming differences between the two empires. New weapons like the atomic bomb have been developed since the US transplanted England as the dominant empire on the planet and the US has been willing to use these new technologies. So, the US is really simply a demographically (the key factor), geographically, economically, politically, and culturally and more technologically bigger empire than England. This fact does not make them fundamentally different.
By the way, the Commonwealth is a different kind of empire with its loyalty to the Crown and British political liberalism. It is also something that I think should be emphasised in this era of Trumpian economic and cultural imperialisms. The world sis sadly in need of a countervailing imperial forces since the fall of the Soviet Empire if simply to keep American imperialism in check. The Commonwealth or the EU, with the addition of the UK and Canada, might be able to check and balance the American empire at least in certain parts of the world.
