Imperialism

Imperialism is the process of forcibly expanding state authority over autonomous foreign territory by means of military conquest. More broadly, imperialism is the complex of practices through which one population establishes and maintains [Page 1546]instrumental control over the spaces, resources, and everyday lives of another. Imperialism is also the ideology through which a population is persuaded to support its domination of another and persuades that other to accept such domination.

There is no single and authoritative definition of empire, and it could even be claimed that any attempt to assert such a definition would itself be an imperializing act. Despite this, differing conceptions of imperialism and its root cognate—empire—do converge on certain principal geopolitical characteristics. Most broadly, imperialism entails the usurpation by an alien power of another's territorial autarchy. This usurpation commonly takes the form of conquest by force, albeit to varying degrees depending on the place and time. The specifics of alien rule are highly contingent on the cultural practices and material needs of both the rulers and those they rule, yielding multiple, varied, and complex “imperial regimes of rule.” One very general illustration of this would be the predilection of European empires for acquiring territory, as contrasted with southeast Asian empires’ focus on the capture and mass relocation of populations. Furthermore, within the European empires there are significant differences between those beholden to monarchical versus republican models of internal governance or between those established chiefly through state military exercises versus those outsourced to private adventurers and mercantile enterprises.

Variations notwithstanding, imperialism can be understood through the world-systems concept of intertwined core and periphery regions, according to which global wealth is concentrated in core countries, while countries in the periphery (such as most of those in the global South today) do not benefit from this wealth. Core regions, and their metropolitan centers in particular, are greatly enriched through the expropriation of wealth from subjugated peripheries. It may even be argued that this asymmetrical core-periphery relationship is the central dynamic of imperialism through which empires are formed, expanded, and maintained by means of forcible exploitation of ever more distant markets and labor forces. It is also debatable, however, whether this explanation is as readily applicable to empires based outside Western Europe during the latter half of the second millennium.

In its constitution of sharply differentiated and dependent core-periphery relations, imperialism is inextricably conjoined with colonialism. The tightness with which the two are coupled, however, is again highly variable and open to debate. Most narrowly defined, and hearkening back to classical Greek city-states and the agricultural coloniae of Imperial Rome, a colony is an imperial possession established on empty (or, more commonly, forcibly emptied) peripheral territory that is occupied by settlers from the core and subject to a more or less direct imperial rule from the core's metropolitan center. This definition, however, tends to underemphasize other, equally significant types of imperial territorial possessions in which preexisting populations are too sizable or well entrenched to be removed prior to resettlement. Such possessions tend instead to be administered by co-opted indigenous intermediaries overseen by functionaries imported from the imperial core, commonly with the intent of gradually absorbing the conquered population into the empire. Furthermore, the diverse spatial manifestations of different empires complicate the definition and identification of colonies. In the case of dispersed empires predicated on a distinct homeland and far-flung conquests, imperial possessions can be more plainly evident as colonies by virtue of their territorial discontiguity. But such recognition can be much more equivocal in the case of peripheral territories held by contiguous empires characterized not by detached possessions but by successive waves of accretive growth just over their own frontiers. Finally, imperialism in practice includes both the resettlement of some core personnel within all its subordinated peripheries and, barring out-and-out genocide, the continued exploitation of expunged populations. Thus, while colonization through dispossession is inherently an on-the-ground practice of imperialism, it is not a necessary one—imperial standing does not depend on possession of colonies in the strictest, narrowly defined sense of the term. Rather, empires deploy in varied combinations a spectrum of colonizing practices that range from the most direct forms of military occupation to more subtle insinuations of hegemonic influence, all inflected by local conditions in targeted peripheries and attenuated by the exercise of foreign rule over increasing distances.

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