London Socialist Historians Group

Ellen Meiskins Wood, "The Historical Specificity of Capitalist Empire"

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Before the latest war in Iraq, anyone who accused the US of imperialism was likely to meet the objection that the US doesn’t occupy any colonial territories anywhere in the world. Now that the US is very visibly in occupation of Iraq, everything seems to have changed overnight. You might want to say that the occupation of Iraq represents a major departure from US foreign policy since World War II—and lots of critics have said just that. The US certainly does appear, on the face of it, to be reverting to an older kind of direct colonial domination. It certainly does seem to be breaking with the pattern of avoiding colonial entanglements which the US has generally preferred. Even if we take into account all the more overt displays of imperialism by the US in the past half-century, all the local wars in which it’s been involved in the third world, all its clandestine, and not so clandestine, efforts at regime-change in Latin America and elsewhere, it’s true, on the whole, that the US mode of imperialism hasn’t been of the old colonial type; and what Bush is doing right now certainly does look like a dramatic break with the postwar past.

But I’m not at all sure about that.

I certainly don’t want to deny that Bush and co. have taken things to insane extremes, which are likely to be self-defeating, especially since Bush is undermining one of US imperialism’s strengths, the hold it has over its allies. The right-wing extremists of the Bush regime are certainly deploying US military power in new and excessive ways, which are already proving to be unsustainable. But I’m not sure that Bush represents such a big break for two major reasons. One reason is that even this regime would prefer to stay out of colonial entanglements and to return to a non-colonial imperialism. I say this not because I think these guys have a spark of decency or some residual commitment to democracy. The very idea is ludicrous. The point is simply that non-colonial imperialism is far less risky and costly, and far more profitable. If the US can use its massive economic power, backed up by the threat of its overwhelming military superiority, to command the world economy, why would it want to get bogged down in colonial rule?.

[The rest of the text can be read on the downloadable version of the paper]