Is there a ‘Hobson-Lenin is’on late nineteenth-century colonial expansion?

Abstract

T hirty years ago, Fieldhouse (building, to be sure, on the work of earlier 1 scholars) proposed the existence of a unified and coherent 'HobsonLenin thesis' concerning the origins of late nineteenth-century imperialism. According to Fieldhouse, the two great theories of imperialism propounded early in the twentieth century, that of Hobson (I902) and that of Lenin (i9i6), had much in common. Both theories were essentially concerned to explain the spectacular growth of western colonial empires in the late nineteenth century; both theories, while acknowledging the presence of political (and even cultural and psychological) factors in this sudden colonial expansion, reduced causation essentially to economics; and within economics, both theories specifically stressed the western need to export capital (and the subsequent need to protect overseas investments by force) as the primary engine behind the growth of the empires of the great powers.2 Fieldhouse, of course, went on to criticize 'Hobson-Lenin' very heavily: much capital investment in the late nineteenth century may have gone to foreign countries, but it can be shown to have tended to avoid those tropical regions which witnessed the growth of formal empires between I870 and i900. European capitalists were investing in other European states, or in Latin America, or in the United States, not in, say, West Africa. Therefore, the Hobson-Lenin thesis was based on a gross factual error.3 Fieldhouse's essay helped to open the way for scholars to stress not the economics but the politics of the period I870-I900-either in Europe, or in the tropics themselves, or in both regions-as the primary cause of the growth of formal empires. Yet Fieldhouse's exposition of 'the Hobson-Lenin thesis' itself eventually came under sharp attack. In i969 Stokes argued that Fieldhouse had misunderstood Lenin's focus of concern. Lenin had been intent on explaining not the origins of late nineteenth-century colonialism, but rather the origins of the First World War; Lenin did not believe that imperialism, as he defined it, had even existed before i896-i900, by which time the scramble