THEORIES OF IMPERIALISM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA REVISITED

Abstract

THE STUDY OF Europeans in Africa has long been tangled up with 'theories of imperialism' expounded in the period 1898-1919. In general it can be said that professional historians have concluded that the archival record does not support the claims of the classic theorists. This conclusion, however, has not had much impact on the contemporary admirers of the theorists. Many of them continue to believe that African empire building was a reflex of difficulties in the functioning of European capitalism in its monopoly stage. A peculiar feature of this controversy has been that the exponents of theories have not read much into the archival record of empire building and that the testers of theories have not read the theories they test with much care. This has created, as Bernard Porter observed recently, a quagmire of 'misunderstandings and confusions and cross purposes'.1 In 1969 Eric Stokes pointed to the way out of the swamp in an article whose analytical power has yet to be adequately appreciated.2 Stokes, who did read archives, took a good long look at the theorists Lenin, Bukharin and Hilferding. He discovered that those gentlemen had not been concerned to explain Victorian colonial expansion. Their problem was to explain the Great Power rivalries which culminated in World War I. Their solution was to point to the driving force of surplus investment capital after the turn of the century. Lenin said--and there can be no mistaking his meaning on this point-that the era of imperialism began 'not earlier than 1898'. Stokes saw at once that this was not a theory to be tested by examining the Scramble for Africa. Anyone who does so is assaulting a straw man. In a paper delivered to the American Historical Association I have extended Stokes's conclusions to cover all the theories of imperialism expounded between 1898 and 1919.3 I will not reproduce my supporting evidence which can be read elsewhere. I will simply restate my message, and then attempt to show how theories of imperialism should be used by historians of Southern Africa. The classic theories of imperialism were devised to predict the future, not to explain the past. The theory that a pressure of surplus capital required capitalist nations to adopt aggressive foreign policies was not the chimerical