Which of the following highlights the relationship between imperialism and religion in India in the 19th century?

Introduction

Economic imperialism is minimally defined as the export of capital from one country to another. Difficulties in arriving at a more substantive general definition than this are considerable because the very meaning of the term is in great measure dependent upon the particular theoretical framework in which it is employed. All of the frameworks at least look at the causes and consequences of the export of capital, although they differ in what they view these to be. Because of these differences in purported causes and consequences, a more substantive general definition seems impossible. Furthermore, while theorists of imperialism usually wish to show that political imperialism serves economic imperialism, accounts of the former also vary. This has implications for a moral account of imperialism. A general account of the morality of imperialism of necessity will be insensitive to some of the particularities (causes and consequences) of the chief empirical theories.

Abstract

Imperialism is a form of international hierarchy in which one political community effectively governs or controls another political community. It is one of the oldest known political institutions, characterizing relations between peoples in ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Rome through modern Europe. It includes rule both within relatively contiguous areas and overseas colonies. Major explanations for imperialism include metrocentric theories, which focus on the internal characteristics of imperial states; pericentric theories, which emphasize conditions within the colonial polities; systemic theories, which highlight competition between the great powers; and relational contracting theories, which explain imperialism by contrast with other possible institutions.

1 Introduction: The Problem of a Definition

‘Imperialism is not a word for scholars,’ Sir Keith Hancock remarked a long time ago, and he was right (see Wesseling 1997, p. 74). Scholars have to make clear what they mean when they use certain concepts or terms, and therefore have to give definitions. This, however, is impossible with the word ‘imperialism.’ The problem is not that there are no definitions of imperialism, rather the contrary. There are about as many definitions of imperialism as there are authors who have written on the subject. They vary from those that refer to one specific form of imperialism, mostly Europe's nineteenth century colonial expansion, to others which give a very general meaning to the word, such as the one in Webster's Dictionary: ‘any extension of power or authority or an advocacy of such extension.’ Clearly, such a definition can cover almost any situation. Not surprisingly therefore, the word has often simply been used as an invective in order to criticize the policy of another country.

So defined, imperialism is useless as a scholarly concept. However, in serious studies, the word has always had a more limited meaning. The problem is exactly how limited its meaning should be. Sometimes the word is used in a universal historical way in order to characterize the politics of a dominant power. Thus, some historians have spoken of Roman or even Assyrian imperialism, but this is highly exceptional. In historical studies, imperialism generally refers to the policy of European countries, and primarily of the UK during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aiming at the expansion of their power and influence over other continents. It is in this context that the term imperialism originated and began to be used as a political and historical concept. Historically speaking, the word imperialism is therefore obviously closely associated with colonialism. While colonialism was only used to refer to one specific form of alien rule, namely the colonial one, imperialism acquired a wider meaning and included various other forms of influence over alien nations and states. For example, the financial influence of France and Germany in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, or such things as British ‘gunboat policy’ and American ‘dollar diplomacy.’

After the end of the colonial empires the word ‘colonialism’ could only be used to refer to a phenomenon from the past and thus fell out of use. ‘Imperialism’ however continued to be used, and from then on also indicated those forms of domination that were formally different from, but factually comparable to, those formerly practiced by the colonial powers. For a while the word ‘neocolonialism’ was also used for this purpose, but somehow that term was less successful. By the end of the Second World War, America had become the new superpower. Accordingly, imperialism was now mainly applied to describe the foreign policy of the USA vis-à-vis other countries, in particular in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. There was also an attempt to make the concept applicable to the policy of the Soviet Union with regard to the Central and Eastern European countries that came under its influence after 1945 (Seton-Watson 1961), but this was not very successful. The reason for this is that historically speaking, imperialism has connotations with capitalism and not with communism, and with overseas possessions, and not with adjacent countries. Although there clearly was a Soviet Empire, it was not considered to be an example of imperialism but of traditional power politics. Only in its very general meaning as another word for all forms of power policies or simply as an invective, was it also used to describe communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. After the end of the Cold War this use of the word imperialism lost much of its earlier attraction.

In this article imperialism is used in the sense of its initial meaning, that is to say as a term to indicate the extension of formal or informal, mostly European, rule over Asian and African countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as, more generally, for some other forms of Western predominance during and after the colonial period.

Violence

Imperialism is relationship of dominance and power. Therefore it cannot do without at least the threat of violence. Colonial rule over indigenous populations relied to a large degree on open violence, ranging from corporal punishment to the so-called punitive expeditions to full-scale war. Even more, however, colonial rule over indigenous populations was based on structural violence in the context of the rapid transformation of economy and society in favor of European interests. In frontier areas, individual violence dominated the expansion. Basically, the application of violence distinguishes imperialism from “peaceful” trade relations; it enters the scene along with political actions. Extreme forms of violence in the context of imperialism were slavery and massacres which recent research has increasingly described as genocide.

Economic imperialism

Economic imperialism demands that money and material possession be the primary yardstick to measure success and failure in every sphere of human life and, therefore, be valued more than everything else in society. In a free and competitive economic environment, to be selfish is regarded as a virtuous act. The concept of enlightened self-interest, which underlies Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy, provides the ideological justification for the notion of economic imperialism. The acceptance of economic imperialism as a societal norm has encouraged the cult of self-worship.

Introduction: The Problem of a Definition

“Imperialism is not a word for scholars”, Sir Keith Hancock remarked a long time ago, and he was right (see Wesseling, 1997: p. 74). More recently, Bernard Porter has written that “‘Imperialism’ is a much vaguer term than ‘the empire’. Its extent and limit are less definite, and for that reason open to interpretation and dispute” (Porter, 2012: p. 4). Scholars have to make clear what they mean when they use certain concepts or terms, and therefore have to provide definitions. This, however, is problematic with the word ‘imperialism’. The difficulty is not that there is no single definition of imperialism. Rather, there are about as many definitions of imperialism as there are authors who have written on the subject. They vary from those that refer to one specific form of imperialism, mostly Europe's nineteenth-century colonial expansion, to others that give a very general meaning to the word, such as the one in Webster's Dictionary: ‘any extension of power or authority or an advocacy of such extension’. Clearly, such a definition can cover almost any situation involving a stronger and a weaker power. Not surprisingly, therefore, the word has often simply been used pejoratively in order to criticize the policy of another country. With some justification, P.J. Marshall has noted: “‘imperialism’ has tended to become a term of abuse for any supposed domination which the speaker happens to dislike” (Marshall, 1982: p. 49).

Used in this context, the term imperialism is of little scholarly value. However, in academic studies, the word has always had a more limited meaning. The problem is exactly how limited its meaning should be. Sometimes the word is used in a universal historical way in order to characterize the politics of a dominant power. Thus, some historians have spoken of Roman or even Assyrian imperialism, but this is highly exceptional. John Darwin has succinctly defined imperialism as the “sustained effort to assimilate a country or region to the political, economic or cultural system of another power” (Darwin, 1997: p. 614). In historical studies, imperialism generally refers to the policy of European countries, and primarily of Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aiming at the expansion of their power and influence over other continents. It is in this context that the term imperialism originated and began to be used as a political and historical concept. Historically speaking, the word imperialism is therefore obviously closely associated with colonialism. While colonialism was only used to refer to one specific form of alien rule, namely, the colonial one, imperialism acquired a wider meaning and included various other forms of influence over alien nations and states, for example, the financial influence of France and Germany in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, or such ideas as British ‘gunboat policy’ and American ‘dollar diplomacy’.

After the end of the colonial empires, the word ‘colonialism’ could only be used to refer to a phenomenon from the past and thus began to fall out of use. ‘Imperialism’, however, continued to be used, and from then on also indicated those forms of domination that were formally different from, but factually comparable to, those formerly practiced by the colonial powers. For a while, the word ‘neocolonialism’ was also used for this purpose, but somehow this term was less successful. By the end of the Second World War, America had become the new superpower. Accordingly, imperialism was now mainly applied to describe the foreign policy of the United States vis-à-vis other countries, in particular in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (Ferguson, 2005). There was also an attempt to make the concept applicable to the policy of the Soviet Union with regard to the Central and Eastern European countries that came under its influence after 1945 (Seton-Watson, 1961), but this was not very successful. The reason for this is that historically speaking, imperialism has connotations with capitalism and not with communism, and with overseas possessions, and not with adjacent countries. Although there clearly was a Soviet Empire, it was not considered to be an example of imperialism but of traditional power politics. Only in its very general meaning as another word for all forms of power politics or simply as an invective, was it also used to describe communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. After the end of the Cold War, this use of the word imperialism lost much of its earlier attraction.

In this article, imperialism is used in the sense of its initial meaning, that is to say as a term to indicate the extension of formal or informal, mostly European, rule over Asian and African countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as, more generally, for some other forms of Western predominance during and after the colonial period.

Abstract

Media imperialism was a key critical interpretive paradigm in international communication in the 1960s. It prompted a considerable body of empirical research and was used in support of key policy concerns such as the New World Information and Communication Order. Yet as the transnational media environment develops, the paradigm is increasingly criticized from a number of vantage points: from historical process and effects, from production and flow, from audiences and effects, from genre, from media policy and regulation. As media industries around the world come of age and as globalization processes spread, including massive movements of people as well as of images, ‘media imperialism’ is of diminishing use in understanding contemporary cultural processes, although its underlying concern about the hegemony of Western, primarily US, cultural domination remains a live concern.

Protagonists

Imperialism was not always primarily a matter of metropolitan governments. People of different social groups and professions acted as protagonists of expansion, with the majority of them not in the metropolis but on the colonial spot (for one example, see Table 1). The scope of their action depended on their position within the imperial system.

Table 1. British imperial expansion, 1783–1815

State officials (viceroys, governors, administrators of all kinds) in existing colonies often had a key interest in further expansion, which would earn them promotion, merits, popularity, and often immediate material gain as well. Prior to the availability of modern means of communication, the higher ranking of them especially had to be vested with vast powers and the right to exercise them without first asking for permission. Thus continuous expansive processes were sometimes completely initiated on the spot by successive governors (early Spanish America, British India). Lower-ranking officials had to rely on more subtle means of carrying through their plans, for example, exerting influence on their superiors, warranted by more intimate knowledge of country and people.

Soldiers (high-ranking army and navy officers) were not just the instruments of conquests or of acts of gunboat diplomacy ordered by the home or colonial government. Instead, by exceeding their authority they frequently used their forces for the conquest of territory, eventually justifying this as peacemaking or peacekeeping. Whether they could get away with that depended on the structure of the armed forces and the colony, and, increasingly in modern states, on whether the public would appreciate their (successful) action. If so, this would even protect them from being court-martialed. The goals in military expansion were glory, merits, promotion, and immediate material gain – pillage.

From the beginning merchants were among the most important protagonists of expansion. The initial aim of European expansion was to expand trade, even prior to conquest, and consequently merchants were often the first to explore an overseas territory and open it for trade. During most of the European expansion the flag followed the trade – merchants only turned to their government for protection when they felt an urgent need to do so. However, because they lacked official authority as well as military force, they rarely had the means to carry out expansion on their own, and had to rely on exerting influence on political or military institutions. On the other hand, merchants’ interests were often used by (colonial) governments as a pretext to justify expansion.

Chartered companies, composed of many merchants and working with their joint capital, were the spearhead of expansion in many parts of the world. Especially in early modern times, governments vested them not only with trade monopolies as an economic basis, but with vast quasigovernmental powers for certain areas, including even the right of war and peace and concluding international treaties. In turn, the state expected financial contributions to the treasury. The end of the companies came with the introduction into politics of free trade principles, or alternatively, with bankruptcy. Their governmental rights reverted to the state, which in some prominent cases (British and Dutch East India) also implied the responsibility for extended territories. Chartered companies witnessed a short revival as relatively cheap instruments of expansion in the ‘scramble for Africa’.

Industrialists and financiers invested in colonial enterprises that opened and developed territories for the world market. Like the merchants, they occasionally had to turn to their government for protection, which often simply meant protective tariffs. Their interests were also frequently used to justify expansion.

Settlers played an important part mainly in those regions where the climate allowed European-style agriculture. Their ever-growing need for more area under cultivation led them to expand into new territory by force. In doing so on their own, the settlers usually ignored the rights of indigenous peoples, even when those rights were guaranteed by their government. Eventually the settlers induced the same government to provide them with protection from indigenous reaction. Thus, large areas were brought under European control (both Americas, southern and eastern Africa, Australasia).

In some regions the clergy was the instrument of comparatively peaceful penetration of frontier areas (Spanish and French America, sub-Saharan Africa) by means of ‘civilizing’ indigenous people. By teaching them European culture and religion as well as the advantages of protection from their enemies by European weapons, missionaries paved the way for the eventual takeover by colonial governments. There were, however, great differences between colonial empires; some were intimately intertwined with the church (Spain), others excluded it completely from vast areas (early British India).

Led by a diversity of personal motives, adventurers, explorers, and scientists acted as the vanguard of expansion in unknown territory. Their prospects and means were as diverse as their appearances, ranging from the sixteenth-century pirate in the Caribbean to the nineteenth-century explorer traveling alone through Central Africa. But their reports often made eventual expansion look promising.

European expansion would have been impossible without indigenous collaboration. In only a few cases did Europeans simply conquer territory; instead, imperialism began as bargaining terms for trade or rights of settlement. Even conquest usually began as ‘assisting’ one indigenous party in an external or internal conflict with another, thus subjugating the enemy and obliging the ally. The more ‘collaboration regimes’ had to rely on European support to stabilize their power, the more they became alienated from their subjects, which in turn made them even more dependent on their European allies. Finally, this vicious circle could cause the breakdown of a regime, thus forcing the imperialist power to take over in order to preserve its interests.

In many cases, resistance emerged only decades after the takeover, when the subjects felt colonial rule in their daily lives. Often the subjugated indigenous people have later been accused of ‘disunity’, which had made conquest possible, but that is largely besides the point: for example, inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent prior to the British conquest did not consider themselves to be ‘Indians’ but Bengalis, Gujaratis, Marathas, and so on, and certainly they were Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. To think in terms of nationality was usually the result of a combination of the experience of European rule, contact with European ideas, and social changes.

Three Hundred Years and Counting

Imperialism, slavery, and colonial exploitation in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries created enduring global linkages that were sustained through the postemancipation period of the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time when the age of exploration was taking place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both science and religion colluded (sometimes consciously and sometimes not) as the two dominant discourses of colonialization and the institutionalization of a permanent racial hierarchy in the Americas, Africa, and South Asia. Advocates for slavery and colonial expansion helped to institutionalize the new science of anthropology, in part to counter Abolitionists' claims based on morality and biblical tenets. As the discipline developed during the late nineteenth century, human difference was parsed along a color-coded hierarchy from savage to civilized – from black through brown, yellow, and red to white (Baker, 1998; Thomas and Clark, 2006; Goodman et al., 2012). The fact that some researchers documented customs and behaviors while others measured brains and bodies did not change this hierarchy because human diversity and cultural differences were blurred and racially mapped in a way that privileged biology as the basis for human difference, with those in power being male Europeans.

However, other changes were afoot in the early twentieth century as altered relationships between the means of production and local and global consumption that also had a hand in transforming racial meanings once again. The rise of resistance movements such as Garveyism and Pan-Africanism in the early twentieth century showed that racialized peoples, both laborers and intellectuals, were also helping to shape notions of their own identity as well as notions of where they belonged, both physically and metaphorically. While socioeconomic and political arrangements in the United States required that racialized labor forces remain fixed within the particular (material and ideological) places to which they were transported, by the middle of the twentieth century models of production and consumption instead relied upon a massive movement of these same labor forces out of their place, “from South to North in the United States, from colony to metropole in the British, French, Portuguese and Dutch West Indies, from country to city in southern and western Africa” (Holt, 2002: p. 70). This movement that was facilitated, in part, by the liberalization of US immigration laws in 1965, helped to generate a transnational wave of immigrants from homelands especially from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, to new lands such as the United States, Europe, and Canada.

New Transnationalisms of City Architecture

Imperialism relied upon international circuits of knowledge and technology transfer, which brought expertise from the metropolitan core to the colonial peripheries, and facilitated emergent colony-to-colony circuits of knowledge and technology transfer. Such circuits gave rise to novel, hybridized architectural typologies and styles. One such typology was that of the bungalow, which, as Anthony D. King documented, was derived from an Indian colonial hybrid but came to travel the world as the standard typology for the suburban home. Similarly, the architecture of imperial metropolitan centers often appropriated symbols and forms derived from the indigenous building traditions of their colonies. Unsurprisingly, postindependence architecture often sought to move away from such ambivalently entangled styles. Such movement is evident in the emphatically modernist visions adopted in postindependence city building projects such as those in Chandigarh and Brasilia. In such schemes, the modernist style adopted offered a formal clarity that radically reinterpreted and even shed the past, thus marking the way to a new future. Alongside such postcolonial tendencies to purge tradition exists a range of culture-linked, regionally informed revivalisms. For example, in a number of contexts, such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, an emergent “tropical modern” has generated powerful, transferable statements about how to build in a way that is in tune with context. Such postcolonial architectural returns can, on occasions, display an unprogressive conservatism. But they are one of a range of efforts by citizens, planners, and architects in cities of the Global South to push back against urban models derived from the West. Such efforts seek to reverse the flow of norms and forms established by colonialism. Planner Ananya Roy has even argued that cities of the Global North can learn from the nonarchitecture and nonplan of informality found in the built form of cities of the Global South.

The currents of transnational production evident in the colonial era have taken on a new scale and intensity of integration in an era of global capital, which is represented in both the built architecture of cities and in the processes by which that architecture comes into being. Both these themes have been of specific interest to geographers and related scholars, particularly those working from a cultural economy perspective. This scholarship has included attention to the transnational circuits that supply the expert knowledge, technical components, and personnel needed to produce urban architecture. Pathbreaking work by Donald McNeil charted the way in which the profession nowadays sports a number of “Starchitects,” architects with an elevated global recognition, critical acclaim, and commercial reach. The rise of the starchitect, and the firms they front, has resulted in the proliferation of identifiable brand buildings in many cities, what has been dubbed “iconic architecture” (Fig. 2). Iconic architecture comprises buildings and spaces that are known for the name of the architect who designed them, often also identifiable by the formal qualities of that architect's stylistic brand and ordained (usually by city, developer, or professional rhetoric) to have distinct symbolic or aesthetic significance. Scholars such as Leslie Sklair and Maria Kaika argue that such buildings mark a fundamental shift in the motivational framing of symbolic expression through architecture, which was conventionally linked to more localized expressions of identity. This new age of architectural iconicity comprises a branding process that trades in architectural names and looks and produces an infrastructure of desire that operates at a global scale. What symbolic work these externally constituted architectures of significant do for the host city is an open question. Will they become icons that stand for a genuinely shared meaning supported by ritualized local practices or will they forever be poorly integrated objects located in, but otherwise disassociated from, their host cities? The symbolic complexity of such transnational urbanisms has been well documented in the fast urbanizing cities of Asia. For example, Ren Xuefei's 2010 book Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China charts how municipal governments and developers pursue the look and effect of “global status” through the marshalling of architectural “design intelligence” from around the world. This generates “mimetic” architectures that feed a distinctly Chinese urban aspiration but that are indifferently embedded in local urban sociality.

Geographical scholarship has also started to interrogate the architects and firms that produce such buildings, situating them as part of a Global Intelligence Corp. The behavior of these architects and their firms is illuminating. Such transnational starchitects usually do not have vast multisited offices but, rather, well-connected firms with the capacity and track record to tender for global reach competitions and opportunities. They manage complex projects in many different localities partly because they partner with local firms who specialize in such collaborative work, and often do much of the detailed, on-the-ground work of translating “out” the local regulations and planning requirements, and translating “in” the design values acquired from the brand-name architect. As such, the influence of such starchitects depends on local corporate affiliates aligning with the aspirations of globally oriented, city politicians and bureaucrats, supported by globalized technical professionals, and mediated by persuasive brand merchants. Ironically, the trend in cities pursuing high-profile, iconic architectural schemes that draw on a limited pool of global starchitects has resulted in a banality of expressed difference. The architecture of cities around the world is converging around a supposedly distinctive imagineering of “brandscapes.”

The symbolic noise of iconic architecture and starchitects can drown a more ubiquitous process of transnational urban architectural formation. Studying firms alone is not sufficient for us to understand the transnational complexity of global city building today. Scholarship also needs to examine the more everyday comparative and mimetic processes that even highly localized firms engage in, ranging from reading magazines with global content reach, attending the increasingly large number of world-scale urban trade fairs (such as Singapore's World City Summit), and integrating certain off-the-shelf (global) components, with all their standardized specifications, into a highly localized design.