Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Gary Pearce on the new imperialism.

Article Excerpt
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital London, Verso, 2003

The United States has always sought a space of plausible deniability when it comes to accusations of imperialism. It has long contrasted itself to the history of European subjugation and control of territories in far-off places. This idea has been helped along by the way the rise of US power in the second half of the last century coincided with the decolonisation of the older European empires. Even with the so called 'new imperialism' of recent months and years, the US presents itself as preserving freedom and democracy with little interest in the entanglements of long-term occupation.

In her new book, Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood seeks to understand US power internationally by looking at the broader historical nexus between capitalism and imperialism. She argues that our received assumptions regarding imperialism have something in common with the direct forms of appropriation and exploitation that characterised pre-capitalist societies. If capitalism's operative modes rely on more opaque forms of economic coercion, then this suggests that a properly constituted capitalist imperialism emerges...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!