A critical examination of the current phase of imperialism.

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 only comparatively recently. This is not to downplay the role of political and military imposition, but to try and understand and explain how capitalism's reorganisation of economic and extra-economic power come to inform contemporary imperial practice. Indeed, the book is partly intended to remind even some on the Left that a 'global system of multiple states' continues to provide the necessary political frame in our own period of globalisation.

Empire of Capital tries to understand contemporary imperialism by first returning to empire's pre-capitalist forms. If Wood sees these earlier empires as based on property or commerce, this is not meant to suggest their association with the economic compulsions of capitalism. Extra-economic appropriation, facilitated by conquering military power, drove the territorial empire of the Romans. The military expeditions of the Spanish conquistadors opened the Americas to the exploitation of resources through its mines and plantations. The Muslim conquests allowed the emergence of vast trading 'networks of religion and commerce' extending from North Africa to India. The naval power of the Venetian Empire enabled its role as a commercial link within European feudalism. Even the Dutch Republic's commercial empire was pre-capitalist in its generation of wealth not from productivity, cost-effectiveness and competition, but from its control and negotiation of separate markets.

Wood is well known for her thesis that Britain was the first country to be shaped and formed by capitalism. She extends this idea here, arguing that Britain's empire was the first to function along capitalist lines, evidenced in the way it colonised land and the prominent role of white settler colonies. The process begins in rural England with the replacement of customary land use with tenancies determined by market forces. Agrarian capitalism's ideology of 'improvement'--the profitable and productive use of land--is also used to legitimate later colonisation. We in Australia should note how general the new ways of valuation were that allowed the principle of terra nullius to justify not just the appropriation of 'unoccupied' or 'unused' land but also lands deemed not fully 'productive'. For all the brutality and exploitation of Spanish and French colonisation, they pale before the outright extermination that characterised the British appropriation of indigenous land.

While Wood's classical marxism lends considerable insight into how capitalism shaped the colonial enterprise, there is little apparent interest in the periphery's impact on European development. According to Wood's schema, the extension of capitalism is largely a European affair, beginning when France and Germany mobilised their economies in response to the competitive threat posed by England. Where England saw an 'internal' development from agrarian capitalism to industrialisation, France and Germany engaged in a state-led development of large-scale industry mainly for 'external' military and geopolitical reasons. The imperial rivalry in the period up until World War I belonged to a world where capitalism was developed but not universal. This only really changes after World War II when economic competition became more important than military rivalry. In an interesting aside, Wood argues that the Cold War was a transition between the period of imperial expansion and rivalry to the US-dominated system of multiple states.

Wood cites the recent example of East Timor as illustrative of how economic strictures, rather than military imposition, are used to control newly decolonised states. This was evident when the East Timorese attempted to renegotiate the energy deal that Indonesia and Australia had previously arranged between themselves (cut to the grotesquerie of foreign ministers Evans and Alatas laughing and toasting each other while flying over the Timor Sea). The US has paid lip service to the importance of Third World development, but since the downturn in the 1970s 'structural adjustment' has meant the continuing displacement of economic crisis and its costs onto poorer countries. Wood argues that globalisation prevents true integration: unevenness remains integral to a system that generates an increasing disparity in labour and social conditions.

We now face the conundrum of a period in which economic competition has replaced military rivalry, but also has the US developing unprecedented levels of military power and dominance. The 'new imperialism' has dispensed with 'just war' principles that stipulate the need for clearly defined and achievable ends in favour of an open-ended war, 'indefinite in its duration, objectives and spatial reach'. Wood argues for the rethinking of classical understandings of imperialism to engage with a world where capitalism has now become truly universalised. The 'surplus imperialism' evident in US interventions is less a response to terrorism (which it is more likely to exacerbate than defeat) than a means of controlling the global system of multiple and subordinate states.

In a certain respect, the targets of US actions are just as much potential competitors such as the EU or China, as they are the 'rogue' or 'failed' states that have slipped the moorings of US hegemony. The scale of US military superiority shapes the global system, removing the need for powers like Japan to achieve genuine military self-sufficiency, as well as warning off potential rivals. One of the important points Wood leaves us with, however, is that the control and dominance of ruling interests is never perfectly achieved. The 'new imperialism' derives from the attempt to bridge the ever-insistent gap between global economic power and more delimited political forms used to control and regulate it. This contradiction will continue to act as a source of both threat and opportunity to peoples and movements with alternative visions.

This book synthesises and develops many years of writing and argument. Some of the more contentious debates Wood has engaged in during this time are touched on--notably, the idea that capitalism originated in rural England--without being fully broached. This lends the work a less polemical, less schematic tone than some of her previous works. There are good and bad polemics, of course, and it is puzzling that a book on imperialism doesn't respond more directly to those who have accused her of a Eurocentric focus. Nevertheless, her prising open of empire's relationship with capital allows some much needed perspective on the 'shock and awe' of contemporary imperial practice.
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