What do we mean when we talk about empire? Well in the British sense, the word empire is synonymous
with colonialism. That is the idea that a country located in one place( i.e. a local power, a local
community, a local economic system) spread[s] out, takes over other areas, often violently clashing
with people who lived in those other areas and whose idea of a future did not include being part
of somebody else's economic system, and especially not a subordinate part of somebody else's system.
And so, setting up a colony often meant violently overthrowing what was there before,
substituting your own people or finding local people to act as your agents,
or literally settling your own people there. That's called settler colonialism, when you
do that. Well the important economic question is why? Why do societies expand like that, especially
when the people they take power over don't like it, don't want it, resist it, fight about it?
Well, before capitalism- that is before the 18th century, 17-18th century when capitalism
takes over in Europe. Before that, the empires we see were usually created
to get something that the society expanding needed.
Could be food. Could be slaves. That was often, in ancient society, the case. It could be wealth in
a kind of general way. It could be labor for the military that they needed to expand even further.
But, it had to do with gold, silver, slaves- things that you could grab and take.
It was a grab and take kind of expansion.
What's different about capitalism is that it's much more organized. It's much more invasive.
It does way more than steal and snatch wealth and people. It does that,
but it wants to integrate the area it takes over into its own economy as a subordinate provider.
It really is an expansion that absorbs one way or another what it's expanding over.
Because what's notable about Britain is its empire was the first modern capitalist empire.
And what do I want to say about it? Well, here's what it went after. As capitalism expands and
as I think most of you understand, it is an expansive system. Every capitalist corporation
is proud and thinks of itself as successful if it's expanding,
if it's market-share is growing, if the size of its business is getting larger. That's what
you want to see. That's what's successful. That makes an executive at the CEO level shine. That's
what makes your stocks look good etc. etc. So, in capitalist colonialism, what you want is to expand
and you want to expand everything. For example, if you're going to expand and hire more people,
you may need more food to be produced in the agricultural part of your country
in order to sustain those workers who are in the industries, in the factories, in the cities.
And you may not have enough agricultural land to produce the food that you need, so you expand to
get it. The British, being an empire on a little island, really wanted to get food,
which eventually they took from the prairies of the United States in huge amounts to feed
their people with grain. Things you might not associate with the British Empire- slavery,
cotton, India- that was all part of integrating a world economy. By having European countries mostly
take over more and more parts of the world and integrate them into their economies as
subordinate places, wealth was created, but wasn't left there. It was shipped to the mother country,
which became very rich. You might think of colonialism as the birth of the modern economy,
and like usual, the conditions of birth have a long lasting effect on what kind of societies
you produce. And being born in colonialism is a violent and dangerous way to come into being.