“A particularly crude form of capitalism” John Hobson’s Theory of Imperialism
During the summer and autumn of 1899, John Atkinson Hobson, a fortyyear-old English economist and writer, visited South Africa on assignment for The Manchester Guardian, a liberal newspaper that was edited by the legendary C. P. Scott. Although Hobson had written several books on economics and a biography of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and polymath, he was little known to the British public. In 1898, however, he had published an essay in The Contemporary Review, a highbrow journal, in which he challenged the arguments of imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain, Britain’s colonial secretary, and Cecil Rhodes, the Britishborn South African politician and mining magnate, who claimed that expanding Britain’s already-vast empire was the best way to create markets for British products and jobs for British workers.1 “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread-and-butter question,” Rhodes had declared a few years earlier, after attending a meeting of unemployed workers in London’s East End. “If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”2 In his article, Hobson dismissed this argument as a canard. He said that territorial conquests were unnecessary to promote trade, and he insisted that the root cause of deficient demand for British products was a domestic one: an inequitable distribution of income, which limited the purchasing power of the masses.3
Hobson’s economic critiques of imperialism came to the attention of L. T. Hobhouse, a noted liberal philosopher who was also an editorial writer at The Manchester Guardian. It was Hobhouse who urged Scott to send
12