nm0078: when you're invited to give a guest lecture it's always important to 
think about who your audience will be they should be kept in mind when you're 
choosing your topic and deciding the best way to present it your audience will 
also want to know something about you who and what you are helps to explain why 
you've chosen a particular subject and what you make of it i'm a historian i 
spend my time studying the past the period of the past that i study most 
intensively is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the particular area 
of the world has been Africa and in particular the European impact on Africa 
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
nm0078: many of you here today are not from Africa but you are many of you from 
parts of the world that have been affected by one of the great global forces at 
work in world history what we loosely call imperialism and that is why i 
thought what i should try to talk to you about today is this phenomenon of 
imperialism not just 
in terms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and as you will see not just 
in terms of the impact of Europe on the non-European world because what we are 
grappling with in the phenomenon of imperialism is a phenomenon that in various 
forms is as old as the formation of state systems by human beings so i'm going 
to er at considerable risk er to myself try to set this phenomenon in a much 
wider er more global perspective i hope that might be of interest to many of 
you who have either been subjected to what you consider imperialism or indeed 
have been part of states and societies that have themselves been imperialistic 
or are still being so because whatever one says about the phase of European 
domination on a global scale which was such a feature of the late nineteenth 
and the first part of the twentieth century European colonial empires may come 
and go but the phenomenon of imperialism goes on and it goes on in different 
forms and in different 
places all the time so what i'm going to try to talk to you about is this 
subject of what is imperialism and what can we say about some of its actual er 
record in the past and the recent past 
nm0078: i think we have to begin by facing up to the fact that today we live in 
an age of anti-imperialism all over the world there is a reaction against the 
things which we associate with the phenomenon of imperialism the domination of 
weak countries or societies by the strong the economic exploitation of the 
natural resources of often poorer countries er in the world by the rich 
industrialized parts of the world the gross and in many parts of the world the 
widening gap in terms of the political military and economic power and 
standards of living between the rich and the poor countries the belief i-, in 
one society of the absolute superiority of its culture its values and its 
beliefs and the attempt to impose these upon the people of other cultures and 
often of 
different races today in Europe and America in the countries of the ex-Soviet 
Union and in Asia as well as in all those areas of the what used to be called 
the Third World which were until so recently under European influence or indeed 
colonial rule imperialism is regarded as a bad thing to call someone an 
imperialist is a term of abuse like calling them a racist or a fascist the very 
word imperialism i think you'll agree is loaded with emotional and ideological 
overtones if i say for instance that recently i have been studying and 
contributing to a new Oxford history of the British empire which i have that is 
a clear concrete and perfectly respectable historical subject to study it was 
indeed the most powerful and extensive empire in world history but if i say i'm 
studying and writing about the history of British imperialism that's already a 
somewhat different thing the kind of books that are written about it are 
different too the point i'm making is well 
illustrated if one looks up the word for one aspect of imperialism colonialism 
in two different dictionaries in Webster's American Dictionary colonialism is 
simply defined as the system in which a country maintains foreign colonies but 
if you take the dictionary produced in the Soviet Union of foreign s-, words 
and look up the word kolonizatsiya you find it defined as the seizure of a 
country or region by imperialists accompanied by the subjection brutal 
exploitation and sometimes the annihilation of the local population you see 
what i mean about the ideological and emotional overtones that almost 
inevitably creep into discussions about the phenomenon we are addressing 
nm0078: now as a historian i believe that if history teaches us anything it 
should teach us to take the long term view of what happens and has happened in 
the past seeing ourselves in the long perspective of time and not just in terms 
of the 
present and its very particular attitudes values and preoccupations that i'd 
say is one of the key things that the study of history can give us and in any 
long view empires and what today we mean by imperialism are a perennial feature 
of history indeed until very recently until almost the twentieth century in 
fact that impulse to expansion by powerful states usually at the expense of the 
weak has been regarded not only as a part of the natural order of things but 
also as a force for good a movement which was bound up with the progress of the 
world as a whole and certainly of its more backward regions it's in this 
context that i think probably the history of the British empire will eventually 
in the long run come to be set in perspective after all that is certainly what 
has happened to the history of the ancient Roman empire it was the conquest 
colonization and incorporation into the Roman empire of the backward areas like 
the British Isles and France which 
first drew these areas into the mainstream of European history certainly in 
Europe as a whole it's a fact that after the collapse of the Roman empire in 
the fifth century A-D the memory of that empire haunted and encouraged the 
attempts of later generations to recreate it Charlemagne the Hohenstaufen kings 
of Germany the Habsburgs and the long history of the Holy Roman Empire as it 
was called right down to its disappearance in eighteen-o-six all these in one 
way or another drew some of their inspiration from the dignity glory grandeur 
and power associated with Rome the very term imperialism deriving as it does 
from the Latin word imperator has clearly Roman associations and if we look 
outside Europe as i think one should encourage everybody to do in terms of this 
term to the world at large then again we find that in the world at large 
empires and imperial systems are a perennial feature of history the Ming and 
Manchu empires in China from the 
fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries the Ottoman empire in the Middle East 
the Mogul empire in India the Aztec and Inca empires in Central and South 
America the Egyptian and Fulani and Zulu empires in Africa the Japanese empire 
in Korea Manchuria and China wherever we look it would seem that empires and 
what we today would regard as imperial situations are as old and continuous as 
the formation of state systems by humankind 
nm0078: the term imperialism is as i've said such a loose and loaded word today 
that in any discussion it's necessary to define what you mean and in this terms 
by what one means quite carefully because one of the reasons why so many of the 
books about imperialism are so unsatisfactory is that different writers use the 
term to mean quite different things now since i'm painting with a very broad 
indeed a global brush this morning and i still stand by the point that the 
question of definitions 
is always important er let me suggest that there are broadly speaking two 
different meanings of the term imperialism firstly there is the meaning as i've 
already been using the term that is to mean any effective dominalation or 
relationship of control by one society over another that control need not be 
direct and political or involve military conquest or rule that control can be 
indirect or informal between two independent countries and take any of the 
forms of economic military social or cultural domination rather than outright 
political rule now defined like that it's clear that imperialism is a perennial 
feature of history and is to be found in all periods and in very different 
parts of the world it's not making imperialism something peculiar to Europeans 
or Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
nm0078: secondly there is the loosely Marxist definition given not by Karl Marx 
himself he never uses the term 
imperialism but by Lenin in his highly influential booklet Imperialism the 
Highest State of Capitalism published when Lenin seemed to be a no hope 
revolutionary in exile in nineteen-sixteen there Lenin defined imperialism in 
terms of a particular stage what he called the highest stage in the development 
of capitalism this is a much narrower definition of imperialism than my first 
one but it has been extraordinarily influential i find amongst African students 
in African universities what mine one might loosely call the Leninist 
definition of imperialism is simply taken for granted defined in Leninist terms 
imperialism becomes a function an inevitable result in his view of the economic 
history of certain mainly western societies in terms of this definition 
imperialism didn't appear anywhere in the world until the late nineteenth 
century and in the twentieth century its main focus has moved from Europe to 
the United States but also to include 
Japan 
nm0078: the trouble with this definition of imperialism is that even within the 
narrow restrictions of nineteenth of twentieth century history it raises very 
awkward questions i can only pause to raise a few of these awkward questions 
here but you can perhaps think about some others yourself firstly if you've got 
er er a definition of imperialism that equates it as a certain stage an 
inevitable stage in Lenin's view in the development of capitalism can 
supposedly non-capitalist economies and societies be imperialistic how else 
would we describe the activities of the ex-Soviet Union or some would say to 
this day of China but how else would we describe many other societies which 
have ex-, exhibited that tendency to expansionism and domination of weaker 
smaller societies or states that i've mentioned if one can think of cases of 
American imperialism which fit that bill what about the relationship of the er 
of the Soviet Union with the states of eastern 
Europe in the half-century or so after the Second World War or about the 
relationship to be provocative between China and Tibet to this day so there's 
that first objection can so-called non-capitalist societies be imperialistic 
the answer seems to be yes secondly why is it that only some capitalist 
societies become imperialistic Portugal for instance one of the least developed 
capitalist societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a large 
colonial empire and was one of the last er European colonial powers to 
decolonize Switzerland far more developed capitalist society Belgium with its 
huge colony in the Congo but not Denmark again a small but highly developed 
highly capitalist society so er if imperialism is a stage an inevitable stage 
in the development of capitalism why is it that only certain states seem to er 
become imperialistic or more so than others and why is it that many states 
which are or societies which 
are not capitalistic in their organization w-, can become amongst the most 
expansionist and imperialist in modern history the straight Marxist-Leninist 
particularly Leninist definition of imperialism of proves so obviously 
unsatisfactory that very few historians today in fact adopt it but many more 
have utilized and worked with what might be called a looser er Marxist 
definition and i would say that some of the aspects of the Marxist definition 
of er imperialism have been by far the most influential and are nearly always 
brought in if as we've time for some questions and discussion afterwards i'm 
sure some of you will bring in this crucial if you like economic dimension to 
imperialism at least in the world in modern centuries 
nm0078: much of the literature about imperialism is not only ideologically 
charged as i said earlier but it's often been rather heavily theoretical and 
full of grand assertions and a bit light on concrete examples many of which are 
taken 
very selectively now you can see at once how if you've got a grand general 
theory about a phenomenon like imperialism it's got to be able to stand up 
against the test of all sorts of empirical actual examples in history if it 
fails that test er against the the actual empirical evidence from the past of a 
whole number of cases then that undermines the validity of the general theory 
and i suppose where we are today is that some of the Marxist-Leninist 
dimensions of what goes into the making of imperialism has become what G N 
Sanderson has called a background theory er the trouble with background 
theories is they do remain in the background and they often become rather 
ineffective for actually explaining why particular societies at particular 
times became as expansionist as they did 
nm0078: just a further word about the danger of selectivity i said general 
theories about anything have to stand up against the test of a wide range of 
empirical examples to 
take the African continent for example it's no good selecting South Africa the 
only major industrialized country in Africa and a key world producer of gold 
and a whole series of other strategic minerals and ignoring all the other 
African examples which don't have minerals and which don't fit the theory you 
see what i mean about the danger of using selective examples simply to support 
a theory which you've decided beforehand er explains the phenomenon you're 
doing good historians are more sceptical than that the theory has to be stand 
the test across a very wide range of examples if it's to stand up as a general 
theory 
nm0078: now i'm using the term imperialism in this lecture in accordance with 
really the first definition i gave i would simply define imperialism as the 
tendency of a state to expand within the confines set by its economic and 
political strength and military and naval power let me repeat that i can see 
you all 
scribbling it down [laughter] imperialism as the tendency of a state to expand 
within the confines set by its economic and political strength and military and 
naval power of course i include air power in that and nuclear power in the 
twentieth century this seems to me as useful a definition for studying the 
phenomenon of imperialism as in the present age as in past ages but i'd like 
first to emphasize er f-, three very important contributions to the debate 
about what imperialism is that i think Marxist writing or loosely Marxist 
writing has made because of course er it remains true you don't have to be a a 
Marxist or a Leninist to take on board some of the valid points that both 
writers have made about the phenomenon of imperialism in the modern world 
nm0078: first there is the point i made just a minute or two ago that following 
the general Marxist approach to history the theory of imperialism in Marxist 
terms is after all part of a materialist explanation of history 
generally the subject of imperialism has got to bring in i think a discussion 
about the importance of economic factors in imperialistic relationships not 
purely political factors of course economics and politics can become closely 
together but you can't leave out examining the economic dimension to 
imperialistic relationships now i think as often is true the perhaps 
exaggerated emphasis indeed making ec-, the economic dimension the be all and 
end all of imperialism in the sort of narrower Leninist view of imperialism has 
actually been beneficial to non-Leninist non-Marxist historians in making them 
ask th-, questions about the economic dimension of imperialism wherever that 
phenomenon is studied 
nm0078: secondly i think the whole debate about what is imperialism from a 
Marxist-Leninist perspective has stressed that informal empire as opposed to 
formal empire formal empire being the empire formal political rule areas that 
the British liked to 
think of as painted red on the map in the British empire case as opposed to 
areas you simply traded with but didn't rule over directly had informal 
relationships with i think there's been a great er usefulness in pointing to 
informal relationships between states which can be very imperialistic even 
where there isn't outright military conquest or political rule or suggestio-, 
or or subjection in the case of the United States in the twentieth century this 
informal imperial rule or role is what a large part of the discussion about the 
imperialistic nature of the United States is actually er about the formal part 
of an American empire which at the very end of the nineteenth century included 
areas like Cuba and er the Philippines it was of course but the tip of the 
iceberg had a far far larger informal American er influence not just economic 
but with strong economic aspects to it so that difference between informal 
imperialism as opposed to formal 
imperialism is i think again something we all at the end of the twentieth 
century er take for granted as part of the debate it certainly is a large part 
of it 
nm0078: thirdly the focus of many Marxist writers was on the central dynamic 
role of the industrial revolution and the continually transforming effects of 
industrialization and the what this has brought about in not just in terms of 
the economic development of individual countries but in terms of the 
establishment of a world economy the bringing into being of an international 
world trading economy run on basically capitalist principles to which different 
parts of the world became increasingly linked or tied in often as a direct 
result of being colonized and of a period of colonial rule in other words 
colonialism one form of imperialism acted as a means by which all sorts of 
previously often rather undeveloped rather isolated parts of the world became 
tied in linked in to a worldwide trading system which 
really has only come into being in the course of the last century in its full 
respect now we at the end of the twentieth century are acutely aware of the 
truth of this in terms of globalization er in the buzz phrase of the current er 
time the way in which more and more parts of the world are not autonomous not 
self-sufficient are inevitably irretrievably and in many cases for in their own 
interests er actually tied in to a worldwide er trading system now this again i 
think er the development of this worldwide trading system has again b-, been a 
large element that writing on the left is one can call it that has focused as 
one of the legacies if you like of the era of high imperialism or the new 
imperialism in which the West played such a strong and im-, dominant role from 
the late nineteenth century on into the mid er twentieth century thus in all 
sorts of fundamental ways er many of which i haven't time to go into here but 
you're very free to 
ask questions about it at the end but in all sorts of ways in the questions 
that this second Marxist-Leninist definition of imperialism has raised it seems 
to me that it's actually been beneficial to historians of all kinds er by and 
large in other words it's been fr-, most fruitful i would say when this these 
dimensions have been taken out of the ideological straitjacket of Marxism or 
Leninism per se and been applied specifically and empirically in all sorts of 
situations er in the modern world 
nm0078: so to conclude the first part of my lecture on about this question what 
is imperialism definitions of it i regard imperialism as a perennial phenomenon 
in history taking all sorts of different forms in all parts of the world in 
different places at different times the forms may change but the phenomenon of 
imperialism goes on and i would say that is just as true in the post- 
decolonization of the European colonial empires era in which we 
are now living as in eras before that great expansion of the European colonial 
empires at the end of the nineteenth century in other words imperialism goes on 
but its forms change and the focus of where it's going on most intensively 
changes from time to time as well and it is to do with that tendency of strong 
states or societies to expand beyond their quote national boundaries and to 
dominate militarily politically economically or culturally weaker states or 
societies which may be even adjacent to them in the same part of the world or 
situated overseas imperialism is by no means necessarily an overseas er 
phenomenon 
nm0078: i want in the second part of my talk to turn to the consideration of 
this phenomenon in imperialism in the twentieth century since that is probably 
er what most er interests er many of you i actually specialize in the 
nineteenth century but i also study the er er phenomenon of colonial empires in 
the twentieth century and their dissolution in the 
second half of the twentieth century which itself raises very interesting 
questions about our times the second half of the twentieth century has been 
very bad for empires of all kinds not just the European colonial empires but 
more recently the dissolution of the Soviet empire one of the last and largest 
empires of the twentieth century so what i began by saying that we live in an 
era of anti-imperialism i'm concluding this section by saying means that the 
phenomenon of imperialism and the driver wheels which drive it have certainly 
not disappeared from the world as we all know but the actual forms that it 
takes and the actual areas of the world er change and are changing where 
colonialism ends neo-colonialism and other forms of imperialism begin if you 
like 
nm0078: the classical phase of nineteenth century imperialism one might say 
began to be brought to an end by the First World War although it's true that 
the greatest of the nineteenth century colonial 
empires the British only reached its greatest territorial extent after the 
First World worl-, War with the redistribution of the ex-German and ex-Ottoman 
er territories this British empire which er Oxford University Press is 
producing in the next two years f-, five volumes over its sort of four-hundred 
year history the British empire brought a total of something like six-hundred-
million people under British rule about a quarter of the world's population er 
so it's no wonder that er some British historians like myself are interested in 
it how did it come into being how was it sustained why did it come to an end 
these questions are very live in historical debates today nonetheless i would 
say that already in the nineteen-twenties and thirties the British empire like 
all the other European colonial empires some of them of very recent creation 
was already weakening by the end of the Second World War it was in a state of 
disintegration today it has gone and many 
would f-, put the sort of full stop on the British empire in terms of its 
exercises in decolonization with er the er the er end of British rule in Hong 
Kong in er nineteen-ninety-seven yet we know imperialism is alive and well and 
living in almost all parts of the world today 
nm0078: but whereas in the past imperialism was usually seen in terms of an 
imbalance of power in the political and military relationship between states in 
the twentieth century and partly as a result of that Marxist influence that i 
emphasized earlier there's been increasing emphasis upon the informal 
relationships of an imperialistic nature and the economic dimensions to those 
relationships on the economic motives and means at work in the relationship 
between two states and of course crucially at the great imbalance in economic 
power between er trading partners investing partners those exporting raw 
materials those acquiring those raw materials themselves a crucial 
part of the continuing process of industrialization which i mentioned earlier 
nm0078: colonialism certainly colonialism in the sense of the European colonial 
empires in Africa and Asia we can now see was only one form of imperialism 
which can be replaced by other forms of dominance influence or control colonial 
empires may have disappeared but imperialistic relationships continue as Kwame 
Nkrumah the first er leader of an independent Ghana said where colonialism ends 
neo-colonialism begins the essence of neo-colonialism he said is that the state 
which is subject to it is in theory independent and has all the outward 
trappings of international sovereignty but in reality its economic system and 
thus its internal policy is directed from outside now this emphasis on the 
economic aspect is typical of a great deal of writing on twentieth century 
imperialism Michael Barrett Brown actually defines imperialism in the late 
twentieth century as a 
complex of economic political and military relations by which the less 
economically developed lands are subjected to the more economically developed 
imperialism remains the best word for the general system of unequal world 
economic relations so this emphasis on the economic aspect of imperialism is a 
very striking feature at the debate about what imperialism is at the end of the 
twentieth century 
nm0078: but whereas earlier imperialism tended to be considered in terms of 
relationships between governments and between states modern imperialism is also 
seen in terms of informal relations between societies and of all sorts of 
groups of people and institutions within and beyond those individual states or 
societies in a world made up of sovereign nation states er under the United 
Nations businessmen banks missionaries United Nations organizations and 
multinational corporations are now seen as the new arenas if you like in which 
imperialism can be 
exhibited above all at the end of the twentieth century there is perhaps an 
awareness of the framework set by the international economy that has come into 
being the terms of trade for instance especially between primary producing 
countries and industrialized countries which in so many respects seem 
disadvantageous to the poor and weak and to the advantage of the rich and 
strong so that's a second er feature of imperialism in the present age 
nm0078: thirdly the instruments of imperialism in the twentieth century have 
also changed and diversified where in the past what was called gunboat 
diplomacy and a fairly crude use of political naval or military power often 
sufficed today the instruments of imperialism are more likely to be the 
granting or withholding of economic aid loans or other forms of technical or 
economic assistance which there should be no doubt about it can amount to the 
difference between whether a political regime in some fairly 
fragile ex-Third World state falls or stays in power and a system of what was 
rightly called client states has developed in which many such regimes are kept 
in place as clients of some larger great power in the world and you if you 
think that's purely an American phenomenon you're wrong other states in the 
twentieth century have proved very adept at the system of clientage if one 
could call it that er as well 
nm0078: the aims behind all this remain largely what they always have been they 
may be in economic the pursuit of markets the search for raw materials or oil 
or energy supplies or they may be strategic the defence of territory or of 
interests including economic interests elsewhere in other words one area 
becomes important for its strategic importance in relation to somewhere else 
not for anything particularly valuable economically in itself the pursuit of 
political power and an influential international role it can also be to do with 
ideology er the 
twentieth century is a highly ideologically charged era saving a small country 
from domination by communism was a hardy perennial in the ideological 
vocabulary of the West and it had its er equivalent in the East in the years of 
the Cold War which we have all just emerged from or are emerging from 
nm0078: quite clearly i would argue imperialism in the twentieth century has 
not been limited to societies with capitalistic economic systems nor has it 
been limited to relations with countries far away overseas both the United 
States and the Soviet Union spent most of the nineteenth century expanding into 
adjacent land areas on a huge scale in the er er Soviet case it was er a 
Russian expansionism right across to the Pacific at Vladivostok and down to the 
Middle East to the Caucasus in the case of the United States it was right 
across from the Atlantic to the Pacific though one should not antedate the 
period before which the United States emerged as a 
world power this was only in the twentieth century so in other words expanding 
into adjacent areas can be er seen to have been a major feature of the two of 
the great powers of the twentieth century Russian expansion into eastern Europe 
during and after the Second World War took the form of indirect rather than 
direct political rule but it was a system of what i call clientage client 
states as the military interventions in East Germany in Hungary nineteen-fifty-
six in Czechoslovakia in nineteen-sixty-eight and the threat of intervention in 
Poland in nineteen-eighty-one all demonstrate Russian dominance in all these 
areas of er eastern Europe therefore remain imperialistic and as effective in 
many ways for being indirect er probably more effective than for being direct 
and certainly it could and was backed up by military power er when necessary er 
the Brezhnev doctrine as it was called in the years of the Cold War whereby the 
destabilization 
of any part of the Soviet bloc was regarded as a threat to the whole was in 
some ways a corresponding er equivalent to the American Monroe doctrine which 
goes right back to the first third of the nineteenth century but the United 
States also has adopted a system in the twentieth century of what i call client 
states in the Caribbean and Central and South America and the United States on 
occasion has not hesitated to send in the Marines to Caribbean countries within 
the American sphere of interest whenever necessary Santo Domingo in nineteen-
sixty-five and Grenada in the early nineteen-eighties are just two very obvious 
examples in a fairly long series of United States interventions in that area 
usually justified ideologically in terms of preserving law and order or 
democracy or a capitalist free trading system 
nm0078: in other words the fact is that the Cold War era the second half of the 
twentieth century was the heyday of a superpower er forms of 
imperialism in which both of the blocs Soviet and er that under the United 
States the West managed client states and what they called spheres of interest 
what in the nineteenth century have been called spheres of influence in which 
we can only er say that the relationships were imperialistic in this activity 
there were losses as well as gains Iran for instance after nineteen-seventy-
nine was a loss to the United States it became a not only an important oil 
producer but it ceased to be a client state in the way it had been and the last 
years of the shah and one might say that Afghanistan if ever it was a very 
effective client state ceased to be so after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union 
from Afghanistan and the sorry state of civil war and collapse which 
Afghanistan has been in er since certain countries have been remarkably 
effective in the height of the Cold War years the nineteen-fifties at playing 
off one bloc against the other i think particularly of Egypt 
for instance under General Abdul Nasser very effective at in a way seeking to 
get er gain something from relations with both blocs without being totally 
subservient to either one of them 
nm0078: all this leads me on to suggest that modern imperialism tends to 
operate informally through a wide range of economic and political forms of 
influence and pressure rather than as in the old days of imperialism through 
outright territorial annexation military conquest or formal colonial rule 
investment or not investing trade arms sales loans raw materials aid programmes 
the export of modern technology these are the new means by which influence is 
exerted but aircraft carrier diplomacy and outright military invasion can be 
resorted to on occasion and still are the basic accusation against imperialism 
in the modern age is that it is by definition exploitative and what one means 
by exploitation is that the terms of the relationship between the two parties 
or two 
countries are grossly unequal with most of the gains going to the richer or 
stronger partner there is i think no doubt that trade and investment and 
purchase of raw materials and all those other things are important er to 
certain developed industrialized countries and that without these economic 
connections and leverage the profits of some industries would be lower the 
costs higher the goods scarcer and more expensive but we need to look a f-, at 
a few of the basic underlying er truths facts er i think before we easily fall 
back on er the assumption that all imperialistic relations are exploitative 
nm0078: first exports if we take the most powerful country in the world today 
the United States we have to face the fact that the markets of the poorer 
countries of the world are relatively unimportant little more than about one 
per cent of the gross national product as markets for all the richer countries 
the poorer countries of the world have been declining in 
relative importance during the last thirty or forty years poorer countries 
amounted to about thirty per cent of world trade in the nineteen-fifties twenty 
per cent in the nineteen-sixties and the gap in the nineteen-seventies and 
eighties as we all know between the rich and the poor has increased meanwhile 
the markets for manufactured goods and so on of the richer countries have been 
growing much m-, faster than those of the poorer countries because that the 
richer countries is where the purchasing power is as in the nineteenth century 
so in the twentieth century trade follows demand and trade between the richer 
countries that is trade between richer countries within what has come by some 
economists to be called a metropolitan centre of the world trading system is 
increasingly as we all know the real source of growth in the capitalist 
economies it's not the trade between the rich and the poor the rich at the 
centre the poor countries at the periphery 
so in terms of this first category exports the rich countries carry out the 
most important part of their trade with each other overwhelmingly so for the 
economic growth of the centre trade with the periphery it's therefore 
peripheral and much less important than the trade of the richer countries with 
each other that's one hard fact 
nm0078: second investment as sources for investment the poor countries are also 
declining in importance large scale capital investment goes to areas under a 
capitalist international economy with the most profitable and rapidly growing 
markets not the poor countries more than two-thirds of all United States 
foreign investment is with mature developed countries in Europe Canada and 
elsewhere in other words also under the heading investment the rich countries 
therefore need each other much more than they need the poor countries there are 
certain exceptions oil rich Arab countries in the Middle East are one obvious 
one which i shall come to in 
just a minute but this point about the rich economies needing each other more 
far far more than they need the poor countries is the terrible truth we live 
with at the end of the twentieth century it's a very grim conclusion with grim 
implications for the poorer countries in the coming twenty-first century Gunnar 
Myrdal one of the great historians of Asia and of Europe's er interaction with 
Asia put the point quite a long time ago unforgettably in one of his books when 
he said that the entire Indian subcontinent could sink beneath the waves of the 
Indian Ocean without this causing so much as a ripple on the economies of the 
developed countries of the world 
nm0078: after trade and investment thirdly raw materials this clearly is the 
area where poor countries surely possess their chief importance in relation to 
the rich countries most industrialized countries are very dependent on imports 
of minerals fuels raw materials and 
other primary products from less developed countries and some of those 
producers of these crucial er commodities are on occasion able to combine to 
extract a better deal from the rich countries whose trade they are dependent on 
i'm thinking of the temporary cartel of the OPEC producers for instance which 
caused such an oil price rise in the nineteen-seventies but too often the 
question of price and the question of alternatives to these imports are 
forgotten but both of these questions price and are there alternatives are 
crucial so long as a raw material or so long as many raw materials this isn't 
true of all oil is an exception in various ways but so long as a raw material 
can be extracted plentifully and imported relatively cheaply it will be 
imported but if difficulties occur in relation to extraction or the price is 
dramatically increased this stimulates a search for alternatives one only has 
to look at the way in which the development of 
synthetics in the last half-century has replaced what were previously er goods 
manufactured with raw materials like rubber for instance to see the truth of 
what i'm saying in other words where a particular primary product becomes very 
expensive or difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities this stimulates a 
search out for a development er of a synthetic replacement and the huge growth 
of plastics and synthetics of all kinds there's a very interesting case in the 
twentieth century of precisely that the same can be seen in certain regional 
areas i haven't time to go into that in terms of er certain topics like er fuel 
as well er coal for instance the rise and fall and sometimes revival of coal as 
a f-, a fossil fuel resource over and against that of alternatives is again 
crucially affected by price as well as readily and near-, nearby er 
availability i've watched this myself in southern Africa where mineral 
extraction has been absolutely crucial to the relatively 
successful er development of one or two of the other positive cases in the 
African continent Botswana for instance a poor very poor country in terms of 
rainfall and er natural resources apart from its minerals or South Africa 
itself with its astonishing er ly-, rich endowment not just of gold but of 
other minerals the development of gold mining has been absolutely crucial of 
course to the take-off of the southern African economies into industrialized 
developed form but er the actual price of gold er became highly destabilized i 
can just remember in the nineteen early nineteen-eighties er no late seventies 
actually early eighties when the price of gold rocketed up to eight-hundred 
dollars an ounce this led to all sorts of mining tips in southern Africa it 
becoming viable to reprocess them to extract the remaining gold in them because 
the price of gold made this viable whereas in a earlier period where the price 
of gold had been lower it simply wasn't 
economically viable to do it so these things can change and er many other er 
subjects i could show about how things can change if the actual er price 
changes the extractability changes the demand for it changes so the actual er 
situation vis-à-vis these er questions er changes 
nm0078: i also er think we should take in one other aspect of imperialism 
having spent some time on the economic side of it and that is cultural 
imperialism because we are far more sensitive at the end of the twentieth 
century than many people in many parts of the world were at the beginning of 
this century about the whole cultural a-, dimension to imperialism in the way 
that rich countries export their tastes their preferences their salary 
structures and their values to poorer countries through a process that the 
economists often like to call trickle-down marketing poor countries of the 
peripheral parts of the world are thereby robbed of their chance to develop 
tastes and lifestyles 
autonomously instead they become imitative artificially stimulated in their 
tastes values aspirations by outside models and processes this is a process 
nicely known as Coca-cola imperialism [laughter] but it could easily be taken 
to er imply that from MacDonalds or any of the other er huge and very er 
pervasive er forms of if you like in this case western or American er culture 
now it's quite true that in many parts of Africa Asia Latin America the new 
elites do tend to imitate the tastes and lifestyles of those in foreign rich 
countries the need of what is often a poor developing country to save and live 
modestly to er aid its national 
progress and development instead gets diverted into conspicuous consumption by 
the elite often with the accompaniment of what's now called in the light of the 
Russian case crony capitalism and elsewhere is rife with corruption of various 
kinds i remember when i was about your age spending some time in Tanzania where 
Julius Nyerere the leader of independent Tanzania gave a notable lead against 
this trend in a series of speeches in his doctrine of Ujamaa er the poorer 
people he er well knew in Tanzania had a word to describe any of the elite in 
their country who started driving around in large cars