Abstract
Ray Kiely’s Rethinking Imperialism is one of the latest contributions to Palgrave’s ‘Rethinking World Politics’ series, edited by Michael Cox of the London School of Economics. The rationale behind this series is to allow scholars to survey ‘big themes’ in the study of politics and escape the limitations of excessive specialisation and disciplinary rigidity. Kiely’s work achieves this laudable aim. Rethinking Imperialism surveys the development of imperialism as a historical phenomenon, as a conceptual framework, and as a feature of contemporary political economy. It marries together historical and social science perspectives to shed new light on an old topic, and to revive, adapt, and develop the way in which scholars approach the issue of empire.
Kiely’s analysis deploys a historical comparison between the mid-19th-century British Empire and the global economic policies of the USA since 1945. Throughout the volume, Kiely sustains the convincing argument that since the Second World War, the USA’s economy has a constituted a form of liberal free trade imperialism. Thus, for Kiely, in the last sixty-odd years, and particularly since the 1970s, the dominance of neoliberal ideology in the USA reflects and necessitates overseas economic policies similar to that of Britain in the mid-19th century.
In order to revive the notion of free-trade imperialism as a tool of critique, Kiely revisits the work of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in their 1953 essay ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ (Robinson and Gallagher, 1953). Kiely accepts the line of argument that posits the turn of the 20th century Scramble for Africa as representative of a change of tactics on the part of British imperialists, not a revival of interest in imperialism itself after a mid-century hiatus. Indeed, the period of so-called indifference towards empire experienced in the mid-19th century was not, as Kiely correctly identifies, indifference at all, but rather a sign of Britain’s ability to sustain a liberal empire as a result of its relative economic advantage over other capitalist economies. Only when this advantage was challenged was Britain forced to move away from a free-trade empire and acquire sovereignty over other territories. Thus by seeing Britain’s 19th century in terms of changing imperial tactics (from informal influence to formal annexation), it can be seen more clearly that imperialism dominated British political economy throughout the 1800s, even if its imperial goals were achieved through different methods as the century unfolded. The century was not partitioned, therefore, into periods of imperial enthusiasm or indifference, as scholars of various political persuasions have contended. This, of course, is nothing new. But Kiely extends this analysis into the 20th and 21st centuries and argues that the advanced capitalism of the USA should be understood as a free-trade empire regardless of whether or not political and/or economic elites profess pro-, or anti-, imperialist sentiments.
Building on this, Kiely takes seriously claims made by US neoconservatives and neoliberals that the USA should spread liberal-democratic models of government globally. In particular, he sees the focus of these groups being states that do not fit the model of a western liberal capitalist democracy. At best, he sees the motivations of these groups as being to end the tyranny of regimes that they characterise, simplistically, as ‘evil’. Kiely argues, however, that no matter how ‘good’ the intentions of western liberal democracies when intervening in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they nevertheless manage to commit evils through the very military campaigns they employ. For Kiely, the problem with liberal imperialism is that its humanitarian ambitions are undermined by three innate problems. The first is that capitalism does not create, as the advocates of liberal imperialism contend, even economic development but rather ‘undermines capitalist development for later developers by kicking away the ladder’ (p. 254). Second, imperial intervention designed to produce ‘liberal-democratic societies’ assumes that such societies ‘are the norm’ (p. 256). Using his historical analysis to examine western democracies in a broader chronological perspective, Kiely argues that democracy has had to be fought for, and that democratic states have developed over decades if not centuries: to assume that it is possible to establish liberal democracy swiftly and through military intervention is a chimera. Third, Kiely argues that the tool of military intervention is problematic. It uses force to impose its values and, through violence, crucially undermines its principles in a self-reflexive act of hypocrisy.
Kiely’s work is invaluable to the scholar of empire not only because it has a clear argument (as outlined above), backed up by detailed evidence and enhanced by the use of various analytical frameworks, but also because he examines the positions of his opponents. Given this, it was almost inevitable that Kiely’s critique of the