Pre-Capitalist Imperialism

• European imperialism was decisive in the process of primitive accumulation of wealth leading to capitalism

  • It drained the resources and halted the development of non-European economies

• Only in Britain was the wealth accumulated converted into industrial capital

• Everything depended on the social property relations at home in the imperial power, the conditions of systemic reproduction associated with those property relations, and the economic processes set in motion by them

• No amount of colonial wealth would have had these effects without the imperatives generated by England’s domestic property relations

• Appropriation was linked with squeezing more out of direct producers rather than enhancing the productivity of labour

• Settlements were used to enhance trade

Ireland: A New Capitalist Imperialism?

• Outward expansion of the same capitalist imperatives that were driving the domestic market

• New motives and justification for coercive dispossession

• England’s Irish strategy: instant transition from feudalism to capitalism

• New economy based on new social relations on the land

• Agrarian capitalism

• To make Ireland an economic dependency of England

Empire and the Ideology of Improvement

• Increasing labour productivity

• New conceptions of property rights

• Making land productive → improving it

• Failure to improve = forfeiting the right of property

• Justification for the colonial appropriation of unused land

• Property derives from the creation of value

From Enclosure to Empire?

• Agrarian capitalism: instrument of imperial domination beyond the boundaries of England

• Relative value of the land + redefining the concept of waste

• The imperial legitimacy of the colonial power was rooted in the productive activities of its subjects, its “improving” settlers

• The colonizer was not robbing subject peoples but adding to the common good

• Economic principles took on a moral and religious meaning