The best recent reader-friendly books on imperialism and colonialism

In the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a flurry of books were produced on the ‘new imperialism.’ One of the best was by the Canadian Marxist scholar, the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. What distinguishes capitalist imperialism from its predecessors, Wood argues, “is the predominance of the economic, as distinct from direct ‘extra-economic’—political, military, judicial— coercion.”

By relying on the imperatives of the market, capitalist imperialism has been able to shed most of the visible trappings of older forms of empire, including its network of territorially based colonies overseen by regionally based armies and administrators: “Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of the capitalist market.”

Even though capitalist imperialism relies primarily on market-based coercion rather than the direct use of force to police its interests, Wood is quick to point out that the extra-economic powers of the state remain vital to the maintenance of present-day imperialism: “It would not be too much to say that the state is the only non-economic institution truly indispensable to capital.”

This updated edition of Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book charts the long history of the United States’ imperial domination of Latin America through gunboat diplomacy, invasion, hard and soft coups, mercenary wars, and covert actions.

Often considered its ‘backyard,’ Latin America is where the United States “learned how to project its power, worked out effective and flexible tactics of extraterritorial administration, established legal precedents, and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it.” Grandin illustrates this history with numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the 1973 US-supported coup in Chile, which brought to power Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship.

With the help of University of Chicago economists Frederic Von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the dictatorship pioneered the first neoliberal imperial “workshop.” Chile would become the template for other attempts at regime change in the region, from the 1980s wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Plan Colombia, which envisioned “endless war as a permanent element of diplomacy, and volatile neoliberal economics as the best poor countries could expect from Washington.”

Grandin concludes his study by reprising the Vietnam-era phrase “the war comes home” to describe how the export of violence and destabilization via US foreign policy rebounds on US society itself in the form of extremist violence and mass shootings, the militarization of domestic policing, the radicalization and polarization of politics and the collapse of legitimacy of the ruling class. Latin America, on the other hand, “has turned into something other than a workshop: empire’s junkyard.”

In this tour de force history of Great Britain’s 19th century ‘liberal empire,’ Elkins demonstrates the glaring contradiction between the official claim that British society and its colonies were governed by liberal principles of ‘the rule of law’ and the systematic violence that lay at its core. “Violence,” Elkins argues, “was not just the British Empire’s midwife; it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.”

In an age when liberal rights were ostensibly universal, race became how the empire was able to exclude black and brown people (which included ‘racialized’ groups such as the Irish and Afrikaners) from the ranks of ‘civilized’ peoples. The so-called ‘civilizing mission,’ in which ‘uncivilized’ peoples would be welcomed into the ranks of the ‘civilized’ at some unspecified point, was draped in the trappings of noble enterprise and moral duty. However, while this thinly veiled ideology may have served the interests of white rulers, things looked very different for those on the receiving end. As Elkins observes, good government “was empire’s fever dream. Its rule of law codified difference, curtailed freedoms, expropriated land, and property, and ensured a steady stream of labor for the mines and plantations of Britain’s domestic economy.” And, when such means proved insufficient, the empire was quite willing to resort to “legalized lawlessness” in which state violence was granted the sanctity of law. “Violence enacted on bodies, minds, souls, landscapes, communities, and histories was intimately connected to the civilizing mission’s developmentist dogma.”

As the history of twentieth-century anti-colonial movements was to demonstrate, the British Empire was not prepared to go gently into its good night. Demands for the same liberal rights and freedoms as those enjoyed by British citizens had to be taken through the same means as they were repressed: force and violence. As Elkins concludes, liberalism has continued to find new and inventive ways to maintain exclusive powers for the few while denying the many “democracy’s ever-elusive promise of universal dignity and equality.”

Up until the 1960s, Buckingham Palace barred “colored immigrants” from working in clerical roles in the royal household. A recent official report demonstrated that both the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office are “institutionally racist.”

Meanwhile, recent estimates put the amount of wealth extracted by the British from India between 1765 and 1938 at $45 trillion and from Africa at $777 trillion. Despite these findings, nearly thirty percent of Britons believe the former colonies were better off under the empire. The reason that these forms of casual racism persist, Sanghera argues in this highly readable book, is a function of a simple fact: “that our society grew out of the racist institutions of the British Empire.” A highly racialized form of imperial nostalgia still permeates modern British society and contributes to a form of collective amnesia about the real history of the empire: “The British profited from slavery for many decades, brutalized and exploited millions, paid compensation of £20 million to former slave owners while offering the slaves nothing—but the moment Britain abolished it, abolition became the main narrative.”

By willfully forgetting the tawdriness of its imperial past, British society continues to delude itself. However much current governments try to deny this past and denigrate those who insist on the truth as ‘woke’ cultural warriors, they are actually losing the battle. Young people, Sanghera optimistically concludes, will have none of it: “They really care about these issues, and no government can stop this change.”

In an age when statues commemorating former colonialists and slave owners have been toppled worldwide, the figure of Winston Churchill has been left largely untouched. Myth-making around Churchill’s role in defeating Hitler is surely part of the explanation: no less than sixteen feature films have been made about his supposed historical achievements, three of them in the past decade.

As Tariq Ali points out in this informative book, “Churchill has become a highly burnished icon whose cult has long been out of control.” Yet, during the 1930s, as fascism ascended throughout continental Europe, Churchill was a fanboy of the far-right. Like many of his social class, Churchill admired fascism for its capacity to keep communism in check. Until 1937, his “support for Mussolini was effusive, his hopes for Franco outlasted the war, and, for some years, he was impressed by Hitler and the sturdy, patriotic Hitler youth.” “Imperialism,” Ali argues, “was Churchill’s true religion… With this view came a belief in and promotion of racial and civilizational superiority … He was, above all, an imperial activist.”

Churchill’s great deficit, however, was that he was not the most competent custodian of Britain’s declining empire: from his disastrous humiliation at Gallipoli during WWI, his backing and subsequent defeat of the counter-revolutionary White Armies during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921); to his cruel decision to refuse food aid as famine swept across the Bengal region of India in 1944—which saw five million people perish. As his secretary of state for India, Leo Amery wrote in his diaries: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

By the end of WWII, the British Empire was bankrupt, but Churchill still clung to the illusion of its greatness. At the Yalta conference, the groundwork was laid for the Cold War division of the world between Stalin’s Soviet Union and ‘The West,’ now dominated by the United States. Churchill’s task was to crush the Greek resistance movement, Europe's most successful anti-Nazi resistance. At least six hundred thousand Greeks paid with their lives. The bloodbath in Greece, carried out by fascists and the army with British backing, was repeated in other post-war imperial adventures overseen by Churchill: the ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the foundation of Israel in 1948, which saw the dispossession of seven-hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, and the massacre or incarceration of the Kikuyu people of Kenya during the so-called ‘Mau-Mau uprising’ in the early 1950s.

Despite Churchill’s efforts, the ‘glory days’ of the British Empire were finished. Henceforth, Ali concludes, Britain would become the loyal servant of American imperialism “to live in the capacious posterior of the White House together with the Saudis and Israel, both creations of Churchill’s empire.”