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Postcolonial Political and Legal Thought

Lecture One January 8 2008

James Tully

Lecture 1 January 8 pp. 1-6

Lecture 2 January 15 pp. 7-13
Lecture 3 January 22 pp. 14-25

INTRODUCTION

In my opinion, postcolonial political thought is the most important and innovative school
/field (or field of schools) of political thought today. Robert Young and Vijay Prashad are
among the best introductions to this broad field.

First and foremost, it is a contested field of thought. It includes (1) a number of different
and often differing schools of political thought, with complex relations to each other and to
Western schools of political thought, (2) different periods/generations of political thought
over the last 100 years, if not 500 years, and (3) the writers and actors are differently situated
in the field of political power (some are revolutionary leaders, others heads of independent
states, others actors at the UN, others oppressed minorities or majorities within 3rd world
societies organizing at the grass roots, others NGOS at the World Social Forum, others
indigenous peoples of the fourth world, others academics in the global south or in the ivy
league universities in the North, public intellectuals, expatriates and refugees living in
between or in exile, and so on).

What I hope to do is to present a critical survey of some of the major features of this field of
thought and action in my introductory lectures. Then we will take it up in more detail in the
presentations (for this approach, see my Political Philosophy as a Critical Activity, in White
and Moon, eds., What is Political Theory? 2004).

What I mean by a survey is a survey of the mode of problematization of the present under
the head of postcoloniality or modernity/coloniality. Here we try to examine the way in
which humans turn features of the present into a set of problems in practice, critically reflect
on them in theory, and present rival solutions to them, and the practices on which the form
of problematization is based. I call the whole the problematization and the practices
postcoloniality. The aim of a critical survey is not only to understand but to effect a
transformation in the way we think and act in/against this body of thought and practices
globally and locally.
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See Walter Mingolo, Local Histories/Global Designs and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe.

This is what Young is trying to do in his own way. He starts with the politics of the
language of description of postcoloniality pp. 1-70 and this section is our first reading.

The first thing to note about the terms postcolonial and their cognates colonial,
decolonization, imperial, empire, neo-colonial is that they are polysemic and contested. They
are family resemblance concepts that authors use in different ways the criteria for their
application are not everywhere fixed by a frontier. Part of what postcolonial writing is doing
as a political activity is engaging in using the inherited vocabulary in new and untoward
ways in order to change the way we think about the present.

Let me illustrate this polysemy, bearing in mind that all concepts that have a history are
polysemic in this sense their uses are the bearers of our histories of struggles (Nietzsche).
Here are four aspects of postcoloniality:

1. A period after colonial imperialism

2. Projected back to 1492 or the Portuguese capture of the Muslim citadel of Cueta in North
Africa (Young)
3. A new (?) form of non-colonial imperialism (Nkrumah).
4. A relationship to modern/western political thought (Man): modernity/coloniality (Cesaire,
Dussel, Fanon)

1. Postcolonial political thought came into language under this name just after the official
period of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century. The first generation called it neo-
colonialism. This was the term used by Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-colonial leader of
Ghana, in his book, Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism (1949, 1965) [below]. It was
also the term widely used at the Bandung Conference of 29 Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, along
with neo-imperialism.

Postcolonial and postcoloniality emerged at the same time but did not elbow aside neo-colonial
until the 1980s when postcolonial studies became an academic discipline. In fact, in literary
studies it is quite common to date postcolonialism with the emergence of postcolonial
literary studies in Western universities in the 1980s. I think one of Youngs aims in his books
is to broaden postcolonialism into its political and historical context associated with political
decolonization.

The first and most obvious sense of postcolonial is the temporal sense that it marks the
period after the long period of colonial imperialism from 1492 to the 1970s that is, after
official decolonization.

In this sense it refers to the formal decolonization of the 120 former colonies, which, in the
early 20thc, made up 85% of the worlds population (Michael Doyle, Empires, Said, Culture
and Imperialism, Abernathy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance)

At the time this referred to the third world in contrast to the first, second and fourth. This
is thus a term of the Cold War: the capitalist countries in the North, the socialist countries of
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the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe, and former colonies. The former colonies are
either under the sway of the first or second world or they are non-aligned if this is possible.
For the USA and UK there was not such thing as non-alignment a country was either
under the influence of the West or part of the Soviet Bloc. The USSR took this view as well
until the Belgrade Conference, under Titos influence; they supported the idea of peaceful
co-existence of the three worlds.

But, as we can see this temporal criterion is difficult to pin down. For example, Young uses
the Havana Conference in 1966 to define postcoloniality in terms of trilateralism: Latin
America, Africa and Asia. But, Latin America decolonized from its European empires in
the 1820s and thus is 130 years ahead of the others, and Haiti is even earlier in one sense.
(For example, Enrique Dusell at Chicago in 2004).

And where does this trilateralism leave the Middle East decolonization, at roughly the same
time, and the Fourth World, which is still colonized, often now by the former colonies
(George Manuel at Bandung, Gandhi and the Untouchables, Taiaiake at Chicago)?

Moreover, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Tibet and other quasi-colonies create problems for this
demarcation as will (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present, 2005) (See below).

Look at the temporal handout of colonisation and decolonization from Abernathy, Dynamics
of Global Dominance. So, any way you look at it, the temporal criterion of postcolonialism is
going to be open to contestation.

2. One interesting thing Young is doing in writing Postcolonialism HI is to argue that we

should call the whole period of writing from 1492 to the present, and in the Imperial
countries as well as in the imperialised countries post-colonial. He begins with Las Casas
and ends with Foucault and Derrida as postcolonial writers.

This has the disadvantage of stretching the term too broadly, but it has the advantage of
showing that there have been successive forms of problematization of western imperialism (in the
West and non-West) since its inception: that is, people have been for and against
imperialism, in various ways, throughout its history, and there is a straightforward sense in
which those who have been opposed to colonial imperialism have been post-colonial that
is, arguing that colonialism is an unacceptable form of rule and that it should be transformed
into a non or post colonial form of rule. This is probably the single most important
rhetorical feature of Youngs text challenging the narrow, disciplinary focus of postcolonial
studies in the northern universities in the 1980s. But, as we will see, it creates problems when
we try to define writers like, say, Bentham, as post-colonial.

3. The third sense of postcolonial, and perhaps the most central in defining the whole body
of writing and acting from decolonization to 2008, is the insight that decolonization did not
lead to deimperialization. Decolonization dismantled formal colonial rule by the great powers,
lead to the building of nation states and a seat in the United Nations for the 120 former
colonies, but these new states / former colonies / found themselves still in imperial relations
of dependency, exploitation, inequality and subordination with the former great powers (the
G8). That is, decolonization got rid of colonial imperialism but not non-colonial or informal
imperialism.
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I will take this up in detail below.

Virtually every postcolonial writer and leader of the third world countries realized this
immediately, from Gandhi through Nkrumah, Fanon, Castro, Guevara down to Morales,
Chavez and de Sousa Santos today. The Bandung Conference is basically a discussion of
how to describe and analyze and abolish postcolonial imperialism or informal imperialism,
as it is now called. At the same time, western theorists of imperialism made the same
discovery, writing articles and books on the end of empire and the continuity of
imperialism, the imperialism of self-determination, imperialism without colonies,
informal imperialism, World Bank imperialism and so on.

At the heart of postcolonial thought, and constantly animating each generation, is this
question:

What mode of imperialism characterises our dependent and unequal present, how does it
work, and how can we transform it, given the failure of the first generation decolonizers and
state-builders? In many ways, this is the question of the seminar.

In my lectures, I want to survey 4 generations of answers to this problem, each generation

reflecting back on the failures of the previous one and changing the way they analyze and
respond to postcolonial imperialism (which also changes).

Lets look at Gandhi and Nkrumah and Guevara and Canada on this key point. One of the
most famous statements of postcolonial or neo-colonial imperialism is by Kwame Nkrumah
in Neo-colonialism. He said that this informal form of imperialism was the worst form of
imperialism because:

For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer it, it means
exploitation without redress. In the days of old fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least
to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the
ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent means by their opponents.
With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

For this and similar theories, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, pp.126-27.

Nkrumahs point was that the former imperial powers of the colonial era, now renamed the
G8, could exploit the resources, labour and markets of the former colonies, adjust their laws
and economies accordingly, prop up an elite dependent on the West, and intervene militarily
when necessary against any attempt to change the relationships of dependency, all in the
name free trade and democratization. Moreover, the great powers set up a set of
international institutions after 1945 to govern this unequal system: the IMF, WB, GATT,
GATS, TRIPS, WTO after 1995, NATO, the US global military system, and the
concentration of power in the UN, especially in the Security Council. Precisely because it is a
form of imperialism that goes unsaid, it is irresponsible and beyond redress.

Nkrumah called it neo-colonial because the new states were forced into a western mould
based in turn on the institutional basis laid down during the colonial period. Even the new
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constitutions, economies and political institutions were designed by experts from the
imperial countries, and re-adjusted if they strayed from openness to free trade dominated
by the western powers and their multinationals. Along with their dependent elite, they
looked like new colonies and functioned this way relative to the hegemony of the western
states that were former empires.

This was called replication imperialism because the post-decolonization polity was forced to
conform to the western model of a nation state with an economy open and subordination to
the global economy and global military dependency. It was already criticised by Gandhi in
Hind Swaraj 1909, Aim Csaire in 1950, in the Discourse on Colonialism, a remarkable book,
and by Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth. Here is how Partha Chatterjee famously put it in
the 1990s:

I have one central objection to Andersons argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to
choose their imagined community from certain modular forms already made available to them by
Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that
we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas,
the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial
enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery.
Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.

I object to this argument not for any sentimental reason. I object because I cannot reconcile it with the
evidence of anti-colonial nationalism. The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the
nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference
with the modular forms of the national society propagated by the modern West. How can we ignore this
without reducing the experience of anti-colonial nationalism to a caricature of itself?

From Partha Chatterjee, Whose Imagined Community?, in Gopal Balakrishanan, ed.

Mapping the Nation, p.216.
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Postcolonial Political and Legal Thought

Lecture Two
1. Summary of Lecture One

In the first lecture, I introduced the field of postcolonial thought as a complex and contested
field. It contains (1) a number of different schools of thought from different continents, (2)
it spans a number of distinct periods and generations since 1945 or 1492, and (3) its main
writers and actors are differently situated: revolutionaries, heads of state, doctors, actors at
the UN, members of oppressed minorities or majorities, grass roots organizers, independent
intellectuals, NGOs, 4th world activists, academics in the global south and north, Diaspora,
migrant workers, expatriates, prisoners, and so on.

The language or vocabulary of postcoloniality and its cognates are polysemic and contested
(Nietzsche). I mentioned 4 initial uses of postcolonialism:
1. the period after colonial imperialism
2. the period since 1492: that is, including all anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought,
as in Young.
3. a new form of non-colonial imperialism.
4. a complex relationship to modern and post-modern western thought (Man):
modernity/coloniality and postmodernity/postcoloniality (Sartre, Barthes, Fanon,
and Cesaire).

1. Postcoloniality emerged after decolonization under the name of neo-colonialism (Kwame

Nkrumah and 1955) and only later postcolonial and only after 1980s that it came to be
associated with literary studies in Northern universities.

Here it refers to the third world and 120 former colonies now formally independent but
substantively dependent on the former great powers. The NAM and Cold War. See the
Abernethy handout.

2. Young accentuates this but also goes back to 1492, for anti-colonial and anti-imperial
writing, and especially the 19thc.

3. I just got to the third use of postcolonial: namely, the period/experience/situation in

which the former colonies have de-colonized, are recognised as independent, self-
determining, sovereign nation states under international law and at the UN but remain
substantively dependent, support, unequal, exploited relative to the former great power
countries. That is, imperialism in a new form survived decolonization and the CW.

We looked at two quotes on this situation: irresponsible imperialism and the postcolonial
world in the situation of being conscripts: that is, of having to order their polities,
economies, and imaginaries in accord with the western modular form of nation states with
economies open to global market and subordinate to the more advanced states. Nkrumah
and Chatterjee. And compare this with Fanon, pp.312. 313. 315. 316.
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Here is the central idea that under postcolonialism 80% of the worlds population
imagined new forms of human communities when they wrested the right of self-
determination from the colonial powers and began to exercise it, yet, somehow, they
were/are constrained to exercise their nominal right of self-determination in the ordering
given to them by Europe: replication and subordination imperialism. Hence the use of the
term conscript. How is this new form of power, postcolonial rule, able to impose an order
on the Third World without colonies and despite formal equality and self-determination?

I said that at the heart of postcolonial thought, and constantly animating each generation, is
this question:

What mode of imperialism characterises our dependent and unequal present, how does it work, and how can
we transform it, given the failure of the first generation decolonizers and state-builders? In many ways, this is
the question of the seminar.

2. The Tasks of Postcolonial Thought

L2 Understanding the imperial situation with an aim to transformation

L3 Decolonization, state-building and hybridity theories and experience
L4 Gandhis alternative imaginary and practice

The first task of postcolonial writers is thus to understand the situation of conscription in which
they find themselves after decolonization. I have characterised it as some form of
imperialism that is able to structure/order their political, legal, economic and cultural powers
of self-determination despite their nominal independence and equality. How is it that their
imagined communities are not realized but rather western models are replicated and
subordinated?

But, this is only half the question, for they do not hold the West totally responsible for this
situation. They also argue that they and their post-colonials leaders are also responsible for
this situation to some extent. So, it is a twofold enquiry into neo-imperialism on the one
hand and postcolonial pitfalls or failures or collaboration or corruption on the other.

This question of self-responsibility is already raised by Fanon in WE in the unread third

chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness and repeated heroically by Aim Cesaire at
the Trilateral NAM Meeting at Havana in 1966.

It is not a question only for the first generation but for each generation in different ways.
For each generation has to ask what went wrong with decolonization, the rise of military
rule, of structural adjustment, and so on.

It is not a question only for those on the left. It is also a question for those who, contra to
Fanon, wish to follow in the footsteps of the West, of the USA, of the WB and IMF and
Keynesianism until 1980 and neo-liberalism after 1983 (like Singapore, Brazil, India and
China today).

The basic inequality of the postcolonial world

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840 million people are malnourished. 6,000,000 children under the age of 5 die each
year as a consequence of malnutrition. 1.2 billion People live on less than $1 a day and half
the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. 91 out of every 1,000 children in the
developing world die before 5 years old. 12 million die annually from lack of water. 1.1
billion people have no access to clean water. 2.4 billion people live without proper sanitation.
40 million live with AIDS. 113 million children have no basic education. 1 in 5 does not
survive past 40 years of age. There are one billion non-literate adults, two-thirds are women
and 98% live in the developing world. In the least developed countries, 45% of the children
do not attend school. In countries with literacy rate of less than 55% the per capita income is
about $600.
In contrast, the wealth of the richest 1% of the world is equal to that of the poorest
57%. The assets of the 200 richest people are worth more than the total income of 41% of
the world's people. Three families alone have a combined wealth of $135 billion. This equals
the annual income of 600 million people living in the world's poorest countries. The richest
20% of the world's population receive 150 times the wealth of the poorest 20%. In 1960, the
share of the global income of the bottom 20% was 2.3%. By 1991, this had fallen to 1.4%.
The richest fifth of the world's people consume 45% of the world's meat and fish; the
poorest fifth consume 5%. The richest fifth consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth
less than 4%. The richest fifth have 75% of all telephones, the poorest fifth 1.5%. The
richest fifth own 87% of the world's vehicles, the poorest fifth less than 1%.

We can see that postcolonial writers are in a different world than from the political writers in
the global north. In the global north the category imperialism disappeared with
decolonization, the establishment of the UN and world of independent and sovereign
nation states bound together by global markets (free trade) and international law.

Western political thought became focused almost exclusively on state-centred or

international-centred theories of justice, equality, democracy, rights, and so on.

This schema was projected back to 1648 by being called the Westphalian System, thereby
erasing the whole history of imperialism. Every so-called state was also a state empire
from 1648 to 1948, but this fact of history dropped out. All the canonical theories from
Hobbes to Schmitt were about these imperial states and their colonies and their competition
with other imperial states, but those chapters were more or less removed from the
curriculum.

One can understand why the generation of the 1940s wanted to forget their colonial past.

But, for 4/5 of the world who had lived through centuries of colonial exploitation, slavery,
genocide, racism, and theft of their resources, this representation of the state of affairs was
out of the question. Their world was the world created by colonialism (colonial foundations
of their states, economies, laws, demographics, diseases, subordination to the global
economy dominated by the west). They now had formal powers of self-government in this
historical field of power and constrained or conscripted to build western style states or face
forms of influence or coercion or intervention.
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So, they had to understand this new form of imperial rule that the former imperial powers
now denied its existence it was a form of imperialism not only without colonies but which
went without saying. The language of imperialism and civilization were removed from the
UN documents and from the great theories to come out of the West and the great rewriting
of classic texts, such as the reconstruction of Kant, Mill and Marx as anti-imperial when they
were the leading proponents of the reconstruction of the non-west in the image of the west
by means of imperial expansion, colonisation, the spread of western laws and markets, and
the establishment of global federations of western-style states to keep others in line.

But, they were not completely alone. The study of western imperialism without colonies
and its continuity with earlier forms of imperialism continued in the margins of western
universities: Harry Magdoff, Marxism Today, The World Systems Project with Emmanuel
Wallerstein, William Appleman Williams, Noam Chomsky, and others continued to study
imperialism in this dual sense.

Then came the new imperialism of the 1990s and imperialism came to be an acceptable
topic once again in the West, on both the right, who promote it, and on the left, who
criticise it. While the major schools of legal and political theory continue to write as if we live
in a post-imperial age, and have since 1648, even here some theorists began to suggest that
the fundamental feature of the global order today is imperial in some sense or another (for
example, Hardt and Negri). And historians began to write about contemporary imperialism:
Ferguson, Max Boot, Thomas Freidman, Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, Anghie,
Grandin, Prashad, Falk, and Koskenniemi, joined with Samir Amin, Gundar Frank, Gandhi
and Eduardo Galeano, who had never stopped writing about the imperial present.

So, I dont think we can understand postcolonial thought unless we understand the theories
of contemporary imperialism, and its relation to earlier forms of imperialism, which any one
in the Third World grows up with as their given form of representation of the present.

As Andrew Bacevich puts in American Empire 86: US informal imperialism is a form of global
hegemony to which most Americans purport to be oblivious, but which others recognize as the dominant
reality of contemporary international politics.

John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, The Imperialism of Free Trade, EHR, 1953
Wolfgang Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, 1976.
Michael Doyle, Empires, 1986.
Stephen Howe, Empire, 2002.

3. Imperialism

Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective
political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political
collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the
process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.
M. Doyle, Empires.
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Informal Imperialism

The classic textbook example of informal imperialism is the British free trade
imperialism of the late nineteenth century, especially its economic dominance of a
number of formally free, post-colonial states of Latin America, the Middle East and East
Asia. The concept was first introduced by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, two
British economic historians, in 1953.i In this type of imperialism, the economic and
political development of a weak and nominally independent state, usually a former
colony, is opened to an international economic, legal and military order constructed
and dominated by the imperial powers, so that the state and its political institutions are
placed under the sway of this imposed order rather than the democratic control of the
people. This informal mode of governance is rendered legitimate in the eyes of the
dominant powers and local elites by the language of non-colonial self-determination,
independence, democratization and free trade. After a long debate, Robinson
restated his view in 1984. He turned his attention from the late nineteenth century to the
emerging decolonized world of the late-twentieth century and argued that the model of
informal empire may well be even more relevant as a measure of post-colonial
imperialism that it is to the nineteenth century.ii

First, Robinson argued that the kind of informal imperialism that came into being
during Decolonization and the Cold War is different in two major respects from
nineteenth century informal and colonial imperialism. No single imperial power can
enforce a monopoly sphere of influence over a weaker state and thus has to compete with
the other imperial powers (the United States, Soviet Union, European states, and China);
and, second, the subaltern states, while subordinate and dependent, are nevertheless not
dominated by the imperial power in the way a colony is ruled. They are active,
decolonized, formally independent states of varying sizes, and thus capable of
collaborating with the imperial hegemon as well as resisting and shaping the vastly
unequal imperial relationships of subordination and dependency to some limited extent.
Drawing on other contemporary works on imperialism that had come to the same
conclusions, he called this interactive and excentric imperialism: that is, a game of
rule that has to anticipate and respond to the actions of the competing imperial powers on
one hand and to the subaltern actors on the other.iii

Second, he concluded that the traditional means of informal imperialism survived

decolonization:iv

Coercion or diplomacy exerted for purposes of imposing free trading conditions

on a weaker society against its will; foreign loans, diplomatic and military support
to weak states in return for economic concessions or political alliance; direct
intervention or influence from the export-import sector in the domestic politics of
weak states on behalf of foreign trading and strategic interests; and lastly, the case
of foreign bankers and merchants annexing sectors of the domestic economy of a
weak state.

In addition, new means of informal control came on stream. For example:v

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In spite of the competition, the United States is by far the largest capitalist exporter.
Without its contributions, the international aid agencies would be much the poorer;
in the case of large development loans, the Western alliance negotiates with weak
states in consortia; almost all loans have explicit economic and implicit political
conditions attached; and they are normally intended to create collaboration in the
domestic politics, foreign and economic policy of the recipients.

Moreover, nation-building aid is accompanied by financial, technical and military

advisors, and since its scale dwarfs that of the nineteenth century, it tends to influence
and corrupt administration and politics in weak states to a correspondingly greater
extent. Furthermore, the opportunities for states and multinational companies to use
foreign investment for purposes of informal imperialism have increased enormously
since decolonization.vi By these means, the so-called new independent states of the
Westphalian non-imperial system of global governance are shaped and controlled by the
imperial powers to continue their rule. They are informally imperialized rather than
formally colonized.

Third, Robinson suggested that the international capitalist system of the Western
alliance during the Cold War shows manifest imperialistic tendencies of an informal
type. It has developed an imperialism of its own that works through the global
regulatory agencies established at the end of the World War II:vii

Both in the use of the transfer of resources for purposes of informal imperialism,
and in the sense of World Bank imperialism, of proliferating the principles and
institutions of good capitalist management into little brothers organization [the
weak states].

The Bretton Woods institutions, which are presented as the modifiable foundations of a
non-imperial post-Westphalian global order by the global governance school, are thus
seen by Robinson as new instruments of informal imperialism.viii

In 1976, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, the leading German historian of Western

theories of imperialism, claimed that the work of Robinson and Gallagher was the most
important and widely endorsed advance in theories of imperialism in the twentieth
century:ix

The most significant innovation in the development of Western theories of

imperialism is no doubt the concept of informal imperialism. By recognizing that
there are numerous informal types of imperialist domination which precede or
accompany the establishment of formal rule, or even make it unnecessary, Western
thinking of the subject of imperialism has drawn closer to Marxist
theory.Generally speaking, most non-Marxist theoreticians admit nowadays that
dependency of an imperialist sort may well result from the most varied kinds of
informal influence, especially of an economic natureFormal political rule
[colonial rule] thus appears only as the most specific, but not the normal type of
imperialist dependence.
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Mommsen applied the model to the period of Decolonization in The End of Empire
and the Continuity of Imperialism in 1986. Like Robinson, he argued that the
decolonized state and its nation-building elite, especially in Asia and Africa, should be
seen as a construct of the imperial powers; a new bargain with the indigenous elites,
who had been acculturated to Western values and Western political traditions [,] rather
than with the people as a whole. This new sort of collaboration is designed to
maintain traditional cultural, economic and political ties with the former mother country.
Although the new relationship is not straight-forwardly imperialist, it did not represent
a clear cut break with the past, particularly if continuing informal links, that is, of an
economic nature, are taken into consideration.x
In addition, Mommsen stressed more than Robinson that the imperial relations of
dependency and institutional structures imposed during the classical imperial period
provide the continuing foundations of informal imperialism today. Moreover, once the
plenitude of informal and indirect types of imperial rule in the classical period are
brought to light, rather than focusing exclusively on the superficial forms of colonial rule,
the continuity is even more apparent and self-explanatory:xi

Social and economic structures, and the educational systems in Third World
countries are it is claimed so firmly linked to the West that they have to conduct
their affairs as if they were still subjected to formal colonial rule. This argument
must be taken seriously, all the more so if we take into account the very important
role which informal and indirect rule played during the age of classical imperialism,
when formal imperialist rule could well be considered to be only the tip of iceberg.

This whole complex historical legacy, which disappears from view in the dominant
vocabularies of global governance, constitutes the underlying unequal field or iceberg
on which the imperial and decolonized parties occupy their respective asymmetrical
bargaining positions. Harry Magdoff, a US Marxist historian of imperialism, while
stressing the continuity with colonial imperialism more than Robinson would allow,
made a similar point in his famous article, Imperialism without Colonies, in 1968,
thereby substantiating Mommsens claim that liberal and Marxist historians agree on the
persistence of informal imperialism:xii

Colonialism, considered as the direct application of military and political force, was
essential to reshape the social and economic institutions of many of the dependent
countries to the needs of the metropolitan centres. Once this reshaping had been
accomplished economic forces the international price, marketing and financial
systems were by themselves sufficient to perpetuate and indeed intensify the
relationship of dominance and exploitation between mother country and colony. In
these circumstances, the colony could be granted formal political independence
without changing anything essential, and without interfering too seriously with the
interests which had originally led to the conquest of the colony.

While Robinson, Gallagher and Mommsen referred to the US as the leading informal
imperial power after World War II, they do not single it out for special attention.
However, throughout the twentieth century American historians have analyzed and
 13

debated US Foreign policy as a form of non-colonial imperialism, from the Monroe

Doctrine of 1823 and its Corollaries down to the present.xiii

End of Lecture Two.

Notes at the end of Lecture 3.
 14

Lecture Three

Postcolonial Legal and political thought

December 22 & Lecture 4 December 29 (not included)

Lecture 3: Part I: Informal Imperialism from a postcolonial perspective

Part II: The Pitfalls of decolonization and postcolonial strategies (1)
December 22

Lecture 4: Part I: The Pitfalls of decolonization and postcolonial strategies (2)

Part II: Gandhis Satyagraha alternative
December 29

LECTURE 3

PART I: INFORMAL IMPERIALISM FROM A POSTCOLONIAL

PERSPECTIVE

A PRELIMINARY SKETCH

1. A preliminary sketch of salient characteristics of contemporary informal imperialism

since decolonization.

1.1. Two ways of characterising political, legal, economic, communicative and cultural
relationships and their corresponding forms of subjectivity and coordinated interaction:
i. Rule (ruler-ruled), sovereignty, formality, and rules as rails (command-
obedience);
ii. Governance (governors-governed relationships), informal, interactive or
strategic, and rules as tools or tactics.

Informal imperialism is predominantly an informal mode of governance, not a system of

rule.1

As we have seen, the postcolonial local and global order is formally represented as a
formal system of rule/sovereignty: a system of formally equal, sovereign constitutional

1
Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States, Cambridge, 2004, Donald Pease, US
Imperialism: Global Dominance without Colonies, in Henry Schwarz and S. Ray, eds., A
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, on Reserve, and references in Tully, Law,
Democracy and Imperialism, on Reserve.
 15

nations states bound together by the three waves of rules of international law and
transnational trade law (free global markets) since 1948. It is on this representation of
global order that most theories of global order are based.

However, as we have also seen, this representation of the global order, while it discloses
the formal rules of the system, conceals the informal networks of complex and interactive
relationships of inequalities, dependencies, and exploitation between the hegemonic
powers (the former imperial powers and their transnational corporations) and the
subaltern powers (the former colonies*). It is this mobile cluster of local and global
practices of governor-governed relationships that keeps the postcolonial world unequal,
dependent and open to economic exploitation, despite the formal equality of the rule-
based mode of representation and recognition of actors as formally equal, and which the
postcolonial writers and actors try to understand and transform in their theories of
postcolonial subjection and conscription (as we have seen).

Edward Said influentially called this form of representation of the global postcolonial
order a contrapuntal ensemble, as opposed to the more or less unilateral, impositional
and systemic representation of the global order as a formal order of sovereigns, formal
rules and obedient or compliant subjects.2

1.2 The main characteristics of this contrapuntal ensemble of unequal relationships of

governance (or governmentalit).

Informal imperialism (II) came into prominence after 1945 and it became global after
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, at the end of the Cold War, which had been able
to block its globalization and support alternatives up until then (although the end of NAM
in 1983 in New Delhi is also a certain sign). See below.

II is not new, but, as we saw last week, it is the victory of one of three main types of
imperialism over the non-West over the other two during decolonization (formal colonial
rule and informal administrative rule). It was called free trade or open door or dollar
imperialism in the 19thc.

However, both colonial and indirect rule/governance laid the foundations of inequality
for informal imperialism, which would otherwise be impossible to sustain. (These sturdy
foundations laid in the colonial and indirect periods are called structures of
domination.)

The former imperial states (Great Powers) became the unequal sovereigns of the
postcolonial period, rebranded as the G7 and G8. They had ruled over the non-West with
colonies, indirect rule and informal rule for the previous centuries and laid down the
conditions of inequality, dependency and exploitation.

2
Culture and Imperialism.
 16

1.3. During DC and the CW they were constrained by the Third World struggles for
liberation to let the former colonies exercise local political power (self-government) over
the territory of the former colonies, recognize them as formally equal, and permit them to
exercise powers of self-determination.

Yet, while transferring formal political power the GPS also reciprocally were able to
control the way the powers of self-government were exercised so that the post-
decolonization leaders were constrained to build western-style state structures, territorial
boundaries, legal systems, dependent, westernised elites, western trained military, and
especially local economies open to dominance by the transnational corporations and
transnational law of the great powers. Quote: LDI 16.3

1.4 The Great Powers were able to do this by a number of informal means. The first and
most important was the establishment of a set of global institutions to govern the post-
WW2 world: The WB, IMF, the WTO after 1995, the UN, and the laws that these
institutions generate: GATT, GATS, and three waves of IL - HR, TNL (lex Mercatoria),
and Security Council Resolutions after 9/11.4

The important feature of the these institutions of global governance is that all the
nations states are included in them, in contrast to the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885,
but that they are radically unequal within them. They are all sites of interaction and
contestation among radically unequal sovereigns.

1.5. Let us look at some of the means that are exercised in these institutions: Quote
Robinson from Lecture 2: pp.10, 12, and CH I of UIT: Magdoff. Loans, investment, aid-
dependency of all kinds, influence, debt trap, coercion, experts, military aid, and
dependency against their own populations, the use and abuse of law, and so on. There are
countless means of informal imperialism.

Another crucial set of actors is the employment of official NGOS (CONGOs) in the
former colonies to spread western forms of subjectivity, savings, attitudes to work and
consumption, public-private division, learn to detest ones own ways and see progress as
adapting to western ways, abandoning local self-rule and legal pluralism, for national
rule, in turn dependent on the West, accept privatization, and so on. I will call these
phases of modernization and the latest neo-liberalization (after 1989). The NGOS play
much the same role that the religious societies and voluntary organizations did in the
earlier period to civilize the natives (see below).

1.6. The next means is the employment of the US global military empire based in 760
bases, navy, air force, satellite surveillance, and the weaponization of space. The world is
divided into 4 provinces and each province is governed by a CIC who sits on the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. The joint chiefs report to the President from time to time.

3
See P. Duara, ed. Decolonization, in Law, Democracy and Imperialism.
4
Kim Scheppele, The International State of Emergency after September 11, MS on her
website.
 17

The role of the military is to intervene militarily and topple a non-compliant regime or to
prop-up a pro-western dictatorship that is threatened by a revolt of its own people. In the
best of circumstances, the military acts indirectly. The train the local military or the death
squads and use these proxy armies to fight their wars for them. They bribe local
governments with military contracts. They sell arms to the local government and make
them and their defence dependent on the expertise of the US army. Increasingly now,
private contractors like Blackwater and Haliburton do much of this work.

Thus, the sense of great game changes from the colonial period to a more interactive
and open-ended game (Barkawi and Laffey).

1.7. With the communications revolution in the 1980s the whole postcolonial global
network could be run like a big multinational. As Iris Marion Young puts it: Quote LDI.

1.8. Finally, the entire global network of II is justified in terms of freedom (market
freedoms), democratization and global governance or good governance.

By freedom they mean the imposition of the institutions of western style market
freedoms (the liberty of moderns), which, by definition, open the local economy to the
freedom of non-locals to privatize and capitalize resources, to hire labour on a free
market, and to sell their products without any preference given to local products. A weak
country only receives aid if it agrees to these conditions of openness to free trade and is
thus designated as a most favoured nation under IL. The weak country has not choice
but to subordinate its own constitution to 2nd and 3rd wave international law.

By democratization they mean the imposition of the modular western-style, centralised

representative government, with parties and elections (at best), with the separation
between the government (public) and the market (private) and the military (dependent on
the West). It means the destruction of non-capitalist forms of economic cooperation, local
self-rule, self-reliance.

If they refuse, and seek to become self-reliant economically, then they violate the
openness to free trade, various informal means of coercion are applied. If these fail, and
all other tactics of good governance, then the military intervenes to punish the
transgressors of IL, seek reparations, and open the society to freedom and
democratization.5

1.9. This intervention is not seen as a violation of sovereignty, but rather assisting the
former colony to exercise its powers of self-determination in the modern or democratic
or free market manner against the constant threat of closure (i.e. self-rule that would
exclude the TNCS from access to resources, labour and markets). This combination

5
Bacevich, American Empire, Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival. The best example of
this democratization policy is the Princeton project on global governance in the 21st
century headed by Anne Marie Slaughter and R. Ikenberry and available on her website.
 18

democratization and informal imperialism was invented by Woodrow Wilson during the
years of the League of Nations. He said every former salt water colony had the right to
self-determination and, at the same time, the more advanced states had the right to
intervene militarily if (1) some imperial power tried to establish a monopoly or closed
colony, or (2) if a backward government tried to close the local economy to foreign
investment and control and thus to block the civilizing and modernising effects of
capitalist investment. Quote Smedley Butler in LDI, page 36.

Wilson saw no contradiction because this policy was a continuation of the Monroe
Doctrine and the Open Door Policy enunciated by Charles Conant in 1898: LDI 8.

THE LINEAGE OF INFORMAL IMPERIALISM

2. This modern form of informal imperialism began to take shape with the formation of
modern international law in the 19th century under the standard of civilization.6

2.1. The imperial powers defined themselves as uniquely sovereign in virtue of their
modern institutions of: a formal system of private property law and modern, negative
liberty, a system of representative government abstracted from local forms of government
and interaction, a free-standing market obeying the laws of supply and demand, the
existence of private corporations recognized as persons with the negative liberty, a
separate military, and obeying only those laws with other states that they had consented
to subject themselves to (Gong).

These institutions are the criteria of a civilized society and sovereign state.

2.2 They then defined non-western societies as uncivilized because they lacked these
institutions. Since they lacked them, they were, by definition, non-sovereign, and thus not
subjects of international law. Rather, they were subject to the imperial law and colonial
law of the respective imperial powers. Their local legal orders were said to be
customary rather than formal; still internally related to the actions of those subject to
them.

The sovereign states had the right to enter into trade with these uncivilized states and they
had a duty of hospitality to open themselves to trade. If they refused, the sovereign states
had the right to intervene militarily and impose the pre-conditions of civility on them (i.e.
western style legal orders that privatised their land and resources and created a free
market in labour through dispossession) (also known as primitive accumulation), by
means of persuasion, indirect rule, or colonial rule.

But, fourth, they also had a duty to civilize these non-civilized peoples to move them
up through the stages of development to the normative ideal of a world of identical
western style sovereign states subject to international law and bound together by the
pacifying effects of commerce and commercial law, as in the Conant quotation.

6
See Gong, Koskenniemi, Keene, Anghie for this section.
 19

The means to civilize the natives were/are various: slavery, indentured labour, labour
discipline, military service for the imperial powers, despotic rule, military rule, low level
jobs in the colonial administration, sweat shops, local self-rule overseen by a westerner,
western education, residential schools, and the vast repertoire of colonial governmentalit
techniques of creating civilized subjectivities.

2.3 Civilization thus stands for a telos and a world historical process (civilizing process)
brought about by the spread of western legal, political and economic institutions by
means of the competitive wars of imperial expansion making the world over in the
image of Europe and America. Replication imperialism.

2.4 This was codified in 19thc international law and all societies were studied and ranked
in various stages of development relative to the European norm by the social sciences and
humanities and comparative lawyers.

This is the basis of all languages of justification of western imperialism whether formal
or informal: modernization, democratization, globalization, neo-liberalisation that is, a
telos and a process (backed up by the means of imperialisation we have just studied in
part one).

This is why there cannot be a neutral or general theory of modernity or globalization

or civilization or neo-liberalization, for these concepts have always been employed in
contrast to the non-west, which is (1) non-modern/colonial, uncivilized/colonial, non-
globalized/local/particular, or postcolonial, and (2) subject to processes of civilization,
globalization, democratization emanating from Western expansion and exploitation.7

2.5. Note that these representations of imperialism are not interactive. They are unilateral
and more or less command-obedience. If a subaltern society resists modernization or
civilization this just proves that it is anti-modern or uncivilized, violates the right of
openness to free trade, and thus triggers the right to intervene and open that society to the
processes of civilization or modernization. In these theories of modernization, there is
non interaction, but rather simply stages of development emanating from a fixed model
with the European capitalist nation-state at its centre.

The great discovery of informal imperialism is that western imperialism has always been
an open-ended game between the West and non-West, a contrapuntal ensemble in which
the west and non-west have been co-created. Compare Orientalism with Culture and
Imperialism.

2.6 The military competition of great imperial powers over the non-European world
continued apace through the Berlin Conference, the scramble for Africa and the horrors
great war for civilization (WW1): Quote Blunt in Lineages.

7
Dusell and Ashcroft, Postcolonial Transformations.
 20

The great powers realized that they had to solve two problems or face the mutual
destruction of the contending powers after WW1:

(1) Create an international system capable of forcing the great powers to cooperate
militarily while still competing economically over resources, markets and labour
of the non-West;
(2) Internationalise the duty to civilize the non-West to some form of international
body since the individual imperial states were failing to do this themselves.

The solution to (1) is: the League of Nations, WWII, the UN, the Marshall Plan, NATO,
the victory over the USSR in the CW, and the Bretton Woods Institutions of global
governance today with the US military to back it up.8

The solution to (2) is: the Mandate System of the LN, the Trustee System of the UN, the
gradual transfer of political power to the colonies during decolonization, and the
imposition of continuing dependency and the institutions of global governance over the
postcolonial societies, and the unequal inclusion of them in the new institutions. Quote
from LN on Three stages of development.9

These came in three phases (Neil Smith): LN, CW, 1989.

Thus, we are back to the preliminary sketch of Section I. The thing to note is the great
continuity of the inequalities and dependencies as well as the languages of justification.

7. However, with the rise of neo-liberalism as a global language and strategy, this history
tends to become overlooked. Like the earlier languages of justification of imperialisation,
neo-liberalism stands for an end-point (a neo-liberal world order of neo-liberal states) and
a set of processes carried out by informal means the neo-liberalization of non-neo-
liberal societies. However, it brings two new features. (1) The language of description of
all actors is global: that is, individual and groups of all kinds are said to be similarly self-
interested and competitive beings engaged in various kinds of struggle or competition.
The only difference among them is that they are unequal equals that is, they are
situated within different positions (hegemon or subaltern) in different relationships they
bear. But, whatever practice they are involved in (markets, marriage, university, love,
friendship, voluntary activity, sports) they are all like economic competition among
interest maximizing economic actors. It is the marketization or commodification of every
human activity into a single language of description. (2) The means that are used to
spread it are the same ones mentioned in the preliminary sketch, with the addition of the
rapid imposition of it after natural and induced crises and disasters of various kinds
(Klein).

8
Neil Smith, American Empire.
9
Michael Callaghan, The Mandate System of the League of Nations, 2 volumes.
 21

PART II: THE PITFALLS OF DECOLONIZATION AND POSTCOLONIAL

STRATEGIES

Of course, the central problems facing the postcolonial societies were (1) the structures of
domination laid down by 500 years of imperialism (colonial institutions of divide and
rule, the destruction of local resources, government, environment, knowledges, inferiority
complex, and a host of enduring features), and (2) the newer and more flexible informal
relationships of inequality that the postcolonial actors could have a say in but not change
in any fundamental way. But, now I want to canvas the pitfalls that postcolonial writers
have criticized in their own strategies.10

1. The first pitfall of the first generation of postcolonial leaders (elites) was the
acceptance of the basic tenants of modernization: the building of a western-style nation
state of either the capitalist or socialist variety as the only way forward. This was to
accept that their legal, political, economic and cultural ways were as the west
characterised them: pre-modern, uncivilized, pre-democratic, non-global and so on. It
was to accept the ground plan of western imperialism. Although Fanon and Chatterjee
and especially Gandhi warned against it, it is striking how many, even within NAM,
accepted the basic modernization world picture and rejected their own traditions. This
could not help but deepen their dependency on and subordination to the West.

When they tried to break away from Western models, since they accepted the denigration
of their own civilizations in the western grand narratives, the only alternative seemed to
be a vague and dangerous conception of the new man of the 21st century.

2. The first pitfall combined perversely with the second: the centralization of power in the
army and/or the nationalist party in order to win the decolonization struggle and build the
new state. This undercut local and regional self-rule, cooperative forms of economic and
political organizations, family life, and silenced dissent in the name of the revolution and
modernization. The elites thus became increasingly cut off from their own people and
often at war with them, needing military assistance and loans from the North to put down
often populist and democratic grass-roots resistance, thus further entrenching their
dependency, militarization, and centralization.

3. The third pitfall was the recourse to violence to win the decolonization struggle and
then to continue to rule afterwards, in the context of the second pitfall. The result was the
proliferation of military coups, by generals to restore the elite classes tied to western
economic interests and by colonels to support more populist movements. In either case,
this deepened dependency on global arms trade of the US, UK, Russia and Canada.
Although this was induced by the horrendous inequalities of life chances caused by
imperialism, the West could then blame these conditions (failed states) on the local
elites (usually at the same time as selling them arms, forcing unequal trade relations on
them, and so on).11

10
Vijay Prashad, Pitfalls, Section II of Darker Nations, 2007, on Reserve.
11
Ruth First, The Barrel of a Gun, 1970.
 22

This is of course a pitfall in the imperial states as well, as their societies have become
increasingly militarised as it becomes more and more difficult to hold 70% of the worlds
population in conditions of inequality and subordination, and more and more military rule
at home takes place.

4. These three pitfalls went along with a fourth: the borrowing of theories of revolution
and liberation from the West from the French Revolution, Hegel, Marx, the Russian
Revolution, Sartre, Fanon, and twentieth century communist parties: the so-called master-
slave dialectic in its various forms. Rather than liberating liberation movements, it
handed them a script that conscripted them into a Western narrative, thus reinforcing their
dependencies (1-3) rather than giving them a critical perspective on them.

5. Many in the second generation did turn to their own traditions and cultural ways to
find an alternative. However, this was often done in an uncritical way, thus propping up
traditional elites and traditional forms of oppression, and simply reversing the Western
modernization scale of civilization. The indigenous cultures were presented as more
advanced and sovereign. Given the pressure of the modernization worldview, this
strategy was sidelined. In the third generation, cultural difference came into
prominence, in the defence of hybridity and of cultural diversity, but this actually fit well
with new forms of informal governmentalit in the North, where individuals and groups
were encouraged to perform their identity-related differences in the institutions of neo-
liberalism.

6. The modernization thesis tended to make the vast majority appear backward to the
leading classes. The peasantry did not appear to embody a form of life worthy of respect
and dialogue until the 1990s (for the most part). Rather, the peasantry, the vast majority
of the population, was seen as a mass that needed to be mobilized in the struggle and
then modernized (Guevara).

7. As a result, as Paulo Friere put it in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most of the
postcolonial states had solidified monological command-obedience relationships between
ruler and ruled in their own societies, even in the revolutionary movements, that
replicated the command-obedience relationships of colonial and indirect rule.

8. By the late 1980s the revolutionary strategy was shown to be insufficient (because of
the ability of informal imperial relationships to survive revolutions and intervene in the
post-revolutionary regime (Vietnam)); the NAM strategy was more or less abandoned
due to dependency, debt trap, and the triumph of the West; and the strategy of aping the
West and trying to beat them at their own game, as Singapore and the Asian tigers
argued, and China, India and Brazil adopted, was the most discussed option. The 21stc
brought two other options: a renewed movement towards socialist leaders in Latin
America and the fourth world strategies of autonomous communities represented by the
Zapatista.
 23

9. However, there was another option that postcolonial writers are beginning to
rediscover the complex approach of Satyagraha practiced by Gandhi
 24

Lecture 3 Handout

December 22 and December 29

Lecture 3: Part I: Informal Imperialism from a postcolonial perspective

Part II: The Pitfalls of decolonization and postcolonial strategies (1)
December 22

Lecture 4: Part I: The Pitfalls of decolonization and postcolonial strategies (2)

Part II: Gandhis Satyagraha alternative
December 29

LECTURE 3
PART I: INFORMAL IMPERIALISM FROM A POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

A PRELIMINARY SKETCH

1. Rule/Governance distinction.
2. Main characteristics of informal imperialism post 1945
3. Interactive Governor-governed relationship during decolonization and CW
4. Main informal means: global sticky institutions
5. Countless informal means: economic, cultural, educational, communicative
6. Military means (2 senses of great game)
7. Communications revolution
8. Justification: freedom, democratization, global governance
9. Informal Intervention and self-determination couple

LINEAGES OF INFORMAL IMPERIALISM

1. Standard of Civilization and International Law in 19thc

2. Rights and duties relative to the uncivilized societies
3. Civilization as telos and imperialising process
4. Scientific ranking of societies; justifications: modernization, liberalisation, etc
5. interactive versus unilateral explanations
6. two problems at Versailles and two solutions in 20thc
7. Neo-liberal globalization as the latest description of informal imperialism

PART II: PITFALLS OF DECOLONIZATION AND POSTCOLONIAL

STRATEGIES (1);

1. Acceptance of modernization schema

2. Centralization
3. Violence and militarization // imperialism and militarism twins
4. Borrowing modernist theories of liberation
5. Nativism and hybridity pitfalls
6. The peasantry question
7. Paulo Frieres question about relationships
8. Summary of dominant strategies today
9. Turn to Gandhis alternative of Satyagraha
 25

Notes to Lecture Two

i
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, The Imperialism of Free Trade, The Economic History
Review, Second Series, 6, 1 (1953), 1-15. The authors attribute the term informal imperialism to
C. R. Ray, The Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1940), II, 399. For the philosophical background to free trade imperialism in the broader
context of European imperialism and classical political economy, see Bernard Semmel, The Rise
of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and
Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
ii
Ronald Robinson, Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire, The Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12, 2 (January 1984), 42-54, 47.
iii
Robinson, Imperial Theory, 42-53. He criticised Marxist theorists of imperial for downplaying
the interactive dimension of informal imperialism and putting too much emphasizes on
structuration. As a result of these and other non-structural factors, contemporary informal
imperialism is even more interactive, contestatory and unsystematic than Robinson conjectured in
1980, as we will see in chapter five. For other theories of interactive imperialism in the twentieth
century, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1977), 81-112.
iv
Ibid., 48.
v
Ibid., 51.
vi
Ibid., 51.
vii
Ibid., 53.
viii
For the critical analysis of the global governance approach to these institutions of informal
imperialism, see below this chapter and chapter 5.
ix
Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism, 86. Although the theory of informal imperialism is widely
recognized among historians of imperialism as a revolutionary advance in the understanding of
western forms of power and rule, it is almost completely unnoticed among political and legal
theorists.
x
Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The End of Empire and the Continuity of Imperialism, in Mommsen
and Jurgen Osterhammel, eds. Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1986), 333-58, at 342.
xi
Ibid., 344-45. Indirect rule in the quotation refers to a form of imperial rule that allows the
subaltern a degree of self-government, democratization, self-determination, and other forms of
self-rule within a background network of imperial control by various means. Informal
imperialism is always indirect, whereas colonial imperialism can be either direct, where the
imperial power governs the colonized in detail, or indirect, where the colonial administrators
allow local forms of self-rule, as in the indirect form of internal colonization of Indigenous
peoples by so called liberal democratic states today.
xii
Harry Magdoff, Imperialism without Colonies, in Imperialism without Colonies (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2003), 91-113. In the Introduction the editor, John Bellamy Foster, replies
to Robinsons objection that Marxist historians of imperialism fail to recognize the competitive
and interactive dimensions of contemporary informal imperialism (Ibid., 9-19).
xiii
I simply introduce the history and theory of US informal imperialism here and then analyze it
in detail in Chapter 4. For the Monroe Doctrine as one of the ideological basis of US imperialism,
see Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US
Empire (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2005).