When Hobson wrote about imperialism in 1902, it was not a term used negatively as it is today. It was an active foreign policy seen to benefit both colonisers and colonised alike. Some of the greatest minds of the day--John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, William Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner--were "social imperialists," partisans of a mission to bring liberal institutions to the rest of the world, and create markets for British manufactured goods. More common by far were advocates of imperialism as an alternative to redistributive socialist policies, as an outlet for surplus population, and as a backyard for flagship companies.

Hobson pioneered theories of underconsumption, later advanced by Keynes, Samuelson, and Tobin, which presuppose that mature economies are unlikely to be able to consume all that they produce; as a result, more capital accumulates, the marginal return on that capital declines, and stagnation sets in.

But while Hobson was a seminal mind in economics, this is not an economics book--it is overwhelmingly a historical survey of ideologies, propaganda and the harsh reality, a disciplined yet creatively assembled explanation of how the needs of industrial Britain were so woefully met by imperial dogma. With the terrifying triumph of neo conservative ideology in our era, this is an extremely relevant book for contemporary citizens of America, and of the world.

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J. A. Hobson (1858-1940) was an English economist and early social theorist. In Imperialism, published in 1902, he argues that imperial expansion was caused by the need to find new markets for the output of the Industrial Revolution, resulting in capitalistic exploitation of the colonies, and leading to international conflict.

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