cultural imperialism thesis

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies

Communication

• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Cultural Imperialism Theories

Introduction.

• Critical Reviews, Discussions, and Limits of the Notion of Media and Cultural Imperialism
• Rethinking the Cultural Imperialism Theory
• Cultural Imperialism and UNESCO
• Cultural Imperialism versus Globalization
• Global South and Cultural Imperialism
• Cultural Imperialism and Social Sciences

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Acculturation Processes and Communication
• Audience Studies
• Critical and Cultural Studies
• Cultural Pluralism and Communication
• Ethnography of Communication
• Global Englishes
• History of Global Media
• Intercultural Capital
• Intergroup Communication
• International Communications
• Interpretation/Reception
• Media Effects
• Political Economy

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Culture Shock and Communication
• LGBTQ+ Family Communication
• Queerbaiting
• Find more forthcoming titles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Cultural Imperialism Theories by Rodrigo Gómez García , Ben Birkinbine LAST REVIEWED: 27 June 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 27 June 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0209

The theory of cultural imperialism has its roots in critical communication scholarship and was used to describe the growing influence of the United States and its commercial media system around the world, specifically in the context of the Cold War, after the Second World War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were attempting to compel and persuade other countries to adopt their respective socioeconomic systems. The theory specifically focused on the ways in which US culture was being spread to and sometimes imposed upon developing nations by US communications and media corporations, by specific media products and their imagery and messages, and by the expansion of the private model of the media system. The critical edge to the theory was its staunch criticism of the strategies and tactics used by the United States in this regard and how the US communications and media system expanded and maintained the asymmetrical economic, political, and cultural power relations between the United States and other countries in the world system. Correspondingly, the theory was also used as a basis for arguing that those people who were subjected to cultural imperialism ought to be granted the right to develop their own sovereign national media systems. The struggle to develop those systems occurred within the context of national liberation struggles against the remnants of Western territorial colonialism and the new de-territorialized imperialism of both the US and Soviet empires. However, the theory was challenged on at least a couple different fronts. The first challenge came from cultural studies researchers who questioned the total homogenizing influences of mass-produced media content on audiences. Drawing from ethnographic and reception studies of audiences, these researchers demonstrated how American media influence was rarely as totalizing and complete as the cultural imperialism theory suggested. Rather, such commercial images and messages were also subject to local adaptation, indigenization and resistance and therefore not always influencing of audiences. A second line of critique focused more on the national economic and political structure of non-US media systems and whether those systems were directly influenced by the United States. Scholars within this area focused on ownership patterns and the structures of media systems, including the impact of dominant, far-reaching systems of government influence and industrial media production that establish prevalent media models or channels. In addition, these scholars focused on whether such systems enable or constrain alternative media forms and functions, and the degree to which they set routine parameters for discourse, thereby shaping the sociocultural norms that media tend to promote and the political and economic interests they routinely serve. Over time, these criticisms of the cultural imperialism thesis have been re-integrated within it, further strengthening its analytical value. Some scholars have sought to revise the theory by incorporating some of the criticisms, while others have tried to reemphasize the value of the original theory. Indeed, the theory’s utility continues to be debated, particularly in light of historical changes and other emergent trends that have reshaped the geopolitical economy of the global communication system. In addition to these ongoing debates, the theory has also shown dynamism in the way that it has been applied across various academic fields in the social sciences and the humanities.

The entries in this section address the more influential texts that figure prominently within the early ideas of cultural and media imperialism during the 1970s, such as Schiller 1969 , Schiller 1973 , Schiller 1976 , Mattelart 1976 , and Mattelart 1979 . The foundations of the media or cultural imperialism theory were laid during the 1970s in the context of the Cold War and the Non Aligned Movement’s struggle for a New World Information and Communication Order at UNESCO, and developed by political economy of communications scholars, North and South, East and West. In addition, the development of the idea of media and cultural imperialism had a substantial impact in policy international circles. Even though Schiller 1969 is often identified as originating the theory, the conceptual basis for the theory has a shared history both within the United States as well as Latin American authors such as Armand Mattelart, Hector Schmucler, Rafael Reyes Mata, Luis R. Beltrán, and Elizabeth Fox, among others. Also included are other influential works that have contributed to the development of the notion from a geopolitical and critical perspective since the 1970s, such as Tunstall 1977 , Boyd-Barrett 1977 , and Boyd-Barrett 1998 . Another important book is Schiller 1989 , which focuses on the growing power of transnational corporate conglomerates to shape and colonize in a wider sense the organization of culture in the United States.

Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 1977. Media imperialism: Towards an international framework for the analysis of media Systems. In Mass communication and society . Edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and John Woollacott, 116–135. London: Edward Arnold.

Outlines the contours of media imperialism as a general thesis to explain the processes by which a given country’s media systems are shaped by or subject to pressures from another country without proportionate reciprocation. The remainder of the chapter is spent discussing “four modes of media imperialism,” which include the shape of the communication vehicle, a set of industrial arrangements, a body of values, and specific media content. In addition, he outlines the necessary preconditions for media imperialism, as well as the consequences and implications of media imperialism.

Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 1998. Media imperialism reformulated. In Electronic empires: Global media and local resistance . Edited by Daya Thussu, 157–176. London: Arnold.

In this chapter, Boyd-Barrett responds to ongoing debates at the time about the usefulness of the “media imperialism” concept in light of developments within theories of globalization. His argument is that media imperialism is still a relevant, as it directly examines the relationship between national economies and the global capitalist economy and focuses attention on the ways that culture and media sustain that relationship.

Mattelart, Armand. 1976. Cultural imperialism in the multinationals’ age. Instant Research on Peace and Violence 6.4: 160–174.

This early article by Mattelart aims to address the specific forms of US cultural imperialism in Latin America, particularly in the age of multinationals and the supremacy of local bourgeois and authoritarian regimes. He understands that the US multinational firms have a double function as agents for economic penetration and ideological propaganda, on one hand, while also serving as agents of order, on the other.

Mattelart, Armand. 1979. Multinational corporations and the control of culture: The ideological apparatuses of imperialism . Brighton, UK: Harvester.

In this book, Mattelart gives an important overview of the interlocks between multinational corporations and the different forms they use for the control of culture, particularly in the Third World. This book is an example of the transnational issues related to communication, culture, and information from a critical perspective.

Schiller, Herbert I. 1969. Mass communication and American empire . Boston: Beacon Press.

This book is the primary source text for the cultural imperialism theory. Schiller argued that the United States emerged following the Second World War as a new kind of empire without formal territorial colonies. Rather, its systems of mass communication were used to impose its influence around the globe. In addition, US media are commercial products and tools of Americanization that dominate the airwaves, cinemas, and cultures of other countries without reciprocation of influence by them.

Schiller, Herbert. 1973. The mind managers . Boston: Beacon Press.

In this book, Schiller turns his attention to the ways in which consciousness is being manipulated by those he calls “mind managers (MM),” which are those who control the means of communication and mass culture. The dynamics of MM are shaped by a complex interplay of forces from government, media, military, corporations, public opinion polling, popular culture, and information technology. Schiller explores the concrete ways in which the mechanisms and messages of the MM have become seemingly normal and inevitable components of social life.

Schiller, Herbert. 1976. Communication and cultural domination . White Plains, NY: ME Sharpe.

While Mass Communication and American Empire is the first Schiller book associated with his cultural imperialism theory, in this book he offers a more accurate definition. In fact, in this book we can find the most cited quotation related with cultural imperialism (p. 9). Schiller conceptualized US cultural imperialism as part of the broader US project of empire.

Schiller, Herbert. 1989. Culture, Inc . New York: Oxford University Press.

Focuses on the growing power of transnational corporate conglomerates to shape and colonize in a wider sense the organization of culture in the United States. Specifically, Schiller expands and updates the “culture industry” thesis of the Frankfurt School by demonstrating how those spheres that were previously imagined as separated from corporate ownership and commercialization, such as the fine arts and education, have been integrated into capitalist productions.

Schiller, Herbert I. 1992. Mass communication and American empire . 2d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

In this updated edition, published twenty-three years after the original, Schiller responds to and elaborates upon some ideas that were criticized or discredited from the original idea of cultural domination. Perhaps most importantly, he added an entire chapter, “A Quarter-Century Retrospective,” to address those critiques. The chapter answers the question of what differentiates the 1990s from the mid-1960s with respect to media-cultural influence by specifically arguing that a distinctly “American” cultural imperialism had become “trans-nationalized.”

Tunstall, Jeremy. 1977. The media are American: Anglo-American media in the world . London: Constable.

In this classic book, Tunstall focuses on the export of media from the United States to countries around the world. As such, he argues that the world’s media systems are largely dominated by US products. Rather than focusing purely on the content of media, however, Tunstall also focuses his attention on the ways in which styles and patterns of media production and consumption have also been exported around the world. His central thesis is that media are about more than merely their content; they are about politics, commerce, and ideas.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Communication »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Accounting Communication
• Action Assembly Theory
• Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis
• Activist Media
• Adherence and Communication
• Adolescence and the Media
• Advertisements, Televised Political
• Advertising
• Advertising, Children and
• Advertising, International
• Advocacy Journalism
• Agenda Setting
• Annenberg, Walter H.
• Apologies and Accounts
• Applied Communication Research Methods
• Argumentation
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advertising
• Attitude-Behavior Consistency
• Audience Fragmentation
• Authoritarian Societies, Journalism in
• Bakhtin, Mikhail
• Bandwagon Effect
• Baudrillard, Jean
• Blockchain and Communication
• Bourdieu, Pierre
• Brand Equity
• British and Irish Magazine, History of the
• Broadcasting, Public Service
• Capture, Media
• Castells, Manuel
• Celebrity and Public Persona
• Civil Rights Movement and the Media, The
• Co-Cultural Theory and Communication
• Codes and Cultural Discourse Analysis
• Cognitive Dissonance
• Collective Memory, Communication and
• Comedic News
• Communication Apprehension
• Communication Campaigns
• Communication, Definitions and Concepts of
• Communication History
• Communication Law
• Communication Management
• Communication Networks
• Communication, Philosophy of
• Community Attachment
• Community Journalism
• Community Structure Approach
• Computational Journalism
• Computer-Mediated Communication
• Content Analysis
• Corporate Social Responsibility and Communication
• Crisis Communication
• Critical Race Theory and Communication
• Cross-tools and Cross-media Effects
• Cultivation
• Cultural and Creative Industries
• Cultural Imperialism Theories
• Cultural Mapping
• Cultural Persuadables
• Cyberpolitics
• Death, Dying, and Communication
• Debates, Televised
• Deliberation
• Developmental Communication
• Diffusion of Innovations
• Digital Divide
• Digital Gender Diversity
• Digital Intimacies
• Digital Literacy
• Diplomacy, Public
• Distributed Work, Comunication and
• Documentary and Communication
• E-democracy/E-participation
• E-Government
• Elaboration Likelihood Model
• Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM)
• Embedded Coverage
• Entertainment
• Entertainment-Education
• Environmental Communication
• Ethnic Media
• Experiments
• Families, Multicultural
• Family Communication
• Federal Communications Commission
• Feminist and Queer Game Studies
• Feminist Data Studies
• Feminist Journalism
• Feminist Theory
• Focus Groups
• Food Studies and Communication
• Freedom of the Press
• Friendships, Intercultural
• Gatekeeping
• Gender and the Media
• Global Media, History of
• Global Media Organizations
• Glocalization
• Goffman, Erving
• Habermas, Jürgen
• Habituation and Communication
• Health Communication
• Hermeneutic Communication Studies
• Homelessness and Communication
• Hook-Up and Dating Apps
• Hostile Media Effect
• Identification with Media Characters
• Identity, Cultural
• Image Repair Theory
• Implicit Measurement
• Impression Management
• Infographics
• Information and Communication Technology for Development
• Information Management
• Information Overload
• Information Processing
• Infotainment
• Innis, Harold
• Instructional Communication
• Integrated Marketing Communications
• Interactivity
• Intercultural Communication
• Intercultural Communication, Tourism and
• Intercultural Communication, Worldview in
• Intercultural Competence
• Intercultural Conflict Mediation
• Intercultural Dialogue
• Intercultural New Media
• Intergenerational Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Interpersonal LGBTQ Communication
• Interpretive Communities
• Journalism, Accuracy in
• Journalism, Alternative
• Journalism and Trauma
• Journalism, Citizen
• Journalism, Citizen, History of
• Journalism Ethics
• Journalism, Interpretive
• Journalism, Peace
• Journalism, Tabloid
• Journalists, Violence against
• Knowledge Gap
• Lazarsfeld, Paul
• Leadership and Communication
• Mass Communication
• McLuhan, Marshall
• Media Activism
• Media Aesthetics
• Media and Time
• Media Convergence
• Media Credibility
• Media Dependency
• Media Ecology
• Media Economics
• Media Economics, Theories of
• Media, Educational
• Media Ethics
• Media Events
• Media Exposure Measurement
• Media, Gays and Lesbians in the
• Media Literacy
• Media Logic
• Media Management
• Media Policy and Governance
• Media Regulation
• Media, Social
• Media Sociology
• Media Systems Theory
• Merton, Robert K.
• Message Characteristics and Persuasion
• Mobile Communication Studies
• Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Approaches to
• Multinational Organizations, Communication and Culture in
• Murdoch, Rupert
• Narrative Engagement
• Narrative Persuasion
• Net Neutrality
• News Framing
• News Media Coverage of Women
• NGOs, Communication and
• Online Campaigning
• Open Access
• Organizational Change and Organizational Change Communicat...
• Organizational Communication
• Organizational Communication, Aging and
• Parasocial Theory in Communication
• Participation, Civic/Political
• Participatory Action Research
• Patient-Provider Communication
• Peacebuilding and Communication
• Perceived Realism
• Personalized Communication
• Persuasion and Social Influence
• Persuasion, Resisting
• Photojournalism
• Political Advertising
• Political Communication, Normative Analysis of
• Political Knowledge
• Political Marketing
• Political Scandals
• Political Socialization
• Polls, Opinion
• Product Placement
• Public Interest Communication
• Public Opinion
• Public Relations
• Public Sphere
• Queer Intercultural Communication
• Queer Migration and Digital Media
• Race and Communication
• Racism and Communication
• Radio Studies
• Reality Television
• Reasoned Action Frameworks
• Religion and the Media
• Reporting, Investigative
• Rhetoric and Communication
• Rhetoric and Intercultural Communication
• Rhetoric and Social Movements
• Rhetoric, Religious
• Rhetoric, Visual
• Risk Communication
• Rumor and Communication
• Schramm, Wilbur
• Science Communication
• Scripps, E. W.
• Selective Exposure
• Sense-Making/Sensemaking
• Sesame Street
• Sex in the Media
• Small-Group Communication
• Social Capital
• Social Change
• Social Cognition
• Social Construction
• Social Identity Theory and Communication
• Social Interaction
• Social Movements
• Social Network Analysis
• Social Protest
• Sports Communication
• Stereotypes
• Strategic Communication
• Superdiversity
• Surveillance and Communication
• Symbolic Interactionism in Communication
• Synchrony in Intercultural Communication
• Tabloidization
• Telecommunications History/Policy
• Television, Cable
• Textual Analysis and Communication
• Third Culture Kids
• Third-Person Effect
• Time Warner
• Transgender Media Studies
• Transmedia Storytelling
• Two-Step Flow
• United Nations and Communication
• Urban Communication
• Uses and Gratifications
• Video Deficit
• Video Games and Communication
• Violence in the Media
• Virtual Reality and Communication
• Visual Communication
• Web Archiving
• Whistleblowing
• Whiteness Theory in Intercultural Communication
• Youth and Media
• Zines and Communication
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.174]
• 81.177.182.174

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Communication and Culture
• Communication and Social Change
• Communication and Technology
• Communication Theory
• Critical/Cultural Studies
• Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)
• Health and Risk Communication
• Intergroup Communication
• International/Global Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Journalism Studies
• Language and Social Interaction
• Mass Communication
• Media and Communication Policy
• Organizational Communication
• Political Communication
• Rhetorical Theory
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Cultural imperialism and communication.

• Oliver Boyd-Barrett Oliver Boyd-Barrett School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.678
• Published online: 25 June 2018

Central to many definitions of the term “cultural imperialism” is the idea of the culture of one powerful civilization, country, or institution having great unreciprocated influence on that of another, less powerful, entity to a degree that one may speak of a measure of cultural “domination.” Cultural imperialism has sometimes been described as a theory, especially where scholars build a case that the cultural influence of the stronger entity has had a pervasive, pernicious impact on the weaker.

The term evolved from 1960s neo-Marxist discourses within cultural, media, and postcolonial studies that contextualized the post–World War II “independence” wave of new nations emerging from colonial servitude. It was propelled by the writings of nationalist revolutionaries, revolutionary theorists, and their sympathizers of the 1950s and 1960s, but it has sweeping relevance across human history. The foremost western theorist of cultural imperialism in the West was Herbert Schiller. The concept was adopted and endorsed in the 1970s by both UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Following Oliver Boyd-Barrett, the concept may denote a field of study embracing all relationships between phenomena defined as “cultural” and as “imperialism.” These encompass cultural changes that are (1) enforced on a weaker entity and (2) occur within both stronger and weaker entities through contact, contest, and resistance, including (3) assimilation of social practices encountered by the stronger in the weaker entity, and (4) original hybrids manifesting cultural traces of both stronger and weaker entities.

The concepts of cultural and media imperialism were much critiqued during the 1980s and 1990s, and many scholars preferred alternative concepts such as globalization and cultural globalization to analyze issues of intercultural contact, whether asymmetrical or otherwise. John Tomlinson critiqued the concept, identified four different discourses of cultural imperialism, and argued in favor of its substitution with the term “globalization.” Mirrlees has placed Tomlinson’s work in context by describing the dialectical—parallel but mutually aware—development of both a cultural imperialism and a cultural globalization paradigm. Both are influential in the 21st century.

“Imperialism” commonly references relations of conquest, dominance, and hegemony between civilizations, nations, and communities. “Cultural imperialism” relates primarily to the cultural manifestations of such relations. Culture and empire relate in many different ways, fueling different theories that often play on dichotomous discourses, including territorial/non-territorial, totalistic/partial, benign/malign, ephemeral/perpetual, superficial/essential, voluntary/involuntary, intended/unintended, welcome/unwelcome, forceful/peaceful, noticed/unnoticed, linear/interactive, homogeneous/heterogeneous, and acceded/resisted.

The concept has affinities with hegemony, the idea that stability in conditions of social inequality is achieved not mainly by force but by securing the consent of the masses (starting with co-option of their indigenous leaders)—through persuasion and propaganda—to the elite’s view of the world. This process is commensurate with forms of democracy that provide the appearance but not the reality of choice and control. Fissures within the ranks of the elites and within the masses create spaces for resistance and change.

Culture encompasses the totality of social practices of a given community. Social practices are manifest within social institutions such as family, education, healthcare, worship, labor, recreation, language, communication, and decision-making, as well as their corresponding domains. Any of these can undergo change following a society’s encounter with exogenous influences—most dramatically so when stronger powers impose changes through top-down strategies of command and influence.

Analysis of cultural imperialism often incorporates notions of media imperialism with reference to (1) print, electronic, and digital media—their industrialization, production, distribution, content, and capital accumulation; (2) cultural meanings that media evoke among receivers and audience cultures; (3) audience and media interactions in representations of topics, people, and ideas; and (4) relationships between media corporations and other centers of power in the reproduction and shaping of social systems.

Media are logically subsumed as important components of cultural imperialism. Yet the significance of media can be understated. The concept of mediatization denotes that “knowledge” of social practices draws heavily on media representations. Social practices that are experienced as direct may themselves be formed through exposure to media representations or performed for media.

Discourses of cultural imperialism speak to major current controversies, including: cultural suppression and genocide; ideas of “globalization”; influential economic models of “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”; ideologies that are embedded in the global spread of concepts such as “modern,” “progressive,” “growth,” “development,” “consumerism,” “free market,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “social Darwinism” and “soft power”; cultural specificity of criteria and procedures for establishing “truth”; instrumentalization for the purposes of cultural conquest of academic disciplines such as psychoanalysis, economics, social anthropology, or marketing, or environmental crises, especially as linked to western ideologies that underwrite humanity’s “right” to dominate nature.

• globalization
• imperialism
• modernization

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 May 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.174]
• 81.177.182.174

Character limit 500 /500

Communication

iResearchNet

Custom Writing Services

Cultural imperialism theories.

The cultural imperialism thesis states, broadly, that a powerful country uses cultural means to achieve or support the political and economic ends of imperialism that were historically attained through military force and occupation. In this view, the tools of culture can smooth the way for domination by exposing people to lifestyles to aspire to, products to desire, and even new sources of allegiance.

Overall, the notion of cultural imperialism appears embedded in critiques of the substantial US export of media programming to other countries. Those lodging the charge of cultural imperialism – found mainly in scholarly, political, activist, and diplomatic realms – have asserted that western films, TV shows, and commodities serve as propaganda for a consumerism-based capitalist model of society. Gaining adherents for this model, the argument goes, would create overseas markets and political environments favorable to western – particularly US – interests. In the process, the autonomy of receiving countries, as well as their cultures, values, and identities, would be weakened or destroyed.

Origin And History Of The Concept

This idea is not limited to the contemporary setting: it has been applied to practices of, for example, Britain, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, France, Spain, and other imperial powers throughout history. The phrase “cultural imperialism” appeared in late-1940s discussions of the nascent United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, expressing trepidation about the potential activities of countries with technologically advanced media systems. Although the term is not new, it first gained wide attention in the 1970s, in the context of the expansion of the US and western European mass media export industries.

The intellectual roots of the cultural imperialism thesis lie in world systems theory (Galtung 1971; Wallerstein 1974), which categorizes the countries of the world by their degree of development and of trade domination. It sees the developed countries – the “center” – dominating the non-industrialized countries – the “periphery” – in ways that do not allow the peripheral countries to establish their own paths. Dependency theory, a Latin American outgrowth of world systems theory that attained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, elaborated the notion that underdevelopment was not simply a matter of some countries’ progress lagging behind others, but rather conferred structural advantages on developed countries. Therefore it was in the interest of powerful countries to maintain their domination. During the same period, analyses of the global trade in entertainment products, particularly film and television programs, confirmed that the US was by a large measure the world’s principal exporter of audiovisual material, while importing very little (Nordenstreng & Varis 1974). Together, these concepts – of center and periphery, of the advantage to industrialized countries of domination, and of the “one-way flow” of audiovisual material internationally – contributed to the charge that in their search for worldwide markets and ideologically sympathetic populations, states and transnational corporations were practicing cultural imperialism.

The name most prominently associated with the cultural imperialism thesis is Herbert Schiller. In Mass communication and American empire he stated that, “Directly by economic control, indirectly by trade and a foreign emulation effect, communications have become a decisive element in the extension of United States world power” (1969, 163). Schiller set forth a fundamental claim of cultural imperialism exponents: that activities labeled as cultural imperialism constituted a threat to “the cultural integrity of weak societies whose national, regional, local or tribal heritages are beginning to be menaced with extinction” (1969, 109).

In his later book Communication and cultural domination, Schiller employed the term “cultural imperialism,” defining it as “the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system.” Mass media, he contended, are the principal vehicle for “shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structure of the dominating center of the system” (1976, 9). In Schiller’s view, this was intentional – US government and business sectors were attempting to mold developing countries’ values and institutions to benefit US objectives.

Related Concepts And Limitations

Other analysts modified and adapted the notion in various ways, often focused on political and institutional relationships. The terms “media imperialism” (Boyd-Barrett 1977) and “electronic colonialism” (McPhail 1981), for example, were coined to describe phenomena recognizable as variants of the cultural imperialism thesis, drawing attention with the labels to the centrality of mass media in the analyses.

Another approach to these questions focused on media content. How to read Donald Duck, a seminal study by European scholar Armand Mattelart and Latin American author Ariel Dorfman, was first published in Chile in 1971. This book parsed Disney comic books distributed in Latin America and found messages of native inferiority that the authors maintained were designed to induce readers to discard their own values and cultural identities, and to accept US superiority.

These diverse analyses both paralleled and intersected international debates about the regulation of media imports in the interest of national development. This controversy pitted the US/UK conception of the “free flow of information,” which promoted unregulated markets in news and entertainment, against many other countries’ insistence on the need for balance in media exchanges, particularly of news. This position was expressed in the UNESCO-based call for a new world information and communication order (NWICO), which centered on concerns recognizably related to cultural imperialism claims. Exemplifying these concerns, the 1980 report of the UNESCO International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems signaled the problems caused by “certain powerful and technologically advanced States [that] exploit their advantages to exercise a form of cultural and ideological domination which jeopardizes the national identity of other countries” (MacBride Commission 2004, 37).

There exist few explicit formulations of cultural imperialism as a theory. John Tomlinson has noted that cultural imperialism is a “generic concept” that has been used as an umbrella term for various propositions that, while related, do not share a precise meaning (1991, 9). Critics have argued not only that the concept lacks a clear definition, but also that it overlooks the complexities of culture and cultural interaction, and disregards the role of audiences in interpreting media texts. Overall, the specific claims of proponents of the cultural imperialism thesis have not been supported by empirical research. As a critical theory, however, cultural imperialism has provided a framework for thinking about global media flows and the power of state and commerce.

In the twenty-first century, the term “cultural imperialism” has been eclipsed. As a way of conceptualizing and analyzing multidirectional cultural interactions, the concept of hybridity has gained attention. Ongoing international trade liberalization and the advent of the Internet have also brought the notion of “globalization” to the fore. The latter has largely supplanted cultural imperialism in discussions of international media flows, with analysts stressing that the concept of media globalization lacks the intentionality implicit in the cultural imperialism thesis.

References:

• Boyd-Barrett, O. (1977). Media imperialism: Towards an international framework for analysis of media systems. In J. Curran, M. Gurevitch, & J. Woollcott (eds.), Mass communication and society. London: Edward Arnold, pp. 116 –135.
• Dorfman, A., & Mattelart, A. (1983). How to read Donald Duck: Imperialist ideology and the Disney comic. New York /Bagnolet: International General.
• Fejes, F. (1981). Media imperialism: An assessment. Media, Culture and Society, 3(3), 281–289.
• Galtung, J. (1971). A structural theory of imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 13(2), 81– 94.
• MacBride Commission (2004). Many voices, one world: Towards a new, more just, and more efficient world information and communication order [Twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the “MacBride Report”]. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• McPhail, T. (1981). Electronic colonialism: The future of international broadcasting and communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
• Nordenstreng, K., & Varis, T. (1974). Television traffic: A one-way street? Paris: UNESCO.
• Schiller, H. I. (1969). Mass communications and American empire. New York: Beacon Press.
• Schiller, H. I. (1976). Communication and cultural domination. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
• Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural imperialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

13.7 Cultural Imperialism

Learning objectives.

• Describe how hegemony applies to different aspects of global culture.
• Identify the attributes of McDonaldization.
• Analyze the ways that local cultures respond to outside forces.

Cultural imperialism was around long before the United States became a world power. In its broadest strokes, imperialism describes the ways that one nation asserts its power over another. Just as imperial Britain economically ruled the American colonists, so did Britain strongly influence the culture of the colonies. The culture was still a mix of nationalities—many Dutch and Germans settled as well—but the ruling majority of ex-Britons led British culture to generally take over.

Today, cultural imperialism tends to describe the United States’ role as a cultural superpower throughout the world. American movie studios are generally much more successful than their foreign counterparts not only because of their business models but also because the concept of Hollywood has become one of the modern worldwide movie business’s defining traits. Multinational, nongovernmental corporations can now drive global culture. This is neither entirely good nor entirely bad. On one hand, foreign cultural institutions can adopt successful American business models, and corporations are largely willing to do whatever makes them the most money in a particular market—whether that means giving local people a shot at making movies, or making multicultural films such as 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire . However, cultural imperialism has potential negative effects as well. From a spread of Western ideals of beauty to the possible decline of local cultures around the world, cultural imperialism can have a quick and devastating effect.

Cultural Hegemony

To begin discussing the topic of cultural imperialism, it is important to look at the ideas of one of its founding theorists, Antonio Gramsci. Strongly influenced by the theories and writings of Karl Marx, Italian philosopher and critic Gramsci originated the idea of cultural hegemony to describe the power of one group over another. Unlike Marx, who believed that the workers of the world would eventually unite and overthrow capitalism, Gramsci instead argued that culture and the media exert such a powerful influence on society that they can actually influence workers to buy into a system that is not economically advantageous to them. This argument that media can influence culture and politics is typified in the notion of the American Dream. In this rags-to-riches tale, hard work and talent can lead to a successful life no matter where one starts. Of course, there is some truth to this, but it is by far the exception rather than the rule.

Marx’s ideas remained at the heart of Gramsci’s beliefs. According to Gramsci’s notion, the hegemons of capitalism—those who control the capital—can assert economic power, while the hegemons of culture can assert cultural power. This concept of culture is rooted in Marxist class struggle, in which one group is dominated by another and conflict arises. Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony is pertinent in the modern day not because of the likelihood of a local property-owning class oppressing the poor, but because of concern that rising globalization will permit one culture to so completely assert its power that it drives out all competitors.

Spreading American Tastes Through McDonaldization

A key danger of cultural imperialism is the possibility that American tastes will crowd out local cultures around the globe. The McDonaldization of the globe applies not just to its namesake, McDonald’s, with its franchises in seemingly every country, but to any industry that applies the technique of McDonald’s on a large scale. Coined by George Ritzer in his book The McDonaldization of Society (1993), the concept is rooted in the process of rationalization. With McDonaldization, four aspects of the business are taken to the extreme: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These four things are four of the main aspects of free markets. Applying the concepts of an optimized financial market to cultural and human items such as food, McDonaldization enforces general standards and consistency throughout a global industry.

Figure 13.6

McDonald’s has opened up many culturally specific versions of its chain, all employing its famous Golden Arches.

Mike Mozart – McDonald’s – CC BY 2.0.

Unsurprisingly, McDonald’s is the prime example of this concept. Although the fast-food restaurant is somewhat different in every country—for example, Indian restaurants offer a pork-free, beef-free menu to accommodate regional religious practices—the same fundamental principles apply in a culturally specific way. The branding of the company is the same wherever it is; the “I’m lovin’ it” slogan is inescapable, and the Golden Arches are, according to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation , “more widely recognized than the Christian cross (Schlosser, 2001).” Yet, more importantly, the business model of McDonald’s stays relatively the same from country to country. Although culturally specific variations exist, any McDonald’s in a particular area has basically the same menu as any other. In other words, wherever a consumer is likely to travel within a reasonable range, the menu options and the resulting product remain consistent.

McDonaldizing Media

Media works in an uncannily similar way to fast food. Just as the automation of fast food—from freeze-dried french fries to prewrapped salads—attempts to lower a product’s marginal costs, thus increasing profits, media outlets seek to achieve a certain degree of consistency that allows them to broadcast and sell the same product throughout the world with minimal changes. The idea that media actually spreads a culture, however, is controversial. In his book Cultural Imperialism , John Tomlinson argues that exported American culture is not necessarily imperialist because it does not push a cultural agenda; it seeks to make money from whatever cultural elements it can throughout the world. According to Tomlinson, “No one really disputes the dominant presence of Western multinational, and particularly American, media in the world: what is doubted is the cultural implications of this presence (Tomlinson, 2001).”

There are, of course, by-products of American cultural exports throughout the world. American cultural mores, such as the Western standard of beauty, have increasingly made it into global media. As early as 1987, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times about a young Chinese woman who was planning to have an operation to make her eyes look rounder, more like the eyes of Caucasian women. Western styles—“newfangled delights like nylon stockings, pierced ears and eye shadow”—also began to replace the austere blue tunics of Mao-era China. The pervasiveness of cultural influence is difficult to track, however, as the young Chinese woman says that she wanted to have the surgery not because of Western looks but because “she thinks they are pretty (Kristof, 1987).”

Cultural Imperialism, Resentment, and Terrorism

Figure 13.7

After September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush framed the issue of terrorism as a cultural conflict as much as a military one.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Not everyone views the spread of American tastes as a negative occurrence. During the early 21st century, much of the United States’s foreign policy stemmed from the idea that spreading freedom, democracy, and free-market capitalism through cultural influence around the world could cause hostile countries such as Iraq to adopt American ways of living and join the United States in the fight against global terrorism and tyranny. Although this plan did not succeed as hoped, it raises the question of whether Americans should truly be concerned about spreading their cultural system if they believe that it is an ideal one.

Speaking after the attacks of September 11, 2001, then-President George W. Bush presented two simple ideas to the U.S. populace: “They [terrorists] hate our freedoms,” and “Go shopping (Bush, 2001).” These twin ideals of personal freedom and economic activity are often held up as the prime exports of American culture. However, the idea that other local beliefs need to change may threaten people of other cultures.

Freedom, Democracy, and Rock ’n’ Roll

The spread of culture works in mysterious ways. Hollywood probably does not actually have a master plan to export the American way of life around the globe and displace local culture, just as American music may not necessarily be a progenitor of democratic government and economic cooperation. Rather, local cultures respond to the outside culture of U.S. media and democracy in many different ways. First of all, media are often much more flexible than believed; the successful exportation of the film Titanic was not an accident in which everyone in the world suddenly wanted to experience movies like an American. Rather, the film’s producers had judged that it would succeed on a world stage just as on a domestic stage. Therefore, in some ways U.S. media have become more widespread, and also more worldwide in focus. It could even be argued that American cultural exports promote intercultural understanding; after all, to sell to a culture, a business must first understand that culture.

By contrast, some local cultures around the world have taken to Western-style business models so greatly that they have created their own hybrid cultures. One well-known example of this is India’s Bollywood film industry. Combining traditional Indian music and dance with American-style filmmaking, Bollywood studios release around 700 major films each year, three times the rate of the major Hollywood studios. India’s largest film industry mixes melodrama with musical interludes, lip-synced by actors but sung by pop stars. These pop songs are disseminated well before a movie’s release, both to build up hype and to enter multiple media markets. Although similar marketing tactics have been employed in the United States, Bollywood seems to have mastered the art of cross-media integration. The music and dance numbers are essentially cinematic forms of music videos, both promoting the soundtrack and adding variety to the film. The numbers also feature many different Indian national languages and a hybrid of Western dance music and Indian classical singing, a certain departure from conventional Western media (Corliss, 1996).

While cultural imperialism might cause resentment in many parts of the world, the idea that local cultures are helpless under the crushing power of American cultural imposition is clearly too simplistic to hold water. Instead, local cultures seem to adopt American-style media models, changing their methods to fit the corporate structures rather than just the aesthetics of U.S. media. These two economic and cultural aspects are clearly intertwined, but the idea of a foreign power unilaterally crushing a native culture does not seem to be entirely true.

Key Takeaways

• Cultural hegemony refers to the power of the dominant culture to overshadow and even overtake local cultures.
• McDonaldization is characterized by efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These four attributes—more than any specific cultural ideas—are the primary features of globalized American businesses.
• Local cultures can respond to outside forces in many ways. In some circumstances, there may be a backlash against what can be seen as a hostile culture. However, cultures such as India have adopted American cultural and economic ideas to create a hybrid of foreign business models and local cultures.

Please respond to the following short-answer writing prompts. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.

• Pick a media company that interests you, such as a magazine, a television station, or a record label. In what ways has this company undergone the process of McDonaldization throughout its history? Has this process made the company more efficient? How so? What, if anything, has been lost because of this process? Why?
• In what ways does the United States act as a cultural hegemon?
• How do local cultures respond to the influence of foreign culture? What are some examples of local cultures resisting the influence of foreign culture? What are some examples where local cultures have embraced foreign culture?

End-of-Chapter Assessment

Review Questions

• What are the three basic business models of media?
• Using the models you listed above, classify the following media industries: book publishing, television broadcasting, and live-event ticketing.
• What are the two ways that media companies make money?
• What is synergy, and how can media companies use it?
• Explain the purpose and influence of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
• What is the effect of digital communication in developing countries?
• How are citizens of developed countries who lack useful Internet access affected?
• What is the digital divide, and who is trying to close it? How?
• How does the information economy differ from the traditional economy?
• What are switching costs?
• How does vertical integration relate to globalized media?
• What effects has technology had on international economics?
• What is globalization, and how does it affect the media?
• How do the media increase profit margins in foreign countries?
• What is hegemony?
• What are the main traits of media McDonaldization?
• Name a positive and a negative way in which culture may respond to an outside force.

Critical Thinking Questions

• How do vertical integration, first copy costs, and the information economy relate to one another?
• How does the digital divide affect developed and developing countries differently? What predictions can you make about its effects in the future?
• How has the Internet changed the value of experience goods?
• Is the application of antitrust legislation to media companies positive or negative? How does having a larger, more efficient media company help society? How does it damage society?
• What is the effect of globalized media on world cultures? Do you think that the current trends will continue, or do you see local cultures reasserting their power? Give examples.

Career Connection

Media now rely heavily on synergy, or cross-platform media distribution. Because of this, one of the industry’s quickly expanding career fields employs people who manage the online outlets of a more traditional media outlet such as radio or television. Although such jobs used to require extensive technological knowledge, modern online project managers, online media editors, and web producers spend much of their time determining how best to display the content online.

In this activity, you will research a media outlet and then answer questions about the choices that the web producer, editor, or manager made regarding its content. Some possible websites to research include the following:

• Time , http://www.time.com/
• Adult Swim , http://www.adultswim.com/
• MSNBC , http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
• BBC , http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Now answer the following questions regarding the site that you picked:

• What sort of multimedia content does the site use that might relate to its main product?
• Is there anything that might not relate to its main product? What might its purpose be?
• How do the editorial decisions of the site reflect the influence of the Internet?
• Are there any online-only content sections of the site? How might these relate to the corporation’s main purpose?

Bush, President George W. address on terrorism before a joint meeting of Congress, New York Times , September 21, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/us/nation-challenged-president-bush-s-address-terrorism-before-joint-meeting.html .

Corliss, Richard. “Hooray for Bollywood!” Time , September 16, 1996, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985129,00.html .

Kristof, Nicholas D. “In China, Beauty Is a Big Western Nose,” New York Times , April 29, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/29/garden/in-china-beauty-is-a-big-western-nose.html .

Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 4.

Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London: Continuum, 2001).

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Bringing imperialism back in: for an anthropology against empire in the twenty-first century

• Original Research
• Open access
• Published: 16 May 2024

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Stephen Campbell 1 &
• Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9648-4334 2  

575 Accesses

8 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

What can a critical analysis of imperialist political economy offer the decolonial turn in the contemporary social sciences? How might revisiting “classic” anti-imperialist thought and politics from the global South push scholars and activists to envision a more revolutionary decolonization? And how, in our discipline’s history, have anthropologists variously opposed or been complicit with the workings of imperialist power? In this article, and in the special issue of Dialectical Anthropology that this article introduces, we engage these questions with a call to bring imperialism “back in” to anthropological research and analysis. Our proposal, however, is not simply for an anthropology of empire, but for an anthropology against empire—a project, that is, not solely of interpreting imperialism, but of aiding its abolition.

Similar content being viewed by others

The Ideological Rhetoric of the Trump Platform and Edmund Burke’s Theory of a Generational Compact

Reading the post kemalism and democracy discussions over the concepts of agonism and antagonism

Introduction: Exploitation, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Misrule in Africa

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Scholarly attention to decolonial thought and practice has surged over the past decade. We can read this trend as demonstrating the efficacy of struggles against racism, Eurocentrism, and settler colonial knowledge production in the academy. As such, it is a welcome development, especially given the historical complicity of Western academic institutions in imperialist and settler colonial projects (Smith 2013 : 64–65). Yet, as Leon Moosavi ( 2020 ) highlights in a review of recent decolonial scholarship, much of this literature remains colored by “Northerncentrism” due to the marginalization of earlier anti-imperialist intellectuals, activists, and militants from the global South.

There are two notable implications arising from this scholarly displacement of earlier “Third World” anti-imperialism. First, as contemporary theorists of decoloniality have turned, instead, to demarcating “alternative epistemic voice,” the result, observes Sujata Patel ( 2021 ), has been the “absence, unfortunately, of political economy, and of a discussion of economic development in decoloniality.” Second, decolonial theorizing grounded in the settler colonial experience has not had to confront, argues Mahmood Mamdani ( 2021 ), the historical lessons of indirect colonial rule, whereby late nineteenth century colonial ideologues shifted their self-rationalizing from an assimilative “civilizing mission” to a protectionist mandate ostensibly geared to conserving culturally defined native identities threatened by the disruptions of colonial modernity. An understanding of the latter is pertinent because of how a non-Western traditionalism can align with the colonial project—even mask imperial relations—and because the neocolonial arrangement that replaced formal colonialism is itself a variant of indirect rule (Nkrumah 1965 ; Rodney 1990 : 59).

For anthropology, it was under the influence of mid-twentieth century Asian and African national liberation movements that disciplinary anti-imperialism achieved its greatest influence. In 1968, Kathleen Gough published “Anthropology and Imperialism,” wherein she argued that anthropologists had “failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even to adequately explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied” (Gough 1968 : 19). Shortly thereafter, Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen ( 1970 ) penned “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” wherein they denounced the participation of professional anthropologists in US counterinsurgency operations. Subsequently, in 1973, Talal Asad published his influential volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter . A central argument of Asad’s ( 1973 : 13–15) contribution is that, by analyzing tribal units as discrete socio-cultural wholes, British social anthropologists had conceptually erased from their ethnographies the imperial relations undergirding indirect colonial rule. We argue that these precedents remain relevant for not only an anthropology of empire, but an anthropology against empire in the twenty-first century. That is what we call for in today’s imperial present.

Such an anthropology is imperative because the present is indeed marked by a reckless Western imperialism rationalized on humanitarian and emancipatory grounds. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has led many Euro-American “progressives” to endorse the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—an imperialist institution that, a decade prior, carried out its own murderous invasion of Libya for the purpose of regime change (Prashad 2012 ). In Gaza, unabashed Western support for Israel’s post-October 2023 genocidal violence against Palestinians—disingenuously framed as self-defense—has aimed to consolidate a Euro-American imperialist outpost in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is militarily active in 38 countries across the African continent, creating a constellation of armed units deployed to secure Euro-American extractive industries (Abdulhamid 2022 ). And in East and Southeast Asia, the United States has doubled down on its regional militarization to counter an economically ascendant China (Foster 2021 ). Yet multipolarity presents no automatic defense against the inter-capitalist competition that continues to drive rivalries between, for instance, the US, China, and Russia (Li 2023 ). States, even when developmental, do not necessarily offer a bulwark against imperialism. They instead often mediate, even intensify, the valorization of capital across time and space (Arboleda 2020 ). As Lenin ( 1916 ) argued, and as remains the case while the US, China, and other powers continue to export over-accumulated capital, inter-capitalist competition shades into inter-imperial rivalry (Hung 2021 ). Hence, it is not ideological differences between multiple states but rather sharpening antagonisms within the capitalist world system—imperialism’s political economy, in short—that provides our contemporary point of entry.

There has in recent years been renewed interest in theorizing present-day imperialism as an extractive relation (Cope 2019 ; Katz 2022 ; Patnaik and Patnaik 2016 ; Smith 2016 ; Suwandi 2019 ). In anthropology, however, notwithstanding a surge in writing on decolonization, a focus on imperialism per se remains minimal (see Price 2016 ; Lutz 2009 ; Neveling and Steur 2018 ; Krupa 2022 : 47–55). Moreover, prominent recent anthropological theorizing around imperialism (e.g., Stoler 2016 ; McGranahan and Collins 2018 ), has concerned itself with current disciplinary interests—with performativity, governmentality, and affect, for example—while shying away from the imperialist political economy that vexed an earlier generation of “Third World” revolutionaries.

With these concerns in mind, we advocate bringing imperialism, as a specifically capitalist formation, “back in” to contemporary anthropological research and analysis. In conjunction, we call for revisiting “anti-imperialist theory from the South” as a conceptual resource for developing a renewed anthropology of and against empire in the present. The special issue of Dialectical Anthropology that this article introduces advances this political-intellectual project. We argue, in this introductory article, for anthropological engagement with imperialist political economy, and for centering in this endeavor “Southern” anti-imperialist thought. The articles composing the body of this special issue thus put contemporary empirical data in conversation with anti-imperialist “theory from the South”—with the classic critiques of “Third World” anticolonial revolutionaries and/or with more recent radical Southern political economic theorizing.

In what follows, we make a general case for the enduring relevance—in anthropology, specifically—of engaging the political economy of imperialism in the present, and, in doing so, of centering anti-imperialist theory from the South. We proceed by sketching the ways imperialism operates as an economic formation. We then connect this understanding of imperialist political economy to an analysis of neocolonialism as a political formation akin to indirect colonial rule. Finally, we advance a historical materialist justification for a specifically “Southern” perspective on global political economic theorizing. But we note, as well, that “theory from the South” has not always been emancipatory (Raza 2022 ). Moreover, in an interconnected world, no theory anywhere has developed autonomously; no epistemology is an island. As with social theory more generally, “Southern” anti-imperialist thought has developed in response to particular local conditions, and through critical and creative engagement with exogenous ideas. The result has been manifold dialogic elaborations of critical theory—aimed, in the case at hand, at interrogating the extractive relations and social dynamics of present-day imperialism. “Southern” in our usage thus denotes less a geopolitical location than a relational political perspective.

Imperialism as an economic formation

Imperialism has its political, economic, ideological, and other dimensions, none of which can be adequately understood in isolation. Here, however, we attend to contemporary imperialism as a specifically capitalist formation. For there is, argues Priyamvada Gopal ( 2021 ), “no colonization without capitalism”—at least, no colonization in its historical Euro-American manifestations. This understanding informs Gopal’s ( 2021 ) assertion that any effective decolonial project requires “taking on the rule of political economy and the rule of capitalism as the fundamental system.” Vijay Prashad states as much succinctly. “The only real decolonization,” he argues, “is anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. You cannot decolonize your mind unless you also decolonize the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality” (Prashad 2022 ).

Conversely, however, capitalist political economy has, from the start, been inseparable from the racial ideologies and coercive imperialist practices deployed to sustain it. This constitutive relation between capitalism and imperialism—which Rosa Luxemburg ( 2003 ) put at the forefront of Marxist theory and practice—challenges narrowly economistic conceptions of capitalism that treat colonialism and racial violence as epiphenomenal (e.g., Wood 2002 ). Thus, “capitalism without imperialism,” argue Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik ( 2016 : 85), “is an impossibility.” Here, the Patnaiks diverge from Lenin’s ( 1916 ) more well-known formulation: that imperialism is but capitalism’s highest stage. Insofar as this is a debate, we side with the Patnaiks. We side, as well, with Gerald Horne ( 2018 ), who locates the enabling conditions of early Euro-American industrial transformation in the mass enslavement of Africans, in the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and in colonial plunder more broadly. Or, as Marx ( 1976 : 915) put it,

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Such “extra-economic” practices of so-called primitive accumulation have persisted throughout capitalism’s history. Imperialism, consequently, can be defined succinctly as racial capitalism (Gopal 2022 )—a definition that helpfully illuminates connections between imperialism at a global level and racialized “internal colonialism” within particular countries. Stated otherwise, the violent social production of racial difference has been essential, historically, to processes of capital accumulation (Roediger and Esch 2012 ).

Capitalism being so understood requires anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the fight against white supremacy and exclusionary border regimes to be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics. For while imperialism as an economic formation entails an unequal transnational transfer of value, such transfers do more than enrich metropolitan capital. They also serve politically to subsidize consumption and to finance social welfare arrangements in imperialist nations, thereby mitigating metropolitan working-class discontent (Smith 2016 : 215, 314). Consequently, any metropolitan leftist or working-class movement that aims at merely redistribution in one country remains but a politics of social imperialism and class compromise—the collaborationist pursuit of an exclusionary racist welfare state built on the back of imperialist violence and exploitation elsewhere (Cope 2019 : 173). Such metropolitan left nationalism manifests domestically where demands for social welfare and labor protections exclude migrant workers and informal laborers in a de facto racially segmented labor market (Walia 2021 : 84, 202).

As mechanisms facilitating the imperialist transfer of value to the metropole, Zak Cope ( 2019 : 2) lists colonial tribute, monopoly rents, and unequal exchange. The first of these—colonial tribute—refers to “classic” colonial plunder. It is such plunder that has, since Marx, earned the moniker of so-called primitive accumulation. It has included the enforced labor of enslaved Africans on “New World” plantations, which financed Western European capitalist industrialization (Williams 1944 ; Mintz 1985 : 66). It has included, as well, coerced Indigenous labor in Latin American mines, such as Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, which served as mercantile Spain’s primary source of silver from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but which consumed over that same period some eight million Indigenous lives (Galeano 1973 : 38–41). It is also seen in France’s enforced levy on Haiti of millions of francs as “reparations” to former enslavers following the latter country’s revolutionary self-emancipation (Méheut 2022 ). And as a contemporary example, we see such coercive expropriation of resources in military-backed land concessions to transnational corporations, such as those that operate Indonesia’s massive oil palm plantations (Li and Semedi 2022 : 2, 7–8).

Samir Amin ( 2012 ) defined monopoly rents—the second mechanism of imperialist value transfer—as “the superprofits of multinational corporations,” which are obtained through exploitation of peripheral laborers remunerated with depressed wages. In such arrangements, wage differentials between peripheral and metropolitan workers go beyond differences in the productivity of labor power. The disproportionate depression of peripheral wages results, instead, from repressive Southern labor regimes and the begetting, through depeasantization without absorption into formal employment, of a large reserve army of workers. The effect is to put downward pressure on the wages of peripheral workers who labor in global supply chains and who produce subsidized commodities for metropolitan markets (Smith 2016 : 237). The imperialist dynamic here is one of “super-exploitation”—a phenomenon whereby peripheral workers are remunerated below the value of their labor power (Marini 2022 : 132). To illustrate, Indonesian sociologist Intan Suwandi ( 2019 : 98–150) highlights the case of low-waged garment workers laboring under restrictive conditions in Indonesia’s export factories—an arrangement enabling metropolitan superprofits under what Suwandi calls “the new economic imperialism.”

Finally, unequal exchange as a mechanism of imperialist value transfer refers to the inequalities embedded in international trade. In his seminal 1973 monograph, The Dialectics of Dependency , Brazilian revolutionary Ruy Mauro Marini ( 2022 : 140) located the conditions of unequal exchange in Latin America’s specialized production of raw materials and foodstuffs for export, alongside its dependence on the import of manufactured goods. Yet, given the subsequent large-scale relocation of industrial manufacturing to sites of depressed wages in the South since the 1970s, Cope ( 2019 : 77) restates, as follows, the concept of unequal exchange in more general terms: “on the world market the poor nations are obliged to sell the product of a relatively large number of hours of labor in order to obtain in exchange from the rich nations the product of a small number of hours of labor.” It is within this relationship that Cope ( 2019 : 47) locates, as well, the contemporary export to poorer nations of the metropole’s “ecological footprints.”

Combined, these mechanisms of imperialist value transfer undermine the possibility of economic convergence between “developing” and “developed” nations. What occurs instead is the “development of underdevelopment” in countries that remain subordinated under relations of political economic dependency (Frank 1967 : 145). Walter Rodney ( 1972 : 30) summarized the effects of this dynamic as follows:

Throughout the period that Africa has participated in the capitalist economy, two factors have brought about underdevelopment. In the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential, which is what development is all about.

This imperialist transfer of value to the metropole requires enabling political conditions. Yet, the particular political arrangements developed to facilitate such value transfer have shifted historically, primarily in response to national liberation movements and collective struggles by sundry laborers in the subordinated periphery, as we examine in the following section.

Imperialism as a political formation

As an uneven transnational political formation, imperialism entails simultaneous tendencies toward a relatively more expansive hegemony in the metropolitan core (subsidized by imperialist profits), alongside greater constraints on the scope and robustness of any hegemonic compromise in the periphery. A caveat to this is that there are always “peripheries in the core and cores in the periphery” (Buzan and Lawson 2015 : 9). The latter fact does not undermine an analytic of imperialism. It instead illuminates one of imperialism’s critical enabling dynamics: incorporation of peripheral elites, alongside hegemonic exclusion of under-privileged segments of the metropolitan working class. This understanding preempts critiques of one-dimensional conceptions of empire.

In a critical intervention on contemporary analyses of imperialism, Al-Bulushi et al. ( 2022 ) highlight certain recurring analytical shortcomings. Such analyses, they note, tend to narrowly privilege the agency of US empire. Global South states are then conceptualized “merely as ‘proxies,’ or as passive recipients of ‘global’ designs” (Al-Bulushi et al. 2022 : 3). Taking the argument further, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò ( 2022 : 38, 180) outright rejects the concept of neocolonialism on the grounds that it neglects the agency of Southern elites—individuals who thus get construed as “dupes” of imperialist machinations. This charge is not new. But neither is the more sophisticated counterargument that the agency of peripheral elites has long been pivotal to reproducing imperialist relations.

Endeavoring, in the 1970s, to avoid a one-sided position in debates over “endogenist” versus “exogenist” accounts of geopolitical inequality, Marini ( 2022 : 152–153) introduced the concept of subimperialism. His aim was to highlight the “autonomous geopolitical role” that the Brazilian ruling class had asserted in striving to project its political and economic power in the region, thereby positioning itself as “a partner, not a puppet, of Washington” (Katz 2022 : 64). But even in peripheral states with less geopolitical autonomy, the agency of comprador classes has long been acknowledged. A caveat, however, is that comprador elites and peripheral ruling classes have themselves been cultivated by imperialist powers. What is especially significant is that this cultivation has been a countermeasure to anti-imperialist movements by popular classes in the periphery.

Following his 1965 ouster from Ghana’s presidency in a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coup, Kwame Nkrumah penned an incisive account of the emergence of comprador classes across the African continent. Confronting mass movements against a dying colonialism, European powers, explained Nkrumah ( 1970 : 56), responded by grooming “a new African elite, closely linked with foreign capital.” Such individuals saw their personal interests served through continued foreign investment under the exploitative geopolitical arrangement that followed formal independence. Frantz Fanon ( 1963 : 163, 155) likewise decried this comprador complicity. And Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o took up Nkrumah’s and Fanon’s arguments in his repudiation of African intellectuals who reproduced neocolonial ideology on the continent. The African “petty bourgeoisie born of the colonial schools and universities,” Ngũgĩ ( 1986 : 20) wrote, “looked forward to a permanent alliance with imperialism in which it played the role of an intermediary between the bourgeoisie of the Western metropolis and the people of the colonies.”

More generally, neocolonialism, Nkrumah ( 1965 : 227) argued, is a geopolitical configuration in which metropolitan states employ political, economic, military, or other means to enforce—against the interests of another, nominally independent, country’s citizenry—unequal transnational relations of value extraction. Such means include direct and indirect military interventions, like the coup that ousted Nkrumah; targeted killings, like the 1961 US- and Belgian-orchestrated assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; and campaigns of mass murder, like the 1965–66 US-sponsored anti-communist genocide in Indonesia. But they also entail, insisted Burkinabé President Thomas Sankara ( 1988 : 65–66, 119–123), conditional loans and donor-driven aid that reproduce relations of political economic dependency. Ultimately, quipped Rodney ( 1990 : 59), neocolonialism was a means to “Africanize exploitation” by propping up client states amenable to metropolitan capital.

So understood, neocolonialism operates as a form of indirect rule through a “native” ruling class. The parallels with the historical emergence of indirect colonial rule are instructive (Campbell 2024 ). For as with neocolonialism in Nkrumah’s analysis, indirect colonial rule was likewise a reaction to mass anticolonial struggle—most critically, to the 1857 revolt of over 130,000 sepoys in colonial India. The revolt laid bare, to the self-assured, if briefly bewildered, British, that something was amiss in the colonial logic. For Scottish jurist Henry Maine, it was a moment of epiphany, as Mahmood Mamdani ( 2012 : 6–42) has argued at length. The British error, Maine contended at the time, lay not in the imperial project per se, but in the assimilative “civilizing mission”—a misguided attempt to assert “universal civilization” over “local custom” in the colonies (Mamdani 2012 : 6). In so arguing, Maine established the conceptual basis for indirect colonial rule and shaped British colonial administration for decades to come.

But the introduction of indirect rule was not, Mamdani ( 1996 ) argues elsewhere, due to some ethical turn in the imperial conscience. It was on the one hand a concession to insurrection in the colonies meant to hedge against further revolt. But in that way, it was also a recuperation of anticolonial desires within a spurious autonomy. That is to say, direct and indirect rules were not, for European powers, distinct political alternatives. They were instead “complementary ways of native control” whose divergent patterns of property relations accorded with the disparate interests of, in the case of direct rule, agrarian capital, and, in the case of indirect rule, mining, finance, and commerce (Mamdani 1996 : 18) Where, for example, colonial rulers demarcated inalienable native reserves, the resulting semi-proletarian conditions functioned to subsidize migrant wage labor (Wolpe 1972 ).

Interwar anthropologists seeking to forestall cultural change among colonized populations likewise endorsed a shift to indirect rule through “traditional” elites, rather than an abolition of imperialism per se. For having conceptualized “tribes” as discrete units of analysis, British anthropologists, like Malinowski, saw colonial-era African socio-cultural transformation as but a process of cultural “disintegration,” for which the “cure” was “re-integration”—the restoration of an authentic precolonial unity (Feuchtwang 1973 : 96). Yet indirect rule was also, for Malinowski and other like-minded European anthropologists, a means to undercut the more revolutionary of anticolonial movements (James 1973 : 54). For “the object” of indirect rule, Malinowski proposed, “is to create in Native authority a devoted and dependable ally, controlled, but strong, wealthy and satisfied” (quoted in Feuchtwang 1973 : 92). Under this indirect arrangement, “non-Western tradition” marked not a site outside coloniality, but instead an alternative modality of colonial rule (Mamdani 1996 : 18).

It was upon recognizing the limits of formal independence under enduring, if indirect, imperialist relations, that “Third World” radicals demanded a more revolutionary decolonization—one that would abolish neocolonial political economy and its enabling class structure. Thus argued Rodney ( 2022 : 297) in the 1970s:

One has to give a social content, an ideological content to the program for decolonization. Whereas decolonization was, some years ago, understood as Africanization, one now has to talk about socialism as an integral part—not a later stage—of the very process of decolonization itself. Without speaking about reorganizing the class relations within Africa, one is not in fact addressing oneself to cutting the reproduction of capitalism as it has reproduced itself in Africa over the last five decades or more.

A comprador class is thus neocolonialism’s political condition of possibility in the periphery. In the metropole, meanwhile, the political formation enabling imperialism is a more expansive hegemony—a collaborationist class compromise between metropolitan capital and the more privileged segments of the metropolitan working class.

Theorizing imperialism from the periphery of an uneven world-system

Critical of the “elitist paternalism” of Latin American studies coming out of the United States, Marini proposed, as a corrective, privileging a view “from the periphery” (cited in Katz 2022 : 66). It was a position he justified on historical materialist grounds, as global political economic unevenness fostered divergent tendencies in regional knowledge production. Brazilian dependency theorist Theotônio dos Santos adopted similar reasoning when seeking to re-theorize imperialism from the specificity of the Latin American experience (ibid.). As revolutionary socialists, Marini and dos Santos were not advocating an ideologically ambivalent “theory from the South.” They were instead calling for historical materialist theorizing that attends seriously to the particularity of peripheralized nations. For the periphery offers a critical vantage point from which to scrutinize the workings of imperialist political economy.

In contemporary scholarship, the concept of the Global South has largely displaced that of the periphery. As a corrective to the political economic flattening that came with post-Cold War globalization boosterism, the language of Global South and North has helped to maintain a focus on enduring global inequality (Al-Bulushi, Grewal, and Ghosh 2022 : 2). Where we employ herein the term “Global South,” we imply a conceptual overlap with “periphery.” But we note that this overlap is imperfect, as talk of the “South” excludes peripheries in the North, such as much of eastern Europe (Kojanić 2020 ). And certain Southern polities, like Singapore, though once formally colonized, are now centers of global capital accumulation in their own right. “Southern” in our usage thus denotes less a geopolitical location than a relational political perspective.

Centering the specificity of peripheralized nations challenges a Eurocentric Marxism that presumes metropolitan political economy and “free” wage workers to be axiomatic of capitalism in general (e.g., Chibber 2013 ; Teschke 2003 : 141, 256). But such theorizing from the periphery is not a parochial fetishism of the particular. Nor is it a blanket rejection of “universal” political projects. It is rather a necessary step in the dialogic construction of a more “worldly” historical materialism (Ali and Raza 2022 ).

In his 1977 monograph, The Myth of the Lazy Native , Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas centered the particularity of Southeast Asian colonial political economy to theorize, drawing on Marx, a novel conception of “colonial capitalism.” Given extensive agrarian smallholdings among the Southeast Asian peasantry, and thus their limited market dependence, colonial plantation owners, mine operators, and administrators were frustrated in their attempts to mobilize “free” native wage labor. They therefore mobilized labor, instead, under assorted coerced, indentured, or otherwise “semi-free” arrangements (Alatas 1977 : 2). But this coercive mobilization of labor for capitalist production was at odds with the ideology of “freedom” used within Europe to legitimate the exploitation of “free” wage workers. The “myth of the lazy native” was therefore introduced to assuage metropolitan colonial guilt—“to justify [to a European audience] compulsion and unjust practices in the mobilization of labour in the colonies” (Alatas 1977 : 20). In this way, the myth of native laziness kept unsullied the metropolitan ideology that capitalism demarcated a realm of freedom, or at least of freedom of contract.

Alatas wrote of a specifically colonial form of capitalism. But this was not a discrete unit of analysis. For capitalism in the colonies and capitalism in the metropole were mutually constituted. Atlantic slavery, for instance, was integral to the financing of European industrialization, as C.L.R. James ( 1989 [1963]: 8) and Eric Williams ( 1944 ) both recognized. Sidney Mintz ( 1985 : 51–52) added that the regimentation of enslaved labor on Caribbean plantations served as the organizational model for industrial labor regimes in European factories. Lisa Lowe ( 2015 : 3) has gone further in arguing that the unfreedoms of racialized slavery and indenture in the colonies subsidized and thus enabled hegemonic liberalism in the metropole. Despotic colonial labor regimes were thus a constitutive condition of possibility for the emergence of a Euro-American liberal labor compact, which underwrote metropolitan working-class collaboration with the imperialist bourgeoisie. This argument has a notable precedent. “The veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe,” wrote Marx ( 1976 : 925), “needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

The political economic particularity of the periphery is not limited to the historical unfreedoms of slavery and indenture. Notably, the prevalence in Republican China of the peasantry over the urban, industrial working-class informed Mao Zedong’s tactical emphasis on peasant mobilization (Wang 2010 : 63). And in the contemporary Global South, we find, along with an enduring peasantry, forms of (often racialized and gendered) petty commodity production, debt bondage, disguised wage labor, human trafficking, coerced child labor, and sundry other informal arrangements, all of which diverge from the so-called standard employment relationship (Campbell 2022 ). Indeed, across the Global South, the so-called standard employment relationship has never in fact been standard (Breman 2013 ; Munck 2013 ). “The very term ‘working class’,” reflected Rodney ( 1990 : 1) on his native Guyana, “has to be liberally or creatively interpreted in our own situation. We have very few workers directly in production in the kind of way that is implied by the Marxist model.”

The South’s importance obviously goes beyond its political economic particularity. And every anti-imperialist struggle is a priority in itself. But where “peripheral” exploitation and expropriation subsidize metropolitan bourgeois hegemony, such struggles take on added global significance. National liberation struggles that break the imperial relation weaken the enemy of anti-imperialist struggles elsewhere. They undermine, as well, the material basis of the metropolitan hegemonic compromise. Thus wrote C.L.R. James ( 2012 : 106) on the world-historical implications of revolutionary Pan-Africanism: “The African bruises and breaks himself against his bars in the interest of freedoms wider than his own.” By contrast, metropolitan leftist or working-class movements that aim at merely redistribution in one country have repeatedly fallen into a politics of social imperialism, whereby welfarist demands are predicated on enduring imperialist violence and exploitation elsewhere. Recognizing the universal ramifications of “particular” anti-imperialist struggles upends the Eurocentric claim that workers in “advanced” countries are the critical protagonists of world revolution. Even as estimable a leftist as Mike Davis fell into this misguided view. “Revolutions of the poor in backward countries can reach for the stars,” wrote Davis ( 2020 :146), “but only the proletariat in advanced countries can actually grasp the future.” Such claims neglect the fact that every twentieth century revolution occurred, not in core hegemonized imperialist nations, but in the periphery—“in the regions encumbered by the most acute capitalist imbalances” (Katz 2022 : 141). It remains for the relatively privileged segments of the metropolitan working class to recognize that their own emancipation must pass through the revolutionary national liberation movements of others.

Southern militants have, moreover, effectively drawn on endogenous radical traditions to advance revolutionary projects—traditions not limited to the emergent habitus of an urban industrial proletariat. It is a misplaced Eurocentric orthodoxy that dismisses such a move as atavistic (e.g., Táíwò 2022 : 87), or which posits an essential dichotomy between “modern” and “backward-looking” elements in a revolutionary movement (Fick 1991 : 250). For whatever the role of French republican discourse in the Haitian revolution (Scott 2018 : 75), the “agricultural egalitarianism” that energized the aspirations of those who emancipated themselves from slavery was informed, primarily, by their repudiation of the plantation system, “their own African origins and the desire to define their lives through their relationship to the land” (Fick 1991 : 250). The outcome was a novel universalism conceptualized around the post-revolutionary establishment of an autonomous smallholding peasantry (Getachew 2016 ). Meanwhile, leftist Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré drew much from Marx. But he also urged his compatriots to “go down to the grassroots of our culture, not to remain there, not to be isolated there, but to draw strength and substance there from, and with whatever additional sources of strength and material we acquire, proceed to set up a new form of society raised to the level of human progress” (quoted in Amoah 1989 : 37). Along similar lines, early twentieth century Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui abjured his contemporaries’ restrictive orthodox privileging of an urban industrial working class—a strategic focus that missed the critical political vitality of Indigenous people’s ongoing struggles for liberation in the country. “The hope of the Indian,” wrote Mariátegui ( 2022 : 47), “is absolutely revolutionary.” Such an embrace of endogenous radical traditions is not, in itself, atavistic. Taking such traditions seriously is, moreover, a critical step in theorizing imperialism “from the periphery” as a dynamic social formation.

From erasures of imperialism to an anthropology against empire

Disciplinary anthropology is a child of imperialism. That is, European colonization was from the start both a stimulus and condition of possibility for ethnographic research by professional European anthropologists. Yet, prior to the formal independence of countries across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, anthropologists rarely scrutinized the workings of colonialism in their published ethnographies (but see Gluckman 1940 for an important exception). Instead, particular populations living under colonial rule were theorized as discrete units of analysis (as “tribes,” for example), conceptually independent of colonial violence, capitalist relations, supra-local population dynamics, and world history more generally (Wolf 1982 : 4, 13–14).

Among the most egregious examples of such anthropological erasures is E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 ethnography, The Nuer . Evans-Pritchard, to his credit, was open about his political partisanship. “My study of the Nuer,” Evans-Pritchard ( 1940 : vii) acknowledged, “was undertaken at the request of, and was mainly financed by, the [British colonial] Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which also contributed generously towards the publication of its results.” That colonial violence was a matter of concern to the Nuer is a fact the author also made clear. Writes Evans-Pritchard ( 1940 : 11): the “recent defeat [of the Nuer] by [colonial] Government forces and the measures taken to ensure their final submission had occasioned deep resentment… When I entered a cattle camp it was not only as a stranger but as an enemy, and they seldom tried to conceal their disgust at my presence, refusing to answer my greetings and even turning away when I addressed them.” Yet, having briefly noted the central fact of imperialist violence, Evans-Pritchard excludes it as a constitutive dimension in the lives of the Nuer—that is, as a phenomenon worthy of anthropological inquiry.

With the formal independence of most colonized countries, few anthropologists would openly defend colonial rule. Yet, David Price ( 2016 ) makes clear in Cold War Anthropology that anthropologists continued to be enrolled in the service of empire, albeit an empire now structured around neocolonialism. The case of Clifford Geertz is illustrative. Price ( 2016 : 96–98, 128–130, 378) documents how the CIA funded, as part of a broader anti-communist strategy, Geertz’s fieldwork in newly independent Indonesia, the results of which Geertz published in his 1963 monograph, Agricultural Involution . The book is a Rostovian critique of Sukarno’s socialist policies, in which Geertz blamed the country’s poverty on collectivist ideology, downplayed the impact of colonial plunder and Cold War “relations of dependency,” and called “for Western administrators to interrupt the Javanese involuted economic stagnation” (Price 2016 : 97; see Geertz 1963 : 80, 153). Two years after the book’s publication, the US-backed Indonesian army ousted Sukarno, massacred up to a million Indonesians, and installed General Suharto as a US client (Bevins 2020 : 155). Geertz later claimed he was unaware the CIA had funded his research (Price 2016 : 96).

Geertz may have indeed been unaware of the origins of his fieldwork funding. But he was being consistent with disciplinary anthropology’s willful obliviousness to the imperialist context of ethnographic research (Roseberry 1982 ). This is a pattern of ethnographic myopia to which Orin Starn called attention in his critique of the romantically inclined Andean anthropology that preceded the 1980 eruption of the Shining Path insurrection in Peru. “Most anthropologists,” writes Starn ( 1991 : 64), “were remarkably unattuned to the conditions which made possible the rise of Sendero.” Peruvian general Francisco Morales Bermúdez had, in 1975, seized power in a coup, and then steered the country into closer alignment with US foreign policy and away from his predecessor’s progressive social and economic reforms. The ensuing deterioration of economic conditions for peasants and the working class catalyzed mass street protests and a nationwide general strike (Walker 2020 ). Facing this opposition, Bermúdez declared a state of emergency, criminalized strikes, and signed on to Operation Condor—a US-backed campaign of terrorist repression that murdered or disappeared tens of thousands of leftists and social activists across South America in the 1970s and 80s. Yet, through it all, anthropologists, writes Starn ( 1991 : 64), “largely overlooked the climate of sharp unrest across [Peru’s] impoverished countryside,” while portraying “contemporary highland peasants as outside the flow of modern history.” Anthropologists, in short, were “missing the revolution” (Starn 1991 : 63).

To be sure, there has over the past decade-plus been a surge in anthropological writing on decolonization (see Gupta and Stoolman 2022 for an overview). There have also been important anthropological interventions centering imperialism as a specifically political economic formation (Krupa 2022 : 47–55; Neveling and Steur 2018 ). Yet, the latter interventions remain overshadowed by an emphasis on decolonization as an epistemological project (Patel 2021 ) and by an enduring disciplinary emphasis on cultural forms disconnected from the imperialist political economy with which they are dialectically imbricated. Consequently, “decolonization” in anthropology risks is being reduced to a synonym for cultural relativism (Gupta and Stoolman 2022 : 781), while imperialism’s political economic structures go unchallenged.

What we see, then, throughout anthropology’s disciplinary history, is a recurring erasure of imperialism as a constitutive dimension in the lives of individuals being researched. It is, in a way, to invoke Michel-Rolph Trouillot ( 1995 ), a silencing of the past. But it is a silencing unfolding simultaneously with the historical process in question. To erase imperialism from anthropological analysis is to be complicit with imperialist denial. It is also to hinder a broader public understanding of the socio-political dynamics that connect readers to the lives of those about whom they read, especially in cases of metropolitan audiences reading of those impacted by imperialist violence. A pressing example is the malicious mischaracterization of increased migration and asylum applications to Northern states as being indicative of a “migrant crisis” rather than as (correctly) a “displacement crisis” (Walia 2022 )—a displacement crisis fueled by prior and ongoing imperialist interventions. Thus writes Harsha Walia ( 2021 : 3) regarding population movements to and across the Mexico-US border:

A long arc of dirty colonial coups, capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, climate change, and enforced oppression is the primary driver of displacement from Mexico and Central America. Migration is a predictable consequence of these displacements, yet today the US is fortifying its border against the very people impacted by its own policies.

The articles included in this special issue challenge such erasures of imperialism. They foreground the political and economic dimensions of empire across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They trace histories of imperialist violence and extraction. And they attend to the critical theorizing of empire by Southern revolutionaries who have confronted imperialist aggression. In his article on “just transition” loans to promote decarbonization in South Africa, Thomas McNamara points out that both climate change and the neoliberal responses proposed to address it have been driven by the interests of established imperialist powers. This unequal relationship has prompted opposition within South Africa to decarbonization and has undermined efforts to tackle climate change at a global level. Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung and Stephen Campbell, in their article, review a tradition of radical thought and practice in Myanmar from the colonial period to the present. The country’s radical politics, they argue, have developed historically in relation to a reactive and reactionary imperial world order. Emma Banks then turns in her article to recent “community consultations” over extractive industries in Colombia—specifically, regarding environmental harms from the Cerrejón coal mine, which is jointly owned by Glencore (Swiss), BHP (Australian), and AngloAmerican (British). Banks finds that the technocratic constraints placed on these “consultations”—set by transnational organizations like the World Bank—have enabled foreign corporations, like those that own Cerrejón, to co-opt the consultative process and ride rough shod over the concerns of local Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups harmed by extractive industries, like coal mining. Lastly, Steve Striffler closes off this collection with a Coda in which he reflects on the contributed articles and on the enduring relevance of anti-imperialist analysis and politics within the discipline of anthropology. In sum, the articles collected in this special issue advance an anthropology not simply of empire, but against it—a project that seeks not just to interpret imperialism, but to aid in its abolition.

Abdulhamid, Farid. 2022. “Why NATO’s wars should worry Africa,” Review of African Political Economy , October 27, https://roape.net/2022/10/27/why-natos-wars-should-worry-africa/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Alatas, Syed Hussain. 1977. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism . Abigdon: Frank Cass and Company Limited.

Al-Bulushi, Samar, Sahana Ghosh, and Inderpal Grewal. 2022. Security from the south: Postcolonial and imperial entanglements. Social Text 40 (3): 1–15.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ali, Noaman, and Shozab Raza. 2022. Worldly Marxism: Rethinking revolution from Pakistan’s peripheries. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 42 (2): 489–504.

Amin, Samir. 2012. The surplus in monopoly capitalism and the imperialist rent. Monthly Review , July 1. https://monthlyreview.org/2012/07/01/the-surplus-in-monopoly-capitalism-and-the-imperialist-rent/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Amoah, Osei. 1989. A Political Dictionary of Black Quotations Reflecting the Black Man’s Dreams, Hopes, Visions . London: Oyokoanyinaase House.

Google Scholar  

Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism . New York: Verso.

Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter . New York: Humanities Press.

Bevins, Vincent. 2020. The Jakarta Method Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World . New York: Public Affairs.

Breman, Jan. 2013. A bogus concept? New Left Review 84: 130–138.

Buzan, Barry, and George Lawson. 2015. The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Campbell, Stephen. 2022. Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Campbell, Stephen. 2024. In defence of ideological struggle against neocolonial self-justifications: Revisiting Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter amid the decolonial turn. Anthropological Theory 24 (1): 3–18.

Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital . New York: Verso.

Cope, Zak. 2019. The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer . London: Pluto Press.

Davis, Mike. 2020. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory . New York: Verso.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. Wretched of the Earth . Paris: Présence Africaine.

Feuchtwang, Stephen. 1973. The discipline and its sponsors. In Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter , ed. Talal Asad, 71–102. London: Ithaca Press.

Fick, Carolyn E. 1991. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Foster, John Bellamy. 2021. The New Cold War on China. Monthly Review 7 (3): 1–20.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Galeano, Eduardo. 1973. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Getachew, Adom. 2016. Universalism after the post-colonial turn. Political Theory 44 (6): 821–845.

Gluckman, Max. 1940. An analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand. Bantu Studies 14 (1): 1–30.

Gopal, Priyamvada. 2021. A demanding relationship with history: A conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. Los Angeles Review of Books . 30 August. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-demanding-relationship-with-history-a-conversation-with-priyamvada-gopal/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Gopal, Priyamvada. 2022. Empire and its enemies: A conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. Jamhoor . 8 August. https://www.jamhoor.org/read/empire-and-its-enemies-a-conversation-with-priyamvada-gopal .

Gough, Kathleen. 1968. Anthropology and imperialism. Monthly Review 19 (11): 12–27.

Gupta, Akhil, and Jessie Stoolman. 2022. Decolonizing US anthropology. American Anthropologist 124 (4): 647–925.

Horne, Gerald. 2018. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hung, Ho-Fung. 2021. Rereading Lenin’s Imperialism at the Time of the US-China Rivalry. Specter Journal. Fall. https://spectrejournal.com/rereading-lenins-imperialism-at-the-time-of-us-china-rivalry/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

James, Wendy. 1973. The anthropologist as reluctant imperialist. In Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter , ed. Talal Asad, 41–70. London: Ithaca Press.

James, C.L.R. 2012. A History of Pan-African Revolt . Oakland: PM Press.

James, C.L.R. 1989 [1963]. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution . New York: Random House, Inc.

Katz, Claudio. 2022. Dependency Theory After Fifty Years the Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought. Leiden: Brill.

Kojanić, Ognjen. 2020. Theory from the peripheries: What can the anthropology of postsocialism offer to European anthropology? Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 29 (2): 49–66.

Krupa, Christopher. 2022. A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lenin, Vladimir. 1996 [1916]. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism . London: Pluto Press.

Li, Tania Murray, and Pujo Semedi. 2022. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone . Durham: Duke University Press.

Li, Promise. 2023. Against Multipolar Imperialism. Specter Journal. 6 January. https://spectrejournal.com/against-multipolar-imperialism/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents . Durham: Duke University Press.

Lutz, Catherine, ed. 2009. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts . New York: New York University Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital . London: Routledge.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2012. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2021. Between the decolonial and the postcolonial: An interview with Mahmood Mamdani. Political Theology Network . 21 August. https://politicaltheology.com/between-the-decolonial-and-the-postcolonial-an-interview-with-mahmood-mamdani/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 2022. Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui . Madison: Iskra Books.

Marini, Ruy Mauro. 2022. The Dialectics of Dependency . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 1. London: Penguin Books.

McGranahan, Carole, and John F. Collins. 2018. Ethnographies of US Empire . Durham: Duke University Press.

Méheut, Constant. 2022. How (and why) we calculated the value of Haiti’s payments to France. 25 May. New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/reader-center/haiti-france-debt-payments.html . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History . New York: Penguin Randon House.

Moosavi, Leon. 2020. The decolonial bandwagon and the dangers of intellectual decolonization. International Review of Sociology 30 (2): 332–354.

Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. The precariat: A view from the south. Third World Quarterly .

Neveling, Patrick, and Luisa Steur. 2018. Introduction: Marxian anthropology resurgent. Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 82: 1–15.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature . Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism . New York: Humanities Press.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1970. Class Struggle in Africa . New York: International Publishers.

Patel, Sujata. 2021. Decolonial research methods: Resisting decoloniality in academic knowledge production. Webinar. National University of Singapore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHXUlWmeTU&t=2582s . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Patnaik, Utsa, and Prabaik Patnaik. 2016. A Theory of Imperialism . New York: Columbia University Press.

Prashad, Vijay. 2012. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press.

Prashad, Vijay. 2022. Africa is on the move. Monthly Review . 1 May. https://monthlyreview.org/2022/05/01/africa-is-on-the-move/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Price, David. 2016. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology . Durham: Duke University Press.

Raza, Shozab. 2022. (Landlord) theory from the south: Empire and estates on a Punjabi frontier. Journal of Agrarian Change 23 (2): 266–285.

Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa . London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.

Rodney, Walter. 1990. Walter Rodney Speaks . Bensenville: Lushena Books.

Rodney, Walter. 2022. Decolonial Marxism . New York: Verso.

Roediger, David and Elizabeth Esch. 2012. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roseberry, William. 1982. Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology. Social Research 49 (4): 1013–1028.

Sankara, Thomas. 1988. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983–87 . New York: Pathfinder Press.

Scott, Julius S. 2018. The Common Wind Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution . New York: Verso.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2013. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples . London: Zed Books.

Smith, John. 2016. Imperialism in the 21st Century . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Starn, Orin. 1991. Missing the revolution: Anthropologists and the war in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 6 (1): 63–91.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times . Durham: Duke University Press.

Suwandi, Intan. 2019. Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism . New York: Monthly Review Press.

Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. 2022. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously . London: Hurst Publishers.

Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations . New York: Verso.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History . New York: Penguin Random House.

Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule . Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Walia, Harsha. 2022. There is no ‘migrant crisis’. Boston Review , 16 November, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/there-is-no-migrant-crisis/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Walker, Charles. 2020. The Shining Path and the emergence of the human rights community in Peru. Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. https://clacs.berkeley.edu/peru-shining-path-and-emergence-human-rights-community-peru . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Wang, Fanxi. 2010. Mao Zedong Thought . Leiden: Brill.

Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric and Joseph Jorgensen. 1970. Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand. New York Review of Books . 19 November. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1970/11/19/a-special-supplement-anthropology-on-the-warpath-i/ . Accessed 10 May 2024.

Wolpe, Harold. 1972. Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: From segregation to apartheid. Economy and Society 1 (4): 425–456.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. Class, race, and capitalism. Political Power and Social Theory 15: 275–284.

Download references

Open access funding provided by University of Vienna.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Nanyang, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

Stephen Campbell

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Neues Institutsgebäude, 4th floor, Universitätsstrasse 7, 1010, Vienna, Austria

Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Campbell, S., Aung, G.R. Bringing imperialism back in: for an anthropology against empire in the twenty-first century. Dialect Anthropol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-024-09724-0

Download citation

Accepted : 28 April 2024

Published : 16 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-024-09724-0

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research