Industrialization and Imperialism

The process underlying the transition from primarily agricultural and craft production to machine-driven mass production organized on the factory model. Industrialization contributes to and correlates with a wide range of other economic, social, cultural, and political transformations, and forms an inextricable part of most theories of modernization and modernity. These broader accounts typically reference the experience of western Europe and the United States, which began to industrialize in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—at varying rates and where industrialization accompanied the development of the modern nation-state, capitalism, democracy, markets and long-distance trade, urbanization, mass literacy and communication,

The growing division of labor associated with industrial production was a subject of widespread interest by the late eighteenth century. Marxism and classical economic theory were quick to understand the competitive advantages of industrialization in the capitalist economy, where machine and factory production provided higher productivity than earlier craft and cottage production (see classical economics; and cottage industry). In this context, profitability alone would speed the development of the industrial model, consign a growing share of the population to the proletariat, and (as Karl Marx argued) transform the structure of ownership as the means of production consolidated in the hands of fewer and fewer owners. Capitalism, especially in the Marxist context, made use of industrialization, but industrialization was not specific to capitalism. Rather it was a set of production techniques that might be organized on the basis of other principles of ownership and other means of distributing wealth. Socialist programs of planned industrialization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for example, dramatically transformed their respective economies without the pull factors of trade and market signals, although the absence of these mechanisms eventually made these industrial sectors rigid and

Most focused on economic factors. John Hobson 's Imperialism (1902) argued that imperialism was a response to the threat of under consumption within Western capitalist economies. The development of capital and the poverty of the lower classes forced industrialists to look outside their home countries for markets to absorb excess production. Marxists, including Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Ilich Lenin, built on this case to argue that imperialism was the highest (and last) stage of monopoly capitalism. Other theorists, such as Joseph Schumpeter and Hannah Arendt, emphasized the irrationality of imperialism. They saw it as a fundamentally political phenomenon generated as much by state consolidation as by capitalist development. A strong “realist” school of international relations has also sought to explain modern imperialism as broadly equivalent to ancient imperialism a natural consequence of the fear and ambition of