Economic Geography

The new imperialism: the proliferation of networks,
difference, states and markets
Humankind has lived most of its recorded history under Empires. The novel
features of the latest version
2
are most lucidly set out by Ellen Meiksins Wood
(2003). Most novel of all, it doesn’t officially exist. This is an Empire ‘adminis-
tered by a global system of multiple states and local sovereignties’ (Wood 2003:
141). It colonises by annexing not territory but the thinking and behaviour of a
multiplicity of policymakers at a variety of scales. So there are no formal imperial
institutions, merely a shifting constellation of corporations, border-crossing
networks, and territorially-defined political units representing, or at least ruling over,
distinct ‘communities’. A little local colour, a plurality of perceived identities and
of governments are more than curiosities, they are essential. The global conver-
gence of policy thinking and outcomes draws on, and fuels, the construction and
mobilisation of difference.
Rather than extracting resources from formally subject peoples, Imperial pros-
perity is derived from the extension of the arena of capitalist accumulation. This
is being further extended through the spread of neo-liberalism,
3
the Hayekian
project to socially-engineer societies and individuals to make them fit market
forces (Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005). Under this influence the ‘global labour
supply’ accessible to mobile capital increased by about a third in the 1990s. Neo-
liberalism is compatible with enormous diversity, attaching itself to religious
fundamentalist politics here, and populist consumerism there. But its encroachment
is associated with an easily recognisable common core of mechanisms and mani-
festations (from the commodification of health and pensions to ‘active labour
market policies’; from instrumentalist education to strategies to manage the
‘socially excluded’; from place marketing to shopping malls with the same shops,
from a spate of new tall downtown buildings to Starbucks, and so on).
As neo-liberalism spread, global per capita economic growth rates declined
(now at a third of the 1960s), North–South resource flows went into reverse, and
in many places so did equalising tendencies between the genders. Reduced growth,
increased imports and inward investment and consequent market saturation
intensified the struggle for market shares. This in turn triggered a corporate (and
thence governmental) obsession with innovation, and a huge expansion of adver-
tising and marketing expenditures. The diversion of investment towards finance
markets and property is now fuelling a spiralling of personal debt (in the ‘West’)
and a spectacular new round of urban ‘regeneration’, currently transforming the
visual and social character of the world’s cities (Smith 1996). The American model
of the city, not one of urbanism’s greatest successes, is being copied everywhere.
A commodity cornucopia coupled to market differentiation exploiting the
commodification of difference has created a new fusion of identity, consumption

---

The new imperial geography
223
and lifestyle. But the shift towards a more ‘vertical’ pattern of accumulation has
also produced unprecedented levels of inequality and poverty, and a globalisation
of ‘Western’ afflictions such as depression and urban fear. Some tentative evidence
suggests that beyond a low threshold ($15,000 per annum) increases in income
bring severely diminishing marginal gains in happiness. In the rich countries
economic welfare seems to have been declining ever since neo-liberalism arrived
(Layard 2005). Some rather more detectable evidence points to a possible environ-
mental catastrophe. The Empire is a frenetically busy and glitzy place, but not a
fair, happy or sustainable one.
Since neo-liberalism requires, contrary to its sales rhetoric, ‘extensive and inva-
sive interventions in every area of social life’ (Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005: 4)
its key element is the nation-state. Its numbers have quadrupled since 1947,
much of this during the neo-liberal period. The number of sub-national units of
governance has multiplied even more, enabling the recruitment of locally defined
identities to strategies for ‘competitiveness’. Along with the on minimal taxation
on the well-off, this has levered tens of thousands of private companies and 
non-governmental organisations into the marketised business of governance. 
A crucial aspect of Empire accordingly being the construction of ever more
‘networks’.
3
The American flavour of the Empire of Capital has given rise (especially since
the invasion of Iraq) to racist anti-Americanism and much finger wagging at the
Bush administration. But its roots lie in the gradual consolidation through the
twentieth century of external and internal conditions whereby the uniquely
gigantic US state became able and willing to play the role of Hobbesian plane-
tary Leviathan. Since the 1970s the United States has been the first major victim
of, then the main exporter of, this particularly voracious form of capitalism
(Harvey 2004). The United States now plays the leading role in promoting,
through regime changes both formal and informal, a world of ‘market states’
(Bobbitt 2002; Ferguson 2004).
In this perspective, the paradigmatic new Imperial event is not the unleashing
of high-tech military violence by Americans thousands of miles away from their
victims. It is one of those routine conferences in which political leaders, academ-
ics, consultants, and business people make speeches about how to transform this
or that real or imagined aspect of their locality into a marketable asset in the
struggle for ‘competitiveness’.