I understand how the free trade policies lead to monopoly, and I understand how financial monopolies take over industrial monopolies. But I don't really get the jump from monopolies to imperialism.
I understand how the free trade policies lead to monopoly, and I understand how financial monopolies take over industrial monopolies. But I don't really get the jump from monopolies to imperialism.
Can you clear up some confusion for me? If it's the ever expanding growth of capital seeking new markets that can generate profits which drives imperialism then what was the cause of imperialism before capitalism? What the drove Mongol or Roman or various other pre capitalist empires?
What's the core idea of historical materialism which the Communist Manifesto starts out with? All history hitherto is the history of class struggle. We're only developing new scales for old methods of exploitation. Romans lacked heavy industry but they had factories with a division of labour reflecting them. They lacked the modern economic relationships that created the bourgeoisie but their patricians served the same role in society. Their colonialism was driven by primitive accumulation, a core population backed by a powerful military and industrial/logistical network which demands ever-greater levels of comfort. They needed Egyptian grain to distribute Caesar's bread, they needed British tin for bronze in regions without tin deposits.
Capitalism evolved out of the new division of labour that developed when aristocracy gave way to a merchant and bureaucrat class. A lord and serf had the same boss-employee relationship in a form reflecting the village and castle, but merchants could afford larger factories backed by larger resource extractors and the way power was wielded shifted away from the old institutions. The forms of modern colonialism increasingly became shaped by the bourgeoisie that profited from it instead of the older aristocratic forms. It's just a more complex manifestation of what has been happening since the Sumerians.
I would say the easiest way to begin is to divorce the historical/political idea of empires from Lenin's ideas of imperialism. There is a reason he called it "the highest stage of capitalism" after all. Capitalist imperialism is drastically different from pre-capitalist imperialism.
You can however, supported by historical reading, begin to see similar trends in the politics and economics of past empires, and ironically empires make a lot more sense as a political unit when you think about them from a materialist perspective. Why did the Romans and the Parthians fight over Armenia? Did crusaders invade the Levant to secure the holy land for pilgrimage or for Italian spice merchants? Why did the Mongols conquer so much? As happybadger says in his reply, this is just history repeating itself, but I would posit that it might be a good idea to firmly understand imperialism as a stage of capitalism (as it is now) first before you try to dig into the imperialism of historical empires because it will be confusing to try to understand imperialism as a universal phenomenon through different modes of production.