Description
Writings on the origins of late-nineteenth-century modern empires have tended to omit, mis-, or under-theorise the international dimension of the social processes that led to such imperial pursuits. This, as IR scholarship has increasingly highlighted, is the issue of internalism. Internalist issues or failed attempts to address them are indeed present in both the classical theory of the origins of modern imperialism — the Hobson-Lenin thesis — and its succeeding criticisms and alternatives over the past century. This collective failure, in turn, sustains flawed understandings of this “age of empire”, which is an important foundation of modern international relations. The limitations of internalism, I argue, are nowhere more detrimental than when the above theories are used to explain the origins of modern Japanese imperialism. Thus, to resolve this empirically driven crisis of internalism, I critically adapt a non-internalist approach — Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development — to account for the Japanese descent into imperialism. This account, if successful in better capturing the Japanese turn to empire, offers an escape to extant internalist readings of the origins of modern imperialism. Furthermore, it also contributes the recent call for a true “international turn” in the social sciences.
