In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we step back from the specific history of Congo to examine the broader theoretical framework of neocolonialism – and how the decline of formal empire prepared the ground for the neoliberal revolution.
Drawing on thinkers from Marx and Lenin to J.A. Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg, we explore the purpose of empire from the perspective of capital: the pursuit of cheap resources, cheap labour, and captive markets. Britain's transformation from a middling European kingdom to a global superpower was built on the extraction of wealth from its colonies – from the opium trade with China to the slave‑based sugar and cotton economies to the systematic deindustrialisation of India.
But what happens when empire becomes unsustainable? In India, the British lost control of the Indian Army in 1946, and with it, their ability to monopolise armed force. By the 1950s and 60s, most of Britain's African colonies were gone. Yet the flow of wealth from the Global South to the City of London did not stop. It continued through neocolonialism – debt, the Bretton Woods institutions, corporate infiltration, and support for pliant regimes.
And then came neoliberalism. As the returns from empire declined, capitalist elites in the Global North turned inward, cannibalising their own societies through privatisation, the erosion of welfare states, and the breaking of organised labour. The neoliberal revolution was, in part, a response to the crisis of empire – a way to maintain elite wealth and power when the old imperial structures could no longer deliver.
We also consider the explicitly colonial and eugenic thinking of some neoliberal architects, and the destructive consequences of imposing market logic on societies with no history of it. From the mass unemployment of Thatcher's Britain to the ongoing exploitation of Africa, the arc of capital bends towards extraction – and the people always pay the price.
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