army officers are part of the state, where do conscript soldiers belong? The arbitrariness of the answers to such questions suggests that rather than posing state and society as a dichotomy, we should conceive them as reflections of one another, or alternate formulations of the same entity. Mobilized for empire all individuals become extensions of the state even as they remain members of society.
Though fundamentally empires are social products, they are not much studied as popular enterprises. Preoccupied with identifying a theoretical model that would explain the causes of imperialism—and particularly the sudden burst of European expansionism in the late nineteenth century—literature on European and American imperialism has tended to focus on the rival merits of economic and political theories of causality. In the former instance, this meant showing how the structures of an expanding industrial capitalism sought to open and control new overseas markets. In the latter, scholars focused on the decision making of both metropolitan leaders and their on-site agents. They identified the motives for the so-called new imperialism in both the rivalrous dynamics of the international system as well as growing political instability on the borders of the European empires in Asia and Africa. For a long time divisions within the Anglo-American academy between Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars fossilized this debate into a series of revisions of the capitalist theory of imperialism on one side and debunking attacks on the other.6
In recent years this has changed, as historians of imperialism have taken up the question of culture. Beginning in the early 1980s, books on empire and technology, science, ideology, propaganda, popular culture, and other topics have appeared, shifting the focus away from political and economic structures of empire.7 Although this conversion to culture reinvigorated the study of imperialism, cultural theories of imperialism have only begun to challenge the monocausal terms of the older debate. In much of this literature culture simply supplanted economy or politics as the sole independent variable. And yet, in the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is impossible to reduce the roots of expansionism to a single cause. No more than Marxist theories of imperialism, power-politics models, or arguments about subimperialists and turbulent frontiers, can studies of the cultural construction of empire account for the multidimensional nature of experience. In an age of unified markets, globalized mass communications, and the exposure of the individual to multiple systems of meaning, it is impossible to look at the economic without considering the political, to study the cultural without thinking about the social, to discuss the national without reference to the international. Therefore we need to look at ways in which economics, politics, culture, and society work together as a unit and the ways in which national systems are integrated into international systems. We need, in short, a total theory of imperialism.
TOTAL IMPERIALISM
Like many abstract concepts, imperialism is a term that resists concrete definition. Most historians deploy the term to describe the annexation of territory and imposition of alien rule over the peoples that live there: domination formalized in the creation of institutions of direct colonial administration. More problematic are instances of informal domination—where a country retains nominal independence, but falls within another nation's “sphere of influence.” Historians agree that the colonization of Senegal by France or Ceylon by Great Britain were expressions of imperialism. But whether Soviet influence in Eastern Europe or American interventions in Indochina are properly characterized as “imperialism” is a subject of debate. My own definition of imperialism, designed to characterize Japan's relationship to China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accommodates both formal or direct, and informal or indirect, mechanisms of domination. Imperial domination implies that the dominated society not only is altered by the interventions of the dominating society, but loses its ability to reject those interventions. The Chinese, for example, were not in a position to tell the Japanese to go home in 1907 or 1932. By contrast the Japanese could and did send their European advisors away in the 1890s. The former was a relationship defined by imperialism, while the latter illustrated Japan's measure of independence from European control. A further characteristic that distinguishes imperialism from other forms of influence is the scale of the disparity of power between the two societies and the one-sided pattern of intervention that emerges. In this way, imperialism is different from interdependence. Japanese influenced basic decisions which structured the economic and political conditions of Northeast China, but Chinese had no such power in Japanese government circles. Such interventions, moreover, may be effected through both formal and informal channels. Hence, the term imperialism is not synonymous with colonialism, but rather subsumes it. Japanese conditioned social life in Northeast China both through formal colonial institutions—the Kwantung governor general and the Manchukuo government—as well as through such informal methods of control as military threat, market dominance, and the cultivation of a collaborative elite.
A final distinction may be added here between imperialism as process and empire as structure. Imperialism is empire building; it represents the process of constructing a relationship of domination. Empire signifies what is built—the structures that produce and reproduce dominance. For Japan and Manchukuo this distinction captures both the mercurial dynamism of the process as well as the ossified weightiness of the structures that together, incongruously, characterized the imperial project.
The phenomenon of imperialism can be traced back to the beginnings of recorded history; its early modern period began with the European voyages of exploration at the turn of the sixteenth century. Here I address imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the features identified with modernity inscribed themselves on the processes of imperialism and created what I call total empires. Conditioned by the advent of the nation-state, industrial capitalism, and other revolutions of the modern age, imperialism became increasingly multidimensional, mass-mobilizing, and all-encompassing. The relationship between modernity and empire, moreover, was dialectical: just as modernization conditioned the growth of empire, the process of imperialism shaped the conditions of modern life. An attempt to puzzle out the evolving relationship between modernity and empire occupies the theoretical heart of this book.
The political revolution of the nation-state represented a key element in this relationship, transforming the meaning of imperialism in the nineteenth century. The rise of nations and nationalism meant that imperialism was increasingly an enterprise of both nation and state, in contrast to the crown colonies of the Americas and the trading factories of Asia that were established under the charter of the absolutist monarchies of early modern Europe. Indeed, imperialism became fundamental to modern projects of state making and nation building, both in Japan—as the government's designating itself “the Great Empire of Japan” (DaiNihon teikoku) and the patriotic popular response to the Sino-Japanese War suggest—and elsewhere around the globe. Moreover, the articulation of constitutional contracts that bound states to represent the interests of society meant that imperialism henceforth would be a joint endeavor. If a faction within the government—such as the Japanese Army—-sought to expand the nation's power overseas, it needed to mobilize social support for the task. Similarly, private groups with imperial ambitions—such as Japanese business organizations—pressured their governments to lend state support to their plans. Such developments led to the emergence of an imperialized nationalism, while making imperial policy the crucible of a growing intimacy between state and society.
All of this was occurring, of course, in the midst of the global expansion of industrial capitalism. The advent of the industrial revolution in Europe stimulated integration of colonial markets into the world economy in a manner that facilitated the export of colonial wealth and resources to the industrial metropole and tended to hinder the development of industrial capitalism in the colonial periphery. Although Japanese colonial policies stimulated economic development in Manchuria and Korea, Japan, too, sought access to colonial export markets and colonial sources of cheap raw materials in order to maintain its own industrial production. Moreover, industrial capitalism not only produced a new form of economic integration between metropolitan and colonial societies, it also stimulated the emergence of what is known as social imperialism—that is, the projection overseas of the social discontents and dislocations engendered by industrialization at home.8 In Japan's case, social imperialism operated
