A consideration of imperialism in the development of economic thought

This is a dissertation in the history of economic thought. The thesis is that the classical theories of imperialism offered by Hobson, Lenin, and Luxemburg were attempts to deal with the problems associated with the accumulation of capital and effective demand in the realistic setting of the age of The New Imperialism (1870-1914). Schumpeter's theory of imperialism argued that the issue of imperialism was divorced from capitalism, and in so doing missed the opportunity to utilize his theory of economic development to analyze the facts of The New Imperialism. These analyses neither constituted a single theory of imperialism nor an investigation of a single historic episode known as the New Imperialism.;The Leo Rogin and Dudley Dillard hypothesis and tests of historic meaning and validity are modified to apply to theories of political economy. The result of this analysis is consistent with the Rogin and Dillard hypothesis that new principles will enter the mainstream of economic theory only when there is an explanatory crisis. Effective demand as the strategic factor in capital accumulation was at the heart of the theories of economic imperialism. Yet without a crisis in the economy and economist's ability to explain economic reality, effective demand did not enter the mainstream analysis until the Great Depression and the economics of Keynes.;John A. Hobson provided the seminal theory of economic imperialism, and the only theory, of the four, that did not frame the analysis in single-exit model. Hobson's analysis contained the central components of the other analyses and provided a coherent explanation of the relations between the economic and social variables of the political economy of the New Imperialism. Hobson's theory emerges as the best foundation for an evolutionary analysis of the period of The New Imperialism.