Atul Kohli’s expansive new book, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the U.S. Shaped the Global Periphery, answers two of the international system’s most pressing questions: Why do states pursue imperial strategies, and what effects does that imperialism have on the developing world? Ultimately, Kohli finds that economic incentives motivated the imperialisms of both the British Empire and the post-Reconstruction United States, and he concludes that both formal and informal interventions were mostly harmful and limited the sovereignty of their targets. In so doing, he addresses other commonly held explanations for imperialism and warns that the economic impetus for such intervention will not likely abate in the future.

These arguments are thought provoking, not least because they both challenge and find common cause with much extant work on Anglo-European imperialism. Kohli makes explicit that one cannot merely look to the nineteenth century to discern imperialism’s effect on the modern world, and this focus on the continuity between the British and American cases provides a superb model for how to conduct historically informed research that is also relevant to the present day. Although he is occasionally too dismissive of other arguments, the sheer depth of his historical analysis will make Imperialism and the Developing World required reading for anyone interested in British and American imperialism. In many ways, this work complements other recent works on imperialism, such as Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019), which taken collectively should catalyze much future debate and conversations.

In the first half of the book, Kohli presents both Britain’s formal and informal imperial periods. He begins with a discussion of how the East India Company (EIC) established territorial control over Bengal in the eighteenth century in collaboration with the British state and other private interests. The British state benefited from the EIC’s exploits in multiple ways, not least from its trade surplus with India that allowed it to balance its wartime current account deficits. This relationship was coercive because Britain taxed India “and used a portion of these revenues to buy Indian calico and Chinese tea that were sold in London and elsewhere” (p. 48). The EIC’s control over India fueled the British economic engine during this period.

Kohli then shows how this economic impetus resonated in Britain’s other informal imperial strategies during the nineteenth century. He discusses interventions in Argentina, Egypt, and China to demonstrate how Britain used its hegemony to maintain its economic superiority. This type of intervention whereby the dominant state maintains effective control without formal control defines informal empire. But these interventions often required the use of force. Britain only occasionally had to use force to open markets for its textiles in Argentina, but Egypt and China did not immediately acquiesce, which required stronger interventions. In Egypt, Britain undermined the ambition of Muhammad Ali to turn the country both into a source of cotton and a market for manufactured goods and loans. In China, the British forcibly opened markets for opium to create revenues from its Indian holdings and to create the same markets for finished goods as in Egypt. Although Kohli shows some variance across these cases, it is clear that each shares a common core: Britain expanded its informal empire for the purposes of economic gain, and this economic expansion negatively affected the global periphery. Even though imperialism occasionally produced some economic growth, in most cases this exploitive intervention inhibited the formation of more complex economies that were not reliant on export-led growth.

These themes carried through to Britain’s formal empire. Kohli focuses on the cases of India and Nigeria, and he argues that profit provided the rationale for imperial strategies in each. In the case of India, the British state and its private capital already depended on a steady stream of income from the period of informal rule. In the case of Nigeria and the rest of the “Scramble for Africa,” Kohli argues that “the search for markets in the context of growing power competition” (p. 180) best explains imperial strategies. There is much to agree with in this appraisal.

However, this is one point where Kohli is not judicious enough with his dismissal of other explanations. Throughout the book, he argues against Lenin and Hobson’s Marxian theories of imperialism, and in this example he argues that “evidence does not support the suggestion that the Scramble for Africa was driven mainly by investors and financiers looking for higher rates of return” (p. 179). Instead, Kohli argues that the search for markets in the context of growing power competition among industrializing powers best explains late nineteenth-century expansionism. Yet this latter explanation is fully compatible with Lenin and Hobson’s theses, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois’s related argument in “The African Roots of War” (1915), which closely resembles the line of reasoning Kohli pursues. A deeper engagement with these works, as well as associated dependency theories, would have been welcome.

In the second half of the book, Kohli traces the United States’ attempts to build an informal empire that would reap economic benefits. Before World War II, the United States intervened in Asia and in the Western Hemisphere to provide future economic outlets for its production and “smooth out the boom-and-bust quality of rapid capitalist expansion” (p. 416). However, the United States pursued informal imperial interests for broader reasons after World War II. Kohli presents the cases of Iran, Vietnam, and Chile to demonstrate how the United States sought to suppress nationalist movements throughout the Global South to mitigate potential risks to its hegemonic position at the center of an open global economy. Controversially, he claims that these economic ambitions, rather than anticommunism, motivated these interventions. This argument is persuasive in the Chilean and Iranian cases, but the connection between America’s economic interests and support for the French in Vietnam is more tenuous, particularly because the United States did not support France at Dien Bien Phu.

In many ways, chapter 6 provides the ideal synthesis of the ideas presented earlier concerning modern American imperial strategy. In this chapter, Kohli outlines the United States’ informal imperial interventions post-Vietnam in Latin America and in the Middle East. These cases not only convincingly accord with the main economic argument but they also show how the United States has updated nineteenth-century imperial strategies for the modern day. The United States and its allies now use the global financial system and postwar international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to influence the developing world and protect economic interests, as Kohli previews with his discussion of the Washington Consensus. Yet financial globalization does not always preclude military interventions, as the recent case of the United States’ post–Cold War interventions in Iraq epitomize. Finally, Kohli’s examination of American imperialism after 1945 demonstrates not only that modern motivations for intervention resemble earlier economic justifications but also that the effects of those interventions remain devastating.

There is much to love about Imperialism and the Developing World. It is extensive, it is provocative, and it provides a great template for historically informed scholarship that is also relevant to contemporary political issues. To the extent that there is anything more to criticize, one could argue that the book does too much. Kohli covers an incredible amount of ground, and it can be hard to keep one’s eye on the ball. Is the book’s purpose to argue why informal empire crops up in certain situations? To debate extant explanations for all types of imperialisms? To demonstrate where and when the most pernicious effects of Anglo-American intervention reared their head? To reveal the character of the imperialisms that will persist in the modern world? Kohli tries his hand at all of this and more, the effect of which is a remarkably ambitious book that will be relevant to a multidisciplinary constituency of readers for years to come.