King Leopold II of Belgium, Creator: Picture-Politicsde Londres, Copyright: Public Domain
February 26th marked the 140th anniversary of one of the most consequential events in the history of Western imperialism: the signing of the General Act at the Berlin Conference of 1885. Convened by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the conference sought to prevent any unsportsmanlike behaviour among the Great Powers as they set about plundering the African continent—of its labour, natural resources, and trade routes. After three months deliberating over territorial borders and free trade zones, the 14 signatories—including Germany, France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium’s King Leopold II—finalised an agreement on what they deemed the most equitable means of ransacking Africa in service of their colonial empires.
A wealth of recent retrospectives has deftly examined the conference and its lasting consequences for both the colonised and the colonisers. Yet what remains largely overlooked is the economic rupture that triggered the ‘Scramble for Africa’—the first major crisis of modern capitalism—a crisis whose repercussions continue to shape global inequality to this day.
The Illusion of Endless Growth and the Shock of Crises
For much of the 19th century, the dominant economic classes of the industrial nations—bankers who controlled credit, merchants overseeing trade, industrialists heading production, and the political class who upheld their interests—prospered within the borders of their respective nation states. They had long reaped the benefits of industrial expansion, believing that capitalist growth could continue indefinitely so long as markets remained stable. A fundamental illusion underpinned the prosperity of the Global North in this period: a belief that the original sin of dispossession—the violent expropriations of land, resources, and labour which originally set the wheels of accumulation in motion—would never have to be repeated. This illusion was violently shattered by the Panic of 1873.
That year marked the beginning of the first truly international economic crisis, as industrial economies from the United States to Austria-Hungary reached a critical threshold: domestic markets could no longer absorb the sheer volume of goods and surplus capital being produced. Factories churned out more than could be sold, banks sat on capital with too few profitable outlets, and economic stagnation loomed. As a result, overproduction and wealth hoarding became an existential threat to the entire capitalist system.
As Hannah Arendt observed in her study of imperialism, once capital could no longer find profitable domestic outlets for distribution and investment, this:
“threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production into a system of financial speculation…the decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market.”(Arendt 135)
Expansion as Crisis Management
The age of imperialism dawned as the industrial elite realised that the only way to overcome economic crisis was to break down national borders and expand into foreign markets. The Long Depression mobilised the capitalist classes of Europe and beyond, compelling governments to make overseas expansion their top priority. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, business interests became indistinguishable from national interests, with economic growth directing the course of foreign policy.
The General Act of the Berlin Conference was the culmination of this decade long shift, in which financiers and industrialists bent the state apparatus to serve their imperialist ambitions. As Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, bluntly put it, “You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs…you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism…which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force”.
And force—the military, the police, and the machinery of state violence— was precisely what the capitalist classes depended upon to secure their overseas investments. The Act formalised what had become essential for capitalism’s survival: transforming state power into the enforcer of financial expansion. Through territorial annexation, trade monopolies, and military intervention, states assumed the role of securing investment frontiers for private capital, reinforcing a pattern in which economic crises were not solved through internal reform but through external conquest. This pattern, established in the imperial age, remains a defining feature of global capitalism to this day.
Imperialism’s Enduring Spectre
J.A Hobson wrote in 1902 that “the economic root of imperialism…consists of rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, not being earned by head or hand, have no legitimate raison d’être.” Hobson identified wealth concentration as the driving force behind economic expansionism, arguing that when a small elite controls a disproportionate share of wealth, the domestic economy falters.
When the bottom 50% of a nation holds just 2.6% of its wealth, the majority lack the purchasing power to sustain demand, forcing corporations to seek foreign markets for investment and trade.Rather than addressing inequality through redistributive policies or progressive taxation, capitalist economies historically respond to crises with constant expansion. This logic has dictated the trajectory of global capitalism for nearly 150 years—from the Berlin Conference, where imperialism was enshrined as the solution to economic stagnation, down to its modern-day incarnations. Today’s multinational corporations inherit this legacy, leveraging state power to shape economic and foreign policy in their favour. Elon Musk’s manoeuvring to secure state-backed trade deals with China and India—circumventing regulations to access new consumer markets and cheap resources—is not an isolated case of corporate opportunism. It is the logical continuation of a century-old pattern, in which capital relentlessly expands its frontiers to resolve crises born from excessive wealth accumulation.
From the gunboats of the colonial era to the trade deals and financial instruments of modern multinational corporations, the means of expansion may have changed, but the underlying rationale has not. Just as imperialist conquest was once justified under the guise of civilising ‘barbarous’ nations, today’s economic interventions are framed as efforts to spread democracy, secure supply chains, or promote development. Meanwhile, far-right movements deflect attention from the structural causes of economic instability, blaming migrants, globalisation, or cultural change rather than the system of wealth concentration that triggers expansion in the first place. Until the root causes of inequality are addressed, the same forces that drove the Berlin Conference in 1885 will continue to shape global power dynamics: perpetuating cycles of imperialism and exploitation under new guises.
