Hobson’s voice: American internationalism, Asian development, and global macroeconomic imbalances

John Hobson’s theory of Imperialism has remarkable relevance for contemporary relations between the United States and Asia/Europe. A reconstruction of his argument shows that whereas the Bretton Woods period presents Hobson’s preferred non-imperial outcome, this outcome was not stable. Instead, the dynamics that brought about Imperialism in the first place eroded Bretton Woods and returned us to Hobson’s situation of “informal imperialism.” Whereas Hobson focused on Imperial underconsumption and the United States is clearly overconsumptionist, these macroeconomic imbalances have the same roots in imperial structures of power and the same deleterious consequences for political and economic stability.