Imperialist globalisation and the political economy of South Asia

Two features of the capitalist world economy in the early years of the new century must be noted at the outset. The first is the continuing, indeed overwhelming, significance of imperialism as the defining feature of global economic relations, with imperialism broadly defined as the struggle by large capital over control over economic territory of various types. The second is that this current imperialism is different in several crucial ways from that described by Lenin nearly a century ago as the monopoly stage of capitalism. To some extent the differences are simply the result of history, the evolution of both the institutions and processes of capitalism. But they are also the result of the effects of the recent processes of deregulation of trade and capital markets as well as other forms of economic liberalisation (constituting the essence of what is typically called “globalisation”), which have given the new imperialism its cutting edge.