Capitalist expansion did not reduce colonized nations to Marx’s two-class bourgeois model

Evidence

Marx and Engels, if we recall, had once conceived the notion that the bourgeoisie of Western Europe would succeed in transforming the whole of the world’s nations into bourgeois societies-loci reduced to social orders of ruling and proletarian classes, as Marx declared in one of his prefaces to the first volume of Capital. Historically, however, capitalist expansion had had as its result only the most approximate relation to Marx’s projected social divisions. In those parts of the world where resourceful indigenous ruling classes were encountered by the empire builders, collisions were inevitable. Not as inevitable were the results: some native elites were vanquished and destroyed, others not. Some, having led formidable anti-imperialist defenses, preserved much of their independent cultures, whittling down foreign influences to the mundane exchanges required by colonial administration. Many, however (and it is within the British Empire that one finds the best examples), became part of the apparatus of “indirect rule,” a system whose rationale could be so concisely put forth by one of its mechanics, the British anthropologist, Margery Perham: The basic difficulty [in carrying out “indirect rule”] is one that will appear in its different aspects-education, land-tenure, economic production, law-in all our coming discussions. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 848

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the earlier chapters’ account of how racial capitalism deviated from classical Marxist predictions of class formation. — connects to: Capitalism was expanding before Marx as colonial extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 41