Financial investors instrumentalized imperial armies as police for their profits

Evidence

The Boers hated and feared the financiers more than the other foreigners. They somehow understood that the financier was a key figure in the combination of superfluous wealth and superfluous men, that it was his function to turn the essentially transitory gold hunt into a much broader and more permanent business. The war with the British, moreover, soon demonstrated an even more decisive aspect; it was quite obvious that it had been prompted by foreign investors who demanded the government’s protection of their tremendous profits in faraway countries as a matter of course—as though armies engaged in a war against foreign peoples were nothing but native police forces involved in a fight with native criminals. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 518

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the superfluous wealth and superfluous men mechanism Arendt builds across the imperialism chapters, feeding the toolkit concept of capitalism outgrowing the nation-state.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the concept of the financier as hinge between excess capital and surplus population.