Imperialism was pushed by business and welcomed by educated elites

Evidence

WHEN IMPERIALISM entered the scene of politics with the scramble for Africa in the eighties, it was promoted by businessmen, opposed fiercely by the governments in power, and welcomed by a surprisingly large section of the educated classes. To the last it seemed to be God-sent, a cure for all evils, an easy panacea for all conflicts. And it is true that imperialism in a sense did not disappoint these hopes. It gave a new lease on life to political and social structures which were quite obviously threatened by new social and political forces and which, under other circumstances, without the interference of imperialist developments, would hardly have needed two world wars to disappear. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 404

Categorization

• XREF: The scramble-for-Africa entry point and the business/educated-class alliance prefigures Arendt’s later account of how the bourgeoisie captured the state — key for the Islamophobia canon’s account of colonial ideology.
• SHARE: For anyone into Arendt’s imperial chapter: the sharp reversal — businessmen promoting, governments opposing — overturns the usual ‘state-driven’ story and shows imperialism as a society-level capture.