ABSTRACT
Despite the radicalism of this attack on the conventional views of Hobson, most of the revisionists still believe that Hobson was principally concerned to explain the African partition. But the most recent contributor to the debate, Dr Norman Etherington, is convinced that Hobson was not interested in the Scramble, except in the case of South Africa, and that in so far as he referred to it in Imperialism he did not use it to illustrate his theory of surplus capital. Etherington argues that when Hobson mentioned acquisitions of territory in tropical Africa he explained them in terms of the influence of colonial bureaucrats, military men, armaments dealers, local traders on the make and other pressures, all of which would have been familiar to Cobden writing 50 years earlier. He goes on to claim that Hobson's concern, like that of many of his contemporaries in Europe and America, was with what he saw as the very recent emergence of a problem of surplus capital, related to the rise of big business and the spread of industrialization, and leading to pressure on governments to adopt a much more aggressive and protectionist policy in the search for overseas outlets. Hobson thought that the South African crisis, beginning with the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the subsequent struggle for control of the Boer Republics, marked the beginnings of this new imperialism of finance;5 and he was far less interested in peripheral matters such as African partition than in the apparently imminent absorption and development of China by the major industrial powers, and the transformation in the economic and political structure of the whole world which he felt must follow.6
