ABSTRACT
The policy of Economic Imperialism includes colonial policy and the acquisition by the Europeanised State of exploitable territory, the policy of spheres of influence, and the policy of obtaining economic control through other political means. In Economic Imperialism Leonard Woolf clarified his own chronology by insisting that it was 'about 1870' that 'Europe had just become ripe for economic imperialism'. Imperialism and Civilization identified imperialism as 'an aspect of the conflict or clash of different civilizations in the nineteenth century'. Woolf, like all the European writers who preceded him, had regarded state action as an essential attribute of imperialism. Economic imperialism aimed 'at using the power and influence of the European form of the State' to win economic advantages in other lands. The opening pages of Woolf's Empire and Commerce in Africa reveal the vast gulf which separates his ideas from the ideas of the Central and Eastern-European socialists.
