TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………01-02

IMPACT OF IMPERIALISM ON INTERNATIONAL LAW..………………..03-07

CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………...08-10

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….....11

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 INTRODUCTION

Although many governments and political bodies have been labeled “empires” throughout world
history, the related term imperialism today refers to a set of ideological principles whereby one
group sets out to impose its belief systems on another. This imposition is most often political but
can also be cultural, religious, economic, or even ecological.

At its core the term imperialism is defined by power relationships and the ability of one group to
assert some form of power or control over another. Historians who examine imperialism tend to
study either one aspect of this power or one concrete example, such as a particular empire or the
spread of a particular system. Most commonly, imperialism refers to the particular type of
political organization that emerged during the nineteenth century, the “New Imperialism” by
which Europe established empires in Africa, Asia, and Oceania (islands of the central and south
Pacific).

The major impact of imperialism was the spread of ideas among different peoples, particularly in
highly cosmopolitan empires. Empires operate on two key principles: acquisition of wealth,
whether in money or in other resources, and the spread of belief systems to other peoples in order
to establish unity under one imperial structure. This structure comes with an attendant worldview
on religious, social, cultural, and political matters that subjects of the empire are expected to
accept or at least accommodate. Internal conflicts within empires usually come as a result of
resistance to the imperial worldview by subject peoples. Modern empires built upon these
foundations and added more sophisticated bureaucratic structures and explicit drives for religious
conversion, particularly Islam and Christianity. Improved means of transportation, particularly
sailing and later steam vessels, and the discovery of the New World added opportunities for
overseas expansion and more diverse empires.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES:

The focus of researcher will be on following issues:

 To understand the impact of imperialism in the formation of international law.
 To understand the relationship between imperialism and international law.

HYPOTHESIS:
The researcher presumes that:
 Imperialism plays a significant role in the formation and working of the international law.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:
The study is doctrinal which is based on primary and secondary data gathered from different

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sources such as books, statutes, journal, and online databases. It consist of descriptive method
research include overviews and actuality discovering request of diverse mixture.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
 How imperialism effects international law in its formation and functioning?

LIMITATIONS:
Owing to the large number of topics that could be included in this project. The scope of this
research paper is exceedingly vast. So the researcher is tended towards the analysis of most
important aspects of fixation of minimum wage rate. So this research is confined only to a small
area of extent in its approach. Also, the researcher has place, time and money limitations while
making the project.

MODE OF CITATION:
The researcher will follow Bluebook Citation [19th Edition].

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 IMPACT OF IMPERIALISM ON INTERNATIONAL LAW

There are four basic narrative templates around which the contemporary international law
discourse about imperialism is built and in reference to which it generally develops. Each of these
narrative templates presupposes its own, relatively distinct concept of imperialism and thus tends
to orientate the course of accompanying reflections and discussions towards its own, relatively
distinct set of questions, issues, events, and phenomena.17 In the first narrative, the concept of
imperialism is essentially identified with the general politics behind European colonial rule
between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. In the second narrative, the language
of imperialism is used to describe the more recent regime of global hegemonic domination
asserted by the United States in the period following the end of the Cold War. In the third
narrative, imperialism is broadly equated with the general complex of ideological and cultural
practices associated with the aggressive advancement of Western modernity as a cultural
ideological regime into the non-Western societies. In the fourth, it is applied mostly to describe
the basic institutional toolbox and political architecture of capitalist globalization, either in its
‘old’ colonial/neo-colonial form or in its ‘new’ neo-liberal/market-fundamentalist form. The
relationship between these four narratives is complex. At first glance, they do not seem to share
anything in common. Each of them, however, performs the same basic function. The discourse
about international law and imperialism, at its core, is an exercise in disciplinary mythology, and
the place which the concept of imperialism occupies in this enterprise can be essentially likened
to that of a Rorschach blot. It opens a window into the discipline’s political unconscious, a guide
to what international lawyers want to believe international law is as a political project.
The stories which international lawyers tell of international law’s relationship with imperialism
at the end of the day tell us far more about their own collective state of mind and their hopes and
anxieties about international law as a project than they tell us about anything else. Each of them
is essentially a projection of what the respective segment of the discipline has come to believe
was international law’s greatest trauma, failure, and catastrophe. Each of them is also a projection
of what they believe to be the source of its greatest promise and the limits of its redemptive
potential. The first two narratives suggest that international law’s greatest disasters, historically,
have come at those points where it crossed paths with Great Power politics. By contrast, the third
and the fourth narratives seem to imply that the real disaster happened much earlier and in a
completely different I discuss this and other related points in greater detail, though from a slightly
different angle in Akbar Rasulov, Writing about Empire: Remarks on the Logic of a Discourse,.
My reading of the operative structures of the contemporary international law discourse about
imperialism, both in that essay and here, have been influenced by Susan Marks, Three Concepts
of Empire,context: it was that ill-fated pact which international law concluded with the ideologies
of capitalist economics and capitalist modernity at the dawn of its youth that has caused its
eventual corruption and fall from grace. Looking at things from this angle, one might say each of
these two pairs of narratives forms a distinct theoretical continuum. The first two narratives both
construct the relationship between international law and imperialism as a relationship between
two formally separate, external entities. In this way they give voice, in effect, to the same species
of basic ontological sensibility and the same basic theory of historical causality. Their general
conditions of intelligibility, one may conclude, are thus largely identical, and their basic

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ideological signatures are fairly similar. By the same token, the third and the fourth narratives,
despite all the important differences that separate them, also follow the same pattern of theoretical
organisation. They share the same general set of assumptions about how international law
correlates with international politics and what role it plays in the production and advancement of
imperial dynamics. They also subscribe to the same general understanding of international law’s
broader place in world history and its identity as a deeply ambivalent ideological construct.
Taking these patterns of commonality into account, it seems possible to rethink the two narrative
pairings as a discursive projection of two distinct disciplinary traditions. Due to their relatively
greater historical popularity within the international law literature, the tradition constituted by the
first pair of narratives could then be described, if only for the purposes of the present exposition,
as the mainstream tradition; that projected by the second pair, accordingly, as the disciplinary
heterodoxy. b. The Mainstream Tradition The common emplotment strategy underpinning the
two narrative templates used in the mainstream tradition consists of three basic components: (i)
Reification: it relies heavily on the use of extremely reified, pseudo-monolithic categories; (ii)
Ahistoricity: it depicts international law and imperialism as fixed, eternally valid essences; (iii)
Progress narrative: it emplots the course of the historical encounter between international law and
imperialism along the lines of the classical progress narrative formula. 18 Every interaction that
occurs between international law and imperialism in this discourse is modelled on the idea of
external mechanical confrontation. Either it is law that confronts and challenges the empire, or it
is empire that confronts, tramples on, and undermines law. In both cases, international law and
imperialism are effectively portrayed as entirely separate orders. What is more, each of them is
also depicted in terms that indicate the existence behind it of some fixed, pre-established essence.
Like two billiard balls, these essences move grimly through history, each following its own
independent trajectory, before colliding fatefully with its counterpart. The regime of European
colonialism had continued unabated until it was challenged when international law turned its
attention to the question of self-determination; the ugly materiality of US hegemony grew
uncontested in some abstract a-legal space before it sprang, fully formed, into the international
arena following the end of the Cold War and began to corrode and subvert the international rule
of law.Every episode, every event which this tradition admits within its discursive space is,
ultimately, only a symptom. The history one encounters in this kind of discourse is not really one
which involves any For a general overview of the theoretical genealogy underpinning the progress
narrative and some of its criticisms, see Margaret Meek Lange, ‘Progress’, in specific institutional
structures, political formations, or legal regimes. It is a history of law and imperialism sub specie
aeternitatis. No matter how unalike and different the immediate political, cultural, or economic
characteristics of the respective imperial regimes may have been, from the standpoint of the
mainstream tradition all imperialisms are assumed to be essentially identical when it comes to
their historical relationship with international law. Russian, French, British, or American – every
empire known to history, it is suggested, pursues the same basic set of goals and objectives: to
achieve dominance; to turn might into right; to expand and aggrandize itself at the expense of the
international rule of law; to place itself above the rest of the international community; to corrupt
and co-opt every mechanism of international cooperation for its own benefit. The practice of
treating all imperialisms as effectively indistinguishable from one another at first glance may
seem strange. But it serves an important theoretical function: it enables us to avoid getting bogged
down in too many comparative analyses, by substituting excessively nuanced historical

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investigations with simple logical deductions. If all the different empires known to history are but
representations of one common essence, then there is no need for us to have to resort to any kind
of complex institutional or comparative historical studies. As soon as we work out all the main
defining features of this ur-Empire, we can use that knowledge to plug whatever gaps we might
otherwise have in our understanding of any given particular imperial incident, project, or
initiative. When you know how the law of gravity works, figuring out what should happen to a
dropped apple is not a difficult challenge. Naturally, one can find all kinds of serious problems
with this way of approaching world history. At the most immediate level, this attitude seems to
cultivate a rather dangerous predisposition for excessive overgeneralizations, a tendency that
cannot help but impact on the overall rigour and accuracy of the resulting analysis, reasoning,
and conclusions. Surely, the fact that Russia’s project of colonial expansion focused on the
directly adjacent regions of the Eurasian landmass, rather than distant overseas territories, as a
result of which in many cases it was not as actively challenged by rival European powers, puts
Russian imperialism on a fundamentally different historical footing when it came to its experience
with and of international law, compared to, say, British or French imperialisms? Surely also the
fact that for most of the 19th century Russia itself remained for the most part only a ‘recipient’
of international rules, not their producer or exporter, was not an entirely irrelevant fact either?
The mainstream tradition’s propensity for aggressive reductionism creates problems not only
when it comes to its depiction of the historical realities of imperialism. However nuanced or
sophisticated an image of international law one may have otherwise, the moment one enters the
mainstream discourse about international law and imperialism, one is immediately treated to the
argument that international law is essentially all just one single, monolithic block. It is
international law as a whole, we are told, and not any one specific part of it, that has helped bring
about decolonization. It is international law as such – and not any specific part of it – that the rise
of the US hegemony in the post-Cold War era pushed into a never-ending spiral of decay and
degradation. Whichever strand in the mainstream discourse one takes, all the different normative
regimes and institutional structures that make up the various dimensions of the international legal
domain immediately and invariably melt into one large undifferentiated mass.None of this, of
course, is incidental or theoretically inconsequential. The universe depicted in the mainstream
discourse is a world that is populated not by men and women, international institutions and states,
but by great reified abstractions: ‘imperialism as such’, ‘international law as a whole’,esprit
internationalite’, ‘American exceptionalism’, ‘multilateralism’, etc. It is a universe of grand
metaphysical essences that interact with one another according to some fixed, pre-determined
laws of history. And at the root of all of these laws lies the idea of inexorable historical trends. In
the case of the imperialism-as-European-colonial-rule tradition, the predilection for the narrative
of progress typically plays out in the form of the standard Hegelian thesis: history is the
movement from darkness and chaos towards enlightenment and order. The age of European
colonialism marked the rise of racism, violence, and exclusion in international politics. Its end
brought a new era of freedom, equality, and emancipation, and international law, through its
commitment to the principle of self-determination, played a central role in effecting this
transformation. The ideological signalling this narrative formula tends to support should not be
too hard to work out. In the first place, it encourages us to adopt an excessively cheerful view
both of the actual historical record of decolonization and of international law’s actual role in this
process, conveniently covering up the fact of law’s historical centrality to the initial formulation

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and advancement of that very system of European colonialism which decolonization sought to
end. In the second place, and far more importantly, it also tends to cultivate a completely false
sense of security among the anti-imperialist segments of its purported audience: not only because
it suggests that the ‘fight’ against imperialism has already been won, or because it misrepresents
the historical reality of imperialism by portraying it in such narrow terms, but also because it
promises that international law itself somehow stands against imperialism, as if there had been
something inherent in the very character of the international legal form that made international
law inimical to imperialism. By contrast, in the case of the imperialism-as-US-hegemony
narrative, the inexorable historical progress formula tends normally to play out in an inverted
sequence. Instead of moving from darkness to light, oppression to freedom, primitivity to
complexity, history here is seen somehow to slide backwards as the international community
tragically slips from a higher stage of development (multilateralism) to a lower one (American
exceptionalism). The sequence of the inexorable movement thus implied repeats in its general
contours the classical Gibbonian fall-and-decline narrative: the expansion of the US hegemony
in the period following the end of the Cold War dealt a heavy blow to sovereign equality,
multilateralism, and the culture of consent in international affairs, ushered in instead an age of
permanent warfare and a cynical disregard for international rules.Again, there can be little doubt
as to what sort of effects this kind of narrative configuration tends to induce: to stand against
imperialism, one must stand up for international law, and to stand up for international law, one
must stand up for sovereignty, multilateralism, consent, and the principle of non-intervention in
domestic affairs. And even if this should mean in the end giving shelter to tyrants and washing
hands off oppression, corruption, civil wars, and human rights abuses in all other parts of the
world, then so be it. The important thing now is to help international law survive the onslaught
of the American empire. The rest of it, for now, may need to wait. It will be a lot easier, anyway,
to deal with all those things once we have saved international law from its untimely demise. A
world of epic struggles, grand reified abstractions, and a sense of everything coming together into
one single line of inexorable progression – this cascade of naive generalisations is neither
ideologically accidental nor theoretically innocent. Above and beyond everything else that it
helps make possible, it helps create and maintain an atmosphere of existential certainty. It does
not matter how powerful the forces of imperialism may seem or how difficult the task of anti-
imperial struggle may be in practice.There is a single overarching logic that ties everything
together, and it is both simple to follow and relatively easy to decode. The reach of empire may
be deep and impossible to escape. But we know that, ultimately, it will end and international law
once more will triumph. A large part of what makes the narratives of the mainstream discourse
about international law and imperialism so popular and so enduring comes down precisely to this
rarely acknowledged feature: the audiences which it targets do not come to it yearning for nuance,
accuracy, or realism; their object of desire is the soothing balsam of moral clarity and the promise
of guaranteed redemption. The mainstream discourse about international law’s relationship with
imperialism is a discourse of facile essentialisms, fuzzy oversimplifications, and lazy conceptual
slippages, but in one important aspect it never falters: the basic role that it assigns to international
law in its universe is always that of an unimpeachably positive character. A tragic victim, a hero,
or a noble sidekick, but never the unprincipled cynic or the dark villain. In the one case, having
first been corrupted by European colonialism, international law eventually turns against it, by
helping develop the law of self determination.In the other case, having risen nobly above the dirty

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world of nationalist politics, international law falls under the assault of the self-aggrandizing
American Empire.The two stories may differ in terms of their immediate content and purported
ideological messages. But the general plot structure that they both use is unmistakably similar to
the traditional formula of the ‘Overcoming the Monster’ tale. The only difference is that in the
first case the defeat-struggle-victory sequence is presented as already completed, while in the
second case, it is shown to be still unfolding.

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 CONCLUSION
Imperialism, the forceful extension of a nation’s authority by establishing political and economic
domination of other nations, inherently implies the advancement of a certain state at the expense
of its subordinated territories. It is for this reason why imperialism essentially benefited the few
expansionist states while exerting long-term damages on the majority colonized territories.

During the 19th century and early 20th century, imperialism arose as a necessity for industrializing
states to secure their own economic prosperity. Increasing protectionist policies in many states
limited the markets, and consequently the demand, for an increasing supply of manufactured
products from the growing industrial output. The industrial powers of the time thus looked
towards imperialism as a means to secure foreign markets and guarantee consumption for their
products by forcefully monopolizing trade with their colonies. Additionally, the wave of rapid
industrialization led imperial states to seek a cheap source of raw materials to supply their thriving
businesses at home, and imperialism provided a means to ensure that. These economic interests,
tied with ultra-nationalistic sentiment, pushed towards the building of huge worldwide empires,
where imperial powers established their control over vast territories, including most of Asia,
Africa, the Polynesia, and parts of the Americas, where imperial powers controlled most of the
world.

Imperialist ambitions pushed for the economic exploitation of colonized nations to benefit the
mother country. As imperial states began controlling the economy of the colonized territory,
interests for the welfare of the colonized peoples had little influence in defining their economic
policies. Instead, imperial states seeked to maximize their profits and gains, regardless of the
consequences such attitudes entailed for the colonized areas. Most notably, the long-term well-
being of the colonized nation was of no interest for the imperial state, and so any form of
sustainable development seemed unnecessary for any imperial government. This is the reason
why deforestation is a massive problem for many nations which had formerly been controlled by
some imperial power. Imperial powers, in their quest for economic prosperity, disregarded the
need for the sustainable management of forest areas and established minimally-regulated lumber
industries which seeked only short-term profits for themselves and their mother country. Thus,
unsustainable overexploitation of natural resources followed. The effects are clearly in modern
times, as the environmental degradation caused because of self-interested imperialist endeavors
is difficult to reverse, and is undoubtedly connected with the rampant poverty and hunger present
in many former colonies.

While some industrial development did occur, imperial interests in colonized territories were
aimed at creating an economy based on agriculture and the exploitation of other finite natural
resources such as gold, silver, or diamonds. Thus, the industrial development that did occur in
colonized territories was relevant to the desire of imperial powers to turn colonized states into
sources of cheap raw products to be later used in their industries back home. The economy of
colonized territories was not diversified or turned into an industrial one, and instead a select
number of goods were targeted, and their production/extraction hugely increased. Imperial
investment and construction focused on the development and construction of communications,
railways, plantations and mines, investments which did not by themselves help in the economic
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transformation of the country from agricultural to industrial. Rather, these investments were
intended to accelerate the exploitation of the colonies’ natural resources and agricultural
capacities. Once the nation attained political independence from the mother country, the legacy
left behind from imperialism established an economy which depended on the export of a few
select natural resources and agricultural, leaving the country’s economy extremely vulnerable to
market price fluctuations. Most importantly, the unwillingness of imperial powers to reinvest the
profits gained from their colonies in their industrial development forcefully kept colonies under
a fragile agricultural economy while still depriving them of their finite natural resources. Thus,
imperialism had a highly negative effect on the economic growth of colonized nations.

The partitioning of colonies worldwide into the spheres of influence of imperial powers created
colonies that encompassed numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups into a single political
entity. This recurrent aspect of imperialism was most notable in Africa, where its partitioning did
not correspond to the historical, cultural, or ethnic boundaries of pre-colonial African societies.
Thus, states were created which shared widely diverse ethnic populations which felt no identity
or connection to the political entity which they had been forcefully drawn into. The political
legacy left behind by imperialism left a cluster of artificially-formed states which had no historic
or cultural similarities on which to legitimatize its existence. This situation, along with the
economic difficulties suffered because of the previously discussed issues, led to an environment
of political turmoil based on ethnic, religious, and linguistic. Countries deeply divided among
ethnic lines, a result of imperialism, not only led to the political instability of the former colonies,
but also, in some cases, led to serious violence. Modern-day Kenya exemplifies this, as the
competition of two different ethnic groups for the control of the government has led to a situation
comparable to that of an early civil war. It is thus clear that imperialism has resulted in a
permanent liability in the geo-political situation of a great number of countries worldwide.

Regardless of the possible economic or technological benefits of imperialism, it is difficult to

even begin to justify those ends by the tremendous loss of life that occurred because of it. The
initial act of conquest needed to begin to exercise control over a given territory was, in the
overwhelming majority of cases, not peaceful, and entailed in the unjust death of many natives at
the hands of the military and technological superiority of imperial powers. However, the effects
of imperialism go much farther beyond conquest: forceful slavery-like conditions in the colonized
territories imposed great sufferings among the native population, and in many cases, unjust
repression by the colonizing power led to the mass killings of a great number of people. In the
Congo Free State, a Belgian colony, an estimated 10 million people died as a consequence of the
imperialist policies of the time. Additionally, retaliatory attacks on indigenous populations in
many other instances resulted in the extermination of huge numbers of people. The unjust and
unnecessary death of such a great number of people because of imperialism is, again, difficult to
justify.

However, one must also admit that imperialism allowed colonized territories to technologically
advance thanks to the connection with other imperial powers. One can also argue that the
introduction of western values through imperialism helped rid colonized territories of certain

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obsolete and morally condemnable practices and traditions. However, these benefits do not even
begin to outweigh the negative impacts which imperialism brought.

Imperialism was thus a largely negative aspect of the 19th and 20th centuries, as it achieved,
through unjustifiable, repressive unjust means, an end which favored the few powerful imperial
states and greatly hindered the great majority of colonized and subjugated territories.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

SECONDARY SOURCES:
BOOKS:
 Culture And Imperialism by EDWARD W. SAID

 Emperialism, The Highest Stage Of Capitalism by VLADIMIR LENIN

 A Theory Of Imperialism by USHA PATNAIK

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