'he was also extraordinarily sensitive to the ways that imperialists could cloak essentially materialist concerns in the language of morality, mission and destiny. Yet in the process and on more than one occasion he provided evidence to show that the financiers too were prisoners of imperial ideology, that they were as much wedded to causes like 'the civilising mission', as much mislead by hightened imperial rhetoric, as anyone else.'

'However, in that autobiography Hobson did confess that he now thought that the emphasis on economic causation in Imperialism: A Study was overdone and that mo…

'He came back to England convinced that Rhodes and his fellow mining capitalists had engineered the war in order to removed the leaders of the Boer republics w…

'in 1938 and at the age og eighty, Hobson decided to republish Imperialism: A Study. By the late 1930s, public opinion was becoming much more critical of empir…