I was interested – and surprised – to read Donald Sassoon’s assertion that Hobson’s Imperialism is not an antisemitic text (Letters, 3 May). Clearly it is not philosemitic, nor is it even neutral on the subject of Jews, the Jewish race, Jewish finance and Jewish power. That these ideas were widely current in this period is irrelevant: the point is that they mattered to Hobson and unquestionably coloured his views about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism not just in this book, but in his earlier work on the Boer war, which he attributed largely to “a class of financial capitalists of which the foreign Jew must be taken as the leading type”.
Scholars such as Peter Cain and David Feldman have written interestingly on this aspect of Hobson’s thought, and I commend their work to those who, like Professor Sassoon, believe it is possible to teach Imperialism without engaging it.
As a historian with a different intellectual focus, I am struggling with the idea that it is possible to teach an analysis of the relationship between imperialism and capitalism, written in 1902 and reflecting contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalist power, without any reference to this context. That Corbyn endorsed this book is troubling, but more troubling for me is the thought that scholars all over the world are teaching Imperialism without bothering to flag the antisemitic dimensions of Hobson’s thought or to contextualise it appropriately. Under these circumstances, the repeated failures by Corbyn (and many others) to identify antisemitic tropes about Jewish money, power and globalism for what they are is hardly surprising. That does not make the failure to call out these – and other – antisemitic tropes any more acceptable.
Abigail Green
Professor of modern European history, University of Oxford
