New Imperialism
"The Imperialism of Free Trade" is an academic article by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson first published in "The Economic History Review" in 1953. The article was influential in the debate concerning the causes of British imperial expansion in the 19th-century which, since John A. Hobson's "Imperialism: A Study" (1902), had focused on economic motivation. Instead, Gallagher and Robinson claimed that the New Imperialism – "the new spate of imperial expansion that gathered momentum from the 1880s" – could be best characterised as a continuation of a longer-term policy begun in the 1850s in which informal empire, based on the principles of free trade, was favoured over formal imperial control unless circumstances made such rule impossible. As well as reigniting scholarly interest in theorizing New Imperialism, the article helped launch the Cambridge School of historiography.