The Netherlands, as the first leading mercantile nation, built its military power on the basis of the wealth acquired from such mercantilism, and that military power, also, correspondingly was manifest in its navy. The same was true of Britain, which overtook the Netherlands as the leading mercantilist nation. In both cases, the actions of these nations, in using their military power, to establish colonial empires, reflected the nature of their own and global economic development at that point. The ruling class comprised a landed aristocracy that appropriated surplus value in the form of rent, and a rising commercial class, that appropriated surplus value in the form of commercial profit, as well as a financial oligarchy, that appropriated surplus value in the form of interest. In other words, all forms of appropriation based on unequal exchange, rather than the production of surplus value.
The basis of that unequal exchange was to buy low and sell high, to obtain commodities below their value and sell them above their value. For a mercantilist nation, the basis of doing this, on a large-scale, was to be able to secure foreign sources of commodities in high demand, for example, all those exotic new commodities such as tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, spices, silks and so on that the voyages of discovery had begun to introduce.
The stage of global development meant that the economies of many of the places where these new exotic products came from were not only pre-capitalist, but, even, pre-commodity production and exchange. It is this combination of the stage of development in the mercantilist nations and the stage of development in the countries they colonised that determines the form of domination and appropriation of surplus value, i.e. the creation of colonial empires, and unequal exchange. The use of superior force was, by no means, thereby, simply arbitrary, but was driven by economic motives, and those economic motives were, themselves, determined by the form of economic relations of the time, i.e. the dominance of mercantilism.
By contrast, at the end of the 19th century, it is not mercantilism that dominates but industrial capital. As Marx describes, in Capital, wherever those “antediluvian forms of capital”, such as commercial capital, and interest-bearing capital, which, together with landed property, form the basis of mercantilism, dominate, it is impossible for industrial capital to prosper. It is precisely because of their nature, extracting surplus value by unequal exchange – commercial profit, interest, rent – that they leach off industrial profit and diminish it, restricting its accumulation. It is why industrial capital, supported by the industrial proletariat had to defeat its mercantilist opponents in 1848, as epitomised by the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
Industrial capital produces surplus value, as industrial profit, and seeks to minimise the deductions from it in the form of rent and interest. As Marx sets out, in Capital III, Chapter 17, it also seeks to reduce the amount deducted from it in the form of commercial costs, but these commercial costs are integral to it realising the produced surplus value. Commercial capital exists as a specialised form of capital solely in order to reduce those costs, and so increase realised profits. Its only on that basis that it forms a part of industrial capital, and is allowed to obtain the average industrial rate of profit.
So, when industrial capital becomes dominant, at the end of the 19th century, this commercial capital, and its role in the old colonial empires remains important to it, in those economies that had those empires. It ensures the continued supply of cheap food and materials, as well as protected markets into which the expanding output of industry can be sold, as a safety-valve against an overproduction of those commodities.
However, the consequence of the role of colonialism, was, itself, a development of commodity production and exchange, in those places it colonised, and, as elsewhere, that led to a development of capital and capitalist production, of a bourgeoisie and proletariat, in the colonies. Moreover, other nations, which did not have extensive colonial empires, had also industrialised, and, now, were based on large-scale industrial capital, notably Germany, Japan and the US.
The US, as a result of the Civil War, turned the Confederate states into its own internal colonies, much as Tsarist Russia did with Siberia. Via the Monroe Doctrine, it also warned European colonialism to keep its hands off South America, which it saw as its own backyard. Germany sought to, belatedly, establish its own colonial empire, in Africa, whilst Japan was just one of the countries, along with Britain, that established itself in China. It is, in fact, this tail-end of colonialism that misled Lenin into seeing this continued carving up of the world into colonial possessions as the characteristic feature of imperialism.
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