In fact, the growing dominance of industrial capital, and its creation of surplus value, in production, is what determines the characteristic features of imperialism, as against those of the mercantilism and colonialism that preceded it. As Marx notes, in The Poverty of Philosophy, without slavery in the US, cheap, plentiful supplies of cotton would not have been available, and the Industrial Revolution, in Britain, based upon textile production, would not have happened. But, that slavery had its day, and became not only unnecessary, but an impediment. It wasn't altruism that led to its abolition, rather it died out, because it was no longer economic.
As soon as slave labour can be replaced by wage-labour, using machines, slavery dies out. But, the use of machines, and wage-labour, in cotton production, as with any other kind of production, means a different mode of production has arisen, and that was true across all of the colonies too, where the old forms of agriculture and other production gave way to machine production, and wage-labour. As in the developed economies, it was, now, industrial capital that was becoming dominant, was producing increasing amounts of relative surplus value, and formed the basis of capitalist exploitation.
Marx noted that, in Britain, despite wages being 50% higher than in Europe, British textiles were continually cheaper than those produced in Europe, and British profits were also higher. The reason for that was that British textile labour was fare more productive, as a result of being backed by a much greater quantity of, and more advanced, machinery and fixed capital. What is true of that manufacturing is true of primary production too. When agricultural workers in the colonies are supplemented by increasing levels of mechanisation, it is this higher level of productivity that reduces the unit value of these primary products, not the fact that they are produced by slaves, or very low paid workers, and the use of those machines, also, itself, changes the nature of the labour required. So, the advantages of colonial empires, which also had to be administered and policed, increasingly diminished, because the capitalist development, within them, itself reduced the value of primary products used in manufacture.
What is more, particularly after WWII, it is the US, which is the epitome of this dominance of industrial capital, and it has an incentive to break up all of those old European colonial empires, and their outmoded protectionism and restrictions. But, its interest is not primarily access to the cheap primary products, or the ability to export its commodities to them – though that remains a function of them – it is rather to be able to export capital itself (i.e. the social relation between capital and wage-labour), to establish its own production in those economies, via the growth of US multinational corporations, and, thereby, to exploit large masses of available labour. Its interest is that of industrial capital, the production and maximisation of surplus value, as against the interests of mercantilism to maximise the appropriation of that surplus value via unequal exchange. It is these changed economic relations that determine the characteristics of imperialism, as against those of colonialism, which, like slavery dies out, as its time and function had passed.
Engels also describes the way it is not only in industry that the introduction of machines requires a different type of worker, and new relations of production, but also applies to the military. The infantryman that uses a flintlock and bayonet is different to the one who previously marched only with a pike staff, and all of the equipment requires the creation of a new type of soldier – the corps of engineers – as well as new tactics and formations.
“The foot soldiers were then the mercenaries of princes; they were rigorously drilled but quite unreliable and only held together by the rod; they were recruited from among the most demoralised elements in society and often from enemy prisoners of war who had been pressed into service. The only type of fighting in which these soldiers could apply the new weapons was the tactics of the line, which reached its highest perfection under Frederick II.” (p 214)
This formation could only move forward very slowly, and that on level ground. Its demise came with the American War of Independence. The Americans had rifled guns, which were more accurate, and they attacked the exposed lines of British infantry, using skirmishing tactics, hiding in small groups in the woods, as they were used to doing as hunters. As revolutionary nationalists, they were fighting for their own interests, and so, not prone to running away, as were the mercenaries that made up the foot soldiers of other armies at that time. The same thing was seen in the guerrilla tactics used by the Maoists in China, Vietnam and elsewhere.
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