Neocolonialism - The Term

The Term

Origins

The political-science term neo-colonialism became popular usage in reference to the continued European control — economic, cultural, etc. — of African countries that had been decolonized in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–45). Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana (1960–66), coined the term neo-colonialism in the book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) As a political scientist, Nkrumah theoretically developed and extended, to the post–War 20th century, the socio-economic and political arguments presented by Lenin in the pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), about 19th-century imperialism as the logical extension of geopolitical power to meet the financial investment needs of the political economy of capitalism.

In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah said that:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism . . . like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. . . .
The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.