Privateers and pirates were instrumental in the development of English and British colonies and territories through military support and economic enrichment. British policy was to use privateers to help break into the New World when it was dominated by Spain, and Britain’s navy was no match for Spain’s navy. The privateers were used to protect the colonies, like Jamaica, from Spanish invasion and to militarily weaken Spain, Portugal, and others by taking or destroying their ships. Plundering brought in substantial wealth to the colonies and the crown while working for British governors. Eventually, Britain’s policy changed when it became more established in the Caribbean and the New World, and because some of its pro-Catholic monarchs made peace with Spain. Sugar production increased and there was less need for privateers. Most privateers moved to new bases in the North American colonies and Madagascar where they continued to be paid to work on behalf of others, in this case mostly for merchants and local politicians. Besides enriching the North American colonies economies through plunder, the privateers also helped protect them from the Native Americans. As pirates from Madagascar, they raided Mughal merchant fleets, bringing loot and exotic goods to the North American colonies in the seventeenth century, which also helped boost trade with Asia because colonists desired Asian goods. The pirates brought massive numbers of slaves from Madagascar to the colonies to sell. Pirates also operated in the Caribbean. There, they were beneficial to the colonies by bringing in money, yet problematic because they would sometimes raid British ships. When Britain became a global power, privateers and pirates became more of a nuisance than a help to the empire and it stopped using them. Still, in the 1800s, a privateer resurgence occurred in the United States and these individuals and their ships served the same function as they had with Britain, helping a new power break into areas across the sea when it lacked a strong navy. Though somewhat problematic to Britain these privateers did benefit the empire by helping Spain’s colonies gain their independence.

The British Empire began in the early seventeenth century and continued into the twentieth century. There have been many different answers to the question of what caused imperialism. One solution, proposed most famously by Vladimir Lenin, was that imperialism was a stage of capitalism, and as such developed from it. In this theory monopoly and finance play essential roles in controlling imperialism and are part of the developmental stages of capitalism which led to imperialism. Lenin’s work drew upon that of British economist John A. Hobson, who argued that sectional capitalist interests and under-consumption were what caused imperialism. These theories focus on new imperialism as an abrupt shift in the nature of imperialism. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the accuracy of this theory of imperialism based on evidence from the British Empire. This thesis presents the details of Lenin’s and Hobson’s arguments to gain an understanding of the foundational ideas of the theory of imperialism as a stage of capitalism. Case studies of areas of the British Empire were done to find if there was evidence that expansion was directed by finance capital and if both political and social forces were controlled by economics in forwarding imperialism. From the data gathered, it was concluded that imperialism was not solely a consequence of capitalism, and imperialism was not a stage of capitalism.