Answer:
What is the relationship between capitalism and colonialism?
Colonialism started before modern capitalism, and it is a basic expression of the human impulse to extend one’s territory and to create wealth through trade and through the exploitation of natural resources available elsewhere but needed locally. Gold, of course, is the ultimate example, where you try to collect gold elsewhere, but other examples could be given, such as the Romans collecting grain throughout the Empire, particularly in Egypt or the European powers trying to collect riches from the Orient, such as spices, silks, dyes,.
With modern capitalism, namely the kind that arose after the Industrial Revolution, and Adam Smith’s seminal work, the problem arose of how to collect enough natural resources and raw materials to feed the added productivity of modern factories. If you increase the production of textiles, processed foods, furniture, household items, you are going to need to collect the raw materials for those staples. You will need cotton, coffee, sugar, tea, silk, dyes, and later oil, coal, natural gas, metals. As the countries that promoted their industrializations did not usually have those raw materials, they had to procure them. Human character being what it is, that meant going elsewhere and getting it at the lowest cost possible. As the populations of those places were not as militarily developed as the newly industrialized countries, the lowest cost usually meant taking the commodities by force, which in turn required a permanent presence in the new territories. Hence the birth of 18th Century colonialism, which was built on previous forms of colonialism, that were mostly born from trade.
Finally, a rivalry between the industrialized countries also meant that colonialism would play a strategic role, whereby there was a need to control strategic spots in the world (The Malacca strait, the Ormus Strait, the Suez Canal, the Middle East, the Cape of Good Hope), whch requireda new sort of military colonialism for strategic purposes.
