Book Review: Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City by Andrii Portnov

Abstract

human body (this was nonetheless fashionable in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ironically Marx himself occasionally succumbed to it). To this is dedicated Chapter 2, but these arguments resurface also in Chapter 3 (on the interwar period, the League of Nations, and the end of the mandate in Iraq), Chapter 4 (on the end of empires and decolonization, with special reference to South West Africa) and Chapter 5 (on civilization-based arguments in the twenty-first century, with special reference to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq). While it is obvious that nineteenthand twentieth-century imperialism has entailed exploitation of the colonies, I find it less plausible that colonial expansionism is a necessary consequence of a capitalist economy, and, therefore, that arguments based on one civilization being superior to another are necessitated by capitalism. Capitalism as Civilisation grounds the necessary link between capitalism and imperialism – which was in fact popularized by the first generation of Marxists – in a reading of the first book of Capital (in which Marx makes no explicit link between capitalism and imperialism, despite what some Marxists read into it. For that matter, there are more explicit, if unsubstantiated, links in the Communist Manifesto, which is a work of Marx as much as it is by Engels, and, also for that reason, cannot be taken without further elaboration to represent Marx’s definitive view). Historiography on the origins of empire has added nuance ever since and suggests including the role of ideas and strategy in addition to a crude materialistic or economic reading (see above all the 1998 Oxford History of the British Empire). If one accepts the link between capitalism and imperialism, the key contention of the book is argued for convincingly: arguments based on a distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ people are ‘a historically contingent response to the need to make sense of and regulate a world shaped and reshaped by these dynamics of unequal, yet global, capitalist development’ (4). In fact, even though the introduction may give the impression that the book is confined to very niche debates (such as the contribution of Marxist studies to deconstruction, whose intellectual significance for the historiography of international law is probably marginal), the book’s four case studies are a valuable contribution on the uses of ‘civilization’ arguments, and this is the case whether or not one agrees with the (more ambitious) theoretical framework through which they are presented.