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Imperialists normally hold the belief that the acquisition and maintenance of empires is a positive good, combined with an assumption of cultural or other such superiority inherent to the imperial power. Subjects of imperial and post-imperial governments and those sympathetic to them have often considered imperialism to be an exploitive evil. This view has even been held by the subjects or citizens of the state which holds an imperial sway over other nations or peoples.
According to the OED, in 19th Century England, imperialism, was generally used only to describe English policies. However, soon after the invention of the term, imperialism was used in reference to policies of the Roman Empire. In the 20th century, the term has been used to describe the policies of both the Soviet Union and the United States although analytically these differed greatly from each other and from 19th-century imperialism. Furthermore, the term has been expanded to apply, in general, to any historical instance of the aggrandizement of a greater power at the expense of a lesser power.
Hobson's analysis of capital flight[?] and the rise of mammoth cartels[?] later influenced Lenin in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which has become a basis for the modern neo-Marxist and Leninist analysis of imperialism. According to this theory, Capitalism becomes unable to sustain itself from its inevitable collapse in countries where it was long established, and so the Capitalist masters must seek domination over other lands in order to plunder their resources and give them new markets.
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