In tropical Africa, on the other hand, Hobson talked of 'lower races' who could only progress under western leadership - P. J. Cain

He was also extraordinarily sensitive to the ways that imperialists could cloak essentially materialist concerns in the language of morality, mission and destiny. Yet in the process and on more than one occasion he provided evidence to show that the financiers too were prisoners of imperial ideology, that they were as much wedded to causes like 'the civilising mission', as much mislead by hightened imperial rhetoric, as anyone else.

However, in that autobiography Hobson did confess that he now thought that the emphasis on economic causation in Imperialism: A Study was overdone and that more emphasis should have been placed on the 'lust for power' with economic gains seen as a means of exercising power rather an end in themselves.

By 1910-14, Hobson had drifted far from the arguments of Imperialism: A Study and was now writing of imperialism as a phase in the extension of a benign, global capitalist network and one that would eventually lead to an economic convergence between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, to world peace and eventually to some form of world government.