Early neoliberal development economics reproduced colonial division of labor while anticipating export-oriented trade strategies

Evidence

Benham’s thinking basically remained confined within the framework of nineteenth-century colonial economics. The recommended concentration on the primary sector (and export specialization in competitive areas thereof) were strategies that would not challenge the prevailing global division of labor and were thus in line with (conservative) interests in the industrialized countries still in control of colonial territories (securing continued and improved access to primary inputs and avoiding potentially new competition for their own industrial exports to the regions). Although the focus of Benham (and other MPS development experts, as we shall see) was in line with traditional liberal colonial economics on export-oriented agriculture (and other raw materials), it is nevertheless easy to see how his reasoning in opposition to import substitution industrialization (ISI) was an early and rudimentary form of what can be presently regarded as generalized free trade strategies (despite the emphasis on exports displayed in the export-oriented industrialization, or EOI, paradigm that came to displace it). Since lowering barriers to imports is considered quintessential to EOI, international trade, and not national development, was the predominant guiding principle. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1282

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reading purpose on origins of the neoliberal network; connects to later chapters on EOI displacing ISI. — connects to: The late-1970s neoliberal export-oriented development paradigm was conceived in the 1950s — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 159; Neoliberal economists inverted colonial extraction into a source of Third World progress — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 401; Cold War anticommunism and colonial economics stunted early neoliberal development thinking — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1267 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: how ‘free trade’ doctrine quietly preserved colonial trade asymmetries — a genealogy from Benham to modern EOI orthodoxy.

Broader Connections

• Early neoliberal development theory echoed colonial assumptions about non-Western peoples #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1290
• The colonial resource grab morphed into a neoliberal regime that maintained extraction mechanisms #corroborates (0.75) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 28
• French development economics inherited colonial premises about exporting African cash crops #exemplifies (0.75)
• Formal decolonization gave way to a neo-imperial global economic order #expands (0.70) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 315