Locke’s improvement doctrine undergirded neoliberal justifications of colonial appropriation.

Evidence

At this stage, the MPS discourse on colonialism was classically liberal, and it drew heavily on John Locke’s justification of colonialism as ‘improvement’. God meant for the earth to be cultivated, Locke had contended, and thus he gave it to the ‘industrious and rational’. Those who ‘fail’ to improve the land – d’Estaing’s nomadic desert people who wasted the oil beneath their feet, for instance – had no grounds for complaint if it was appropriated by others. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 399

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘improvement’ doctrine as the conceptual hinge connecting private property, labor, and colonial seizure.
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s existing framework on how property-rights discourse legitimizes economic dispossession. — connects to: Locke naturalized market creation as inevitable to defend his class’s property project — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 281; Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28; Neoliberals reframed inequality as apolitical difference to erase colonial exploitation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 404 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority #qualifies (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28
• Neoliberals reframed inequality as apolitical difference to erase colonial exploitation. #corroborates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 404
• Early neoliberal development theory echoed colonial assumptions about non-Western peoples #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1290
• The US reframed colonialism as differential development opportunity, a discourse later central to neoliberalism #expands (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 84
• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy #corroborates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 246
• Mill borrowed Locke’s ‘Nonage’ term to justify colonial immaturity claims #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28