Mises favored retaining European military presence to preserve imperial market integration

Evidence

Writing with a nervous eye on rising anticolonial movements from India to the Philippines, Mises warned that, if independence damaged the integration of the colonies in global circuits of trade, it would be ‘an economic catastrophe of hitherto unprecedented proportion’. Despite his liberal scruples about coercive rule, he believed that political independence was of minor significance compared to the future of an international market civilisation. ‘European officials, troops, and police must remain in these areas’, he wrote, as far as their presence is necessary in order to maintain the legal and political conditions required to insure the participation of the colonial territories in international trade. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 249

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘the libertarian justification of imperial policing’ — how market-civilisational arguments were used by liberals to defend coercive rule, against the grain of their own anticolonial rhetoric.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the recent ‘classical liberal defenders of empire’ literature (e.g., Bourke’s discussion of J.S. Mill) and to debates on postcolonial sovereignty in the human-rights-and-economics literature. — connects to: Mises privately welcomed fascism as a temporary bulwark against Bolshevism and European decline — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 105; Mises justified imperial war as legitimate compulsion to trade — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 261; Hayek and Mises favored global governance, not unfettered free markets — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 79 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Hayek and Mises favored global governance, not unfettered free markets #corroborates (0.82) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 79
• Third World wars and oil price rises chiefly benefited imperialist economies #complicates (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 30