Neoliberal international order modeled supervision on the British Empire and mandates system
Evidence
The question for the neoliberals was how to secure a legal and institutional structure that would foster the moral environment on which an international division of labour depended. In seeking to answer this, they drew on the experiments in international governance and supervision pursued by Rappard and the Permanent Mandates Commission, and by the earlier British Empire, which Mises depicted as a ‘mandatory of European Civilization’. … Faced with growing anticolonial movements, the neoliberals sought to ensure that political self-determination did not enable the people of the former colonies to claim their natural resources as their own property or subject them to political control. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 265
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s human-rights-law angle: the mandate system as a precursor of international economic governance connects to literature on trusteeship and the ‘civilizing mission’ in international law (e.g., Antony Anghie’s imperialism/sovereignty work). — connects to: Neoliberals idealized the British free-trade empire as a postnational frame — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 334; Mandate governance techniques directly influenced neoliberal attempts to discipline sovereignty — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 89; Unequal treaties prefigured neoliberal empire without formal territorial control — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 262 (+3 more)
- SEED: Angle: how postwar human-rights and economic-governance regimes inherited the mandate system’s paternalism — a bridge piece between the reader’s human-rights discourse and economic policy literature.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that political self-determination must not let postcolonial peoples claim their own natural resources is a strikingly candid statement of the tension between sovereignty and market order — sits with the reader’s core interest.
Broader Connections
- Mandate-system administrators directly shaped the postwar neoliberal movement
#expands(0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 88 - Formal decolonization gave way to a neo-imperial global economic order
#expands(0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 315 - Middle Eastern leaders misread the US as a reincarnated British Empire.
#qualifies(0.70) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1666