State ownership of resources turns geographic inequality into a cause of war

Evidence

For the neoliberals, it was the confusion of sovereignty with ownership that made territorial control the precondition of economic exploitation and led to international conflict. Once states take over the ownership of the materials within their border, Robbins argued, ‘the distinction between territorial jurisdiction and property disappears and, for that very reason, the fact of geographical inequality becomes a permanent cause of disharmony’. He once again contrasted this situation with the free trade of the old British Empire, in which, for ‘cultivated Britons’, the ‘dominions of the empire’ were a ‘ceremonial fiction’, not a concrete reality; in a free-trade economy based on the principle of the open door, any private investor can buy a country’s raw materials on the market on equal terms, he argued, and so has no need to resort to conquest. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 259

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the neoliberal claim that free trade removes the motive for conquest — vs. the anticolonial reality that markets themselves disciplined raw-material access without formal borders.
• QUESTION: Does this neoliberal ‘open door’ argument amount to an endorsement of informal empire, since resource access is guaranteed without formal sovereignty?
• XREF: connects to: Enclave economies centered on resource extraction become privileged spaces of war — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 134

Broader Connections

• Enclave economies centered on resource extraction become privileged spaces of war #corroborates (0.78) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 134