Neoliberal imperialism

This essay approaches the neoliberal tradition of thought through the lens of liberal imperialism. Seeking to bring scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas together with research on liberal defences of empire, I show that the neoliberal tradition of thought contains a number of formal, explicit, and systematic defences of (European) colonialism. In the first section of the essay, I contextualise neoliberal imperialism by showing that many prominent early neoliberals had close ties to the British Colonial Office. I then offer a close reading of two highly influential instances of the neoliberal defence of empire. The first was articulated between the 1930s and 1940s by Herbert Frankel, who saw colonisation as a form of civilisational improvement that places a heavy ethical and political burden on the coloniser. The second was articulated by Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan between the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to Frankel’s civilisational justification of colonialism, Gann and Duignan articulated a more dispassionate cost-benefit argument, claiming that colonialism’s advantages outweigh its disadvantages. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this shift from a civilisational to a consequentialist frame both for the neoliberal tradition and for liberal imperialist discourse at large.