Robbins sought a form of ­human social organ­ization that would clarify the distinction between the po­liti­cal and economic realms and dissolve the small, discrete collective of mutual identification—­the miners or the Papuans—in a larger unity. Like Bonn, he saw the British as having provided such a transnational frame ­until 1931. The “open door policy” meant “that ­those parts of the Empire which ­were administered from at home ­were administered as if in trust for the world as a ­whole,” he wrote. “So long as foreign goods ­were admitted ­free and foreign investment and foreign settlement not discriminated against, the En­glishman was not eco­nom­ically better off than the foreigner ­because his country had wide possessions . . . ​The administration of the free-­trade Empire is not,” he said, “one of ­those episodes of history of which En­glishmen need be ashamed.”

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 334