Bauer's response to postcolonial demands of the 1970s was largely consistent with the earlier MPS members' Lockean defence of European colonialism. Referring to an English student pamphlet that accused the British of taking 'the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, raw materials from all over the world', Bauer – who had begun his career working for a trading company with rubber interests in Malaya – retorted that this was the opposite of the truth; 'the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India', he wrote. Far from the West causing the poverty of the Third World, Bauer argued that (what he euphemistically called) 'contacts with the West' had been the central agents of material progress.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 401