At this stage, the MPS discourse on colonialism was classically liberal, and it drew heavily on John Locke's justification of colonialism as 'improvement'. God meant for the earth to be cultivated, Locke had contended, and thus he gave it to the 'industrious and rational'. Those who 'fail' to improve the land – d'Estaing's nomadic desert people who wasted the oil beneath their feet, for instance – had no grounds for complaint if it was appropriated by others.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 399