This argument was made with the greatest force by the British economist Lionel Robbins, in a series of lectures at William Rappard’s Geneva Institute of Graduate Studies. In 1939, as another war broke out in Europe, Robbins challenged Lenin’s argument that the previous Great War was an imperialist war – ‘an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder’ for the division of the world and ‘the partition and repartition of colonies’. Robbins depicted war as inimical to a ‘Great Society’ based on private property and the division of labour, and finance capital as a pawn of government, not a prime mover. In geopolitical matters, he argued, bankers are a ‘pacific influence’. If war was contrary to the interests of capital, Robbins argued its cause lay elsewhere – in politics, and especially in the existence of independent sovereign states. ‘Not capitalism’, Robbins argued, ‘but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.’ Imperialism, from this perspective, was a result of the abandonment of free trade, and of liberalism’s ‘strict distinctions between territory and property’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 257