Summing up the shared neoliberal perspective, Wilhelm Röpke complained that imperialism was one of the 'sad results of the politicization of the economy into which we lapse the more we increasingly abandon the principles of the market economy'. Against postcolonial demands for economic self-determination, the neoliberals mobilised their dichotomy between the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange, and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic. Separating political sovereignty from economic ownership, they argued, would enable all parties to purchase the raw materials of former colonies on the open market, rendering colonisation and conquest unnecessary.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 231