Less than a decade after the UDHR's adoption, the Swedish social democrat Gunnar Myrdal proclaimed that the welfare state, which was becoming a reality in all 'advanced nations', should be transformed into a 'welfare world'. This dream was undercut by the reality of colonial exploitation. The same year that the UDHR was adopted, the UK's minister of economic affairs, Sir Stafford Cripps, contended that Britain's very survival depended on 'a quick and extensive development of our African resources'. The demand to increase production in the colonies made the UK very wary of extending economic rights. For anticolonialists, who were accustomed to the gap between universal pronouncements and colonial realities, the seeming contradiction between welfarism at home and the denial of economic rights at an international level provided a lens through which to illuminate the post-war economic order.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 236