Benham's thinking basically remained confined within the framework of nineteenth-century colonial economics. The recommended concentration on the primary sector (and export specialization in competitive areas thereof) were strategies that would not challenge the prevailing global division of labor and were thus in line with (conservative) interests in the industrialized countries still in control of colonial territories (securing continued and improved access to primary inputs and avoiding potentially new competition for their own industrial exports to the regions). Although the focus of Benham (and other MPS development experts, as we shall see) was in line with traditional liberal colonial economics on export-oriented agriculture (and other raw materials), it is nevertheless easy to see how his reasoning in opposition to import substitution industrialization (ISI) was an early and rudimentary form of what can be presently regarded as generalized free trade strategies (despite the emphasis on exports displayed in the export-oriented industrialization, or EOI, paradigm that came to displace it). Since lowering barriers to imports is considered quintessential to EOI, international trade, and not national development, was the predominant guiding principle.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1282