I'm pretty sure I read this in an Our World in Data article but I think that a persuasive way to read these kinds of chart is that decolonization was the biggest step ever toward global equality since incomes diverged.
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Basically it seems like you are conflating "the creation a world full of sovereign nations that can trade with each other" with neoliberalism, which I think most would call a much narrower project.
Most liberal economies thorough history has trade restrictions. Even now, you famously get thrown in jail if you carry weed into Japan, and Australia restricts all manner of animals.
My argument is that the difference-maker is domestic economic control rather than free trade as we understand it today. Anticolonialism does overlap with liberalism and a lot of indep. movements were led by liberals - but there were liberals among the colonizers too. It's a big ideology!
Neoliberalism, otoh, is mainly about restrictions on sovereign govts and what they are able to do. In global south it was mostly imposed from outside via conditions on loans and pressure from investors. And I think when imposed it leads to, at best, stagnation. So some differentiation is important
One of the critical reasons Ancien Regime France fell was a sovereign debt crisis — aka "pressure from investors." The alternative to liberal institutions like IMF being lender of last resort is either war or state collapse
Yeah but they can like... have different policies. Like the differences in imf loan conditions across countries and across time are huge. Again, neoliberalism does not start with the founding of the IMF but much later.
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