Route 1 Cox: institutions never neutral, carry the interests of their builders → Chomsky: IMF/World Bank as instruments of TNCs and wealthy investors → test the charge at three sites of governance: votes, loan conditions, trade rules

Route 2 design settled at the founding: White’s dollar supremacy defeats Keynes’s neutral reserve currency → creditor power wrote the rules → “new imperial age” is a claim about design, not accident

votes: White over Keynes → quota system freezes the advantage → US ~16.5% + 85% rule = veto → G-7, 4% of membership, 43% of Board power → European MD, American Bank President → Strange’s “structural bias” → loan conditions: SAP austerity, privatisation, market opening → Washington Consensus → served corporations, banks, investors ahead of borrowers → Stiglitz: uniform formula, worse outcomes in the South, 1997 East Asian crisis → trade rules: GATT liberalisation selective → McCalla and Nash: agriculture and textiles least covered → services and IP bound tightly instead → Nathan: patent monopolies capture value-chain profits → enforcement one-way: US blocks Appellate Body appointments, funding cut December 2019

machinery not only extractive → Gilpin: WTO’s rules-based regime gives predictability, discourages trade wars → Fund credit still steadies economies in crisis

Route 1 asymmetry sits in the rules themselves — that is what “new imperial age” names → South no longer only petitions: quota reform, AIIB, NDB now contest who writes them

Route 2 the design charge holds precisely at votes and enforcement → reform is judged there, not in rhetoric → Gilpin’s rules-based order survives only if authorship widens