Muslim countries, virtually all of which were colonised or brought indirectly under Western non-Muslim domination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are naturally wary of foreign models of development. The process of globalisation, accelerated by late twentieth-century neo-liberal reforms, bore some resemblance to that earlier period of globalisation, 1870–1914, when virtually all of the territories of Dar al-Islam were consolidated under European flags. Although European gunboats no longer physically threatened debtor states in the 1980s and 1990s, many of these states were obliged to undergo IMF workouts, followed by structural reforms encouraged by World Bank loans, a process that continues in the current decade.

The Washington Consensus still serves as the intellectual underpinning of second-generation structural reform, although in its most recent (“post-WC”) formulation, Dani Rodrik has added an additional ten guidelines to its ten original commandments, albeit with the proviso “do whatever you can, as much as you can, as quickly as you can”. To tame the prolific confusion of commandments, the World Bank commissioned Nobel laureate Michael Spence to lead a distinguished group of world leaders and economists (not the Bank's earlier chief economist and critic, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz) to draft a new consensus. The Spence Report, issued in May 2008, singled out the thirteen countries that had displayed at least thirty years of sustained high (at least 7 per cent) growth rates since the Second World War.