Against the background of the broader history of the idea of human rights, this lecture investigates when and why the contemporary field of "global justice" in philosophy and political theory was invented. Returning to the engagement of American liberals with the decolonisation process in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and even as more powerful tendencies were about to bring the welfarist ideal of the postwar era low, this lecture presents contemporary "cosmopolitanism" as a response to a forgotten revolt of the global south against the prevailing economic order of our age.