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RESEARCH NOTE
Development? It’s History

I tap the command s=economic development into the library catalog and the
computer produces five thousand records, the maximum, under alphabetical
subheadings that reach only partway through the letter E. The remainder of
the titles – there must be at least another twenty thousand – cannot be retrieved
by any commands I know. For social scientists in the s, according to John
Kenneth Galbraith, “no economic subject more quickly captured the attention
of so many as the rescue of the people of the poor countries from their poverty.”
They did their work well. Underwritten by governments and private founda-
tions, scholars around the world tackled the problem of how to turn poor,
backward countries into wealthy modern ones. They split into rival factions –
classical, dependency, world systems – and turned out case studies, comparative
studies, works on theory and application. Official reports from national and
international aid agencies added to the pile, which continues to grow.
Historians who write about U.S. relations with Asia, Africa, or Latin America
must sooner or later grapple with this immense literature and the ideas behind
it. Its idiom fills the official record. Terms like “absorptive capacity” cropped
up in National Security Council meetings beginning around , and under
the influence of Walt Whitman Rostow and Lucian Pye, developmentese
became the Kennedy administration’s court vernacular. “Area Studies” made
it the language of scholarship as well, and the bulk of social science research
on countries outside of North America, Europe, and the Communist bloc after
 concerned questions of modernization. For historians of American foreign
relations, this corpus is inescapable, a water hazard that must be played through
or around.

. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty (Cambridge, MA, ), .
. A useful introduction to this literature is Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Seers, eds., Pioneers
in Development (New York, ).
. NSC /, “Statement of U.S. Policy Toward the Philippines,”  June , U.S. Depart-
ment of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, – (Washington, ), : . The State
Department published the first FRUS volume on development last year. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, –, Vol. , International Development and Economic Defense
Policy; Commodities (Washington, ).
. Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During
and After the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York, ),
–.

D H, Vol. , No.  (Fall ). ©  The Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishers,  Main Street, Malden, MA,
, USA and  Cowley Road, Oxford, OX JF, UK.

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As Ole Holsti suggests, dependency, world systems, and modernization

theories provide virtually the only accepted models for studying U.S. economic
relations with the Third World. Rather than be caught without a methodology,
diplomatic historians feel obliged to challenge or support one of the modern-
ization paradigms or at least to exhibit familiarity with the main texts in a
ceremonial footnote. This is so even when the development literature has little
to say about context, motives, or indeed, history.
Recently, scholars in a variety of fields have joined a new critique of the
development idea, attacking core assumptions shared by modernization theo-
rists and their critics. Their solution puts the framework inside the frame. It
treats development as history, as an artifact of the political and intellectual
context of the Cold War, and makes history the methodology for studying
modernization, instead of the other way around. This historicist approach offers
a way to write about development without accepting its clichés, and to see the
record of Americans’ cynical, heroic, disastrous, occasionally inspired, and
benevolent attempts at global humanitarianism in all of their moral and
political complexity.
Noah Webster’s  dictionary defined development as “an unfolding,” as
of a story. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the term acquired specific
meanings in technical fields ranging from biology to urban planning and
photography, along with a sense, common to them all, that the unfolding
proceeded through knowable processes toward a predetermined end. In other
languages equivalent terms – dessarollo (Spanish), Entwicklung (German),
pag-unlad (Tagalog) – also describe a process of growth that is natural, under-
standable, and inevitable.
“Economic development” implies a similar maturation process: economies
differ from one another only in the extent (and the speed) of their progress from
the traditional to the modern. At the core of modernization theory is an
assumption of convergence, that there is one best form of political economy and
that all states are moving toward it. Dependency and world systems theory are

. Ole R. Holsti, “International Relations Models,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (New York, ), –. See also David
Painter, “Explaining U.S. Relations with the Third World,” Diplomatic History  (Summer ):
–.
. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York, ), vol. .
. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, ), : .
Raymond Williams notes that the meaning of “development” expanded in the mid-nineteenth
century through associations with the theory of evolution and social Darwinism. The post-
coinage of underdevelopment connected the term with an idea that economies and societies pass
through predictable stages, a meaning that paralleled the contemporary usage in psychology.
Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, ), –.
. H. W. Arndt attributes the first use of “economic development” to Karl Marx () who
permanently stamped it with implications of historical inevitability. Arndt, “Economic Develop-
ment: A Semantic History,” Economic Development and Cultural Change , no.  (): –.
. The latest development economics text notes that within the field, disagreement ranges
between those who believe in “unconditional convergence” and those who prefer the conditional
variety. The difference concerns the relative speed with which nations will approach the final end
 It’s History : 

structuralist variants, examining the features of international trade and capital

that impede or reverse poor nations’ natural progress. As bitterly as Rostovian,
dependency, and world system theorists feud, they agree on fundamental
assumptions encoded in the terms development and modernization.
Specialists rarely give precise definitions of either term. The latest and most
widely used textbook on the subject asserts that development is “intuitive” and
offers a series of associations: “We picture in our minds a society in which people
are well fed and well clothed, possess access to a variety of commodities, have
the luxury of some leisure and entertainment, and live in a healthy environ-
ment.” The Journal of Developing Areas, a review published at Western Illinois
University, offers more specific guidance in its Statement of Editorial Princi-
ples, which explains that a developed area is characterized by “most of the
following”:
() An economy integrated into the international industrial-commercial
community
() A substantial urban population
() A high literacy rate
() A high natural resource utilization rate
() An established and institutionalized political-government system
() General recognition as a developed area.
These generalities dissolve on contact with historical detail. Points –
presuppose that development indices are comparable across space and time,
but to circumscribe such comparisons the terms become uselessly elastic. Can
urbanization look and feel the same in Ras Tanura and Rome? Firmly estab-
lished governmental institutions might include the U.S. Supreme Court, the
Baath party, and the Tonton Macoutes. Literacy in English can be accomplished
by the sixth grade; in Japanese it might take years longer and have an entirely
different social meaning, but statistically it is identical. Even figures on national

state. Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton, ), –. Only Immanuel Wallerstein has
been bold enough to set a date for convergence:  (mental note: make hotel reservations).
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The World System After the Cold War,” Journal of Peace Research , no. 
(): –.
. Proponents of these approaches acknowledge their inheritance from modernization the-
ory. Thomas J. McCormick describes world systems as “an interesting hybrid of two competing
developmental theories – dependency and modernization.” Louis A. Pérez, Jr. writes that “In its
most usable form, dependency theory establishes the relationship between development and
underdevelopment as the context in which to examine relations between the United States and
Latin America.” McCormick, “World Systems,” in Hogan and Paterson, eds., Explaining the History,
; Pérez, “Dependency,” in ibid., .
. I use these two terms interchangeably, as does most of the literature. Modernization
originally referred to a process of renovation in architecture and fashion, but by the twentieth
century referred to economic and social improvement. Its meaning fused with development after
. Williams, Keywords, –.
. Ray, Development Economics, .
. Nicholas C. Pano, general editor, letter to the author,  January .
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income and resource use are suspect because they apply accounting methods
designed for industrial countries.
Moreover, each measure of development falls prey to the logical fallacy of
reification, the assumption that because a thing has a name it therefore exists
apart from the words used to describe it. Abstractions (integration, literacy,
institutionalization) are elevated to the status of objects that can be charac-
terized and quantified. Point  makes the circular reasoning explicit: an area is
developed if it is “generally” recognized to be developed. Discourse creates
reality.
Development’s present and past may be murky, but its future is clear. Within
this definition, history has a direction and a destination. We can glimpse the
final convergence: Once developed, all societies will be urbanized, literate, and
integrated into the global economy; they will use their natural resources to the
fullest and have well-established institutions. Progress toward each of these
attributes is quantifiable, and can be tracked in the volumes of comparative
statistics published annually by the United Nations and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Advances in quality do not make an area more
developed. The terms on which an economy is integrated, whether it uses its
resources well or wastefully, the refinement of a society’s urban life, literature,
and institutions are immaterial to its progress toward development. In fact,
revolutionary improvements (which might disestablish institutions) set the
clock back. Development is imagined as a process of incremental, managed
change toward a final ideal state. But since people constantly devise new
institutions and new ways to integrate and use resources, the end point is always
receding into the future.
The development literature thus presents a science of history, a method for
managing the passage between a timeless “tradition” and an equally timeless
ultimate state of modernity. Centuries become yet another statistical measure
of material progress. Jungle doctor Thomas A. Dooley remarked in  that
“In Asia I run a th century hospital. Upon my departure the hospital may
drop to the th century. This is fine, because previously the tribes in the high
valleys lived, medically speaking, in the th century.” He saw Laotian villages,

. Dudley Seers, “The Birth, Life and Death of Development Economics,” Development and
Change , no.  (): . According to Seers, economists applied a statistical “framework which
had been developed in a different context, and loaded it with largely meaningless numbers” in
response to “professional convenience.”
. Since , the UN Development Program has produced a Human Development Index
using a conflation similar to Gerald Ford’s Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment, remem-
ber?). The HDI factors together figures for life expectancy, literacy, and per capita income to
produce a decimal figure between zero and one that represents the “fraction of ultimate develop-
ment.” Ray, Development Economics, .
. This is particularly true of the literature’s seminal texts, such as Daniel Lerner, The Passing
of Traditional Society (Glencoe, IL, ); Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of
Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley, ); and W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A
Non-Communist Manifesto (New York, ).
. James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, – (Amherst, ), . Such
formulations equate the past with poverty. Time is money, or at least the things money buys.
 It’s History : 

rice paddies, and patient water buffalo as remnants of a preserved antiquity, not
the products of colonial development schemes only a few decades old. Tradi-
tion, as Eric Hobsbawm has observed, changes rapidly through constant rein-
vention, yet for the development expert it must be frozen and standardized in
order to provide a starting point for the development process. The common
expression “in most traditional societies,” conveys this sense that tradition, like
modernity, is uniform.
A characteristic feature of modernization studies is modeling, the dissection
of case studies with the aim of revealing generalizable principles that can be
applied in other circumstances. For the development specialist, the only point
in studying micro-lending in Bangladesh is to discover how a similar program
might work in Ecuador. Within this viewpoint, according to political scientist
Timothy Mitchell, “a particular nation state appears to be a functional unit –
something akin to a car, say, or a television set – that can be compared with and
used as a model for improving other such units.” In the process, history gets
lost. Universal, repeatable features are emphasized while idiosyncracies,
unique circumstances, individuals, or motivations are blotted out like unwanted
commissars in a Stalinist photograph.
Politics also vanishes. The literature treats popular resistance to modern-
ization, and all political problems, as technical difficulties. In IMF parlance,
apartheid becomes “labor market rigidity,” and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia
a “misallocation of resources due to involvement in a regional conflict.” To
the planner, development is a process that never stops; it proceeds at a slower
or faster pace depending on local circumstances or the design of the plan. So
where others might notice clashes of ideas, cultures, or personalities, develop-
ment writers see only obstacles to implementation.
C. Douglas Lummis views economic development as politics camouflaged,
a “way of organizing power in a society, and of simultaneously concealing this
power arrangement – more accurately, of concealing that it is a power arrange-
ment.” Under cover of a humanitarian mission expressed in neutral, technical

Compare Curtis LeMay’s familiar aphorism about “bombing them back to the stone age,” or
Fareed Zakaria’s recent observation that “for developing countries, hitching their wagons to the
global economy has proved to be the only way out of thousands of years of poverty.” Zakaria, “Our
Hollow Hegemony,” The New York Times Magazine,  November .
. Eric Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York, ).
. Timothy Mitchell, “America’s Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry,” Middle East
Report  (March/April ): .
. Paul Blustein, “The IMF’s Faceless Commandos,” Washington Post National Weekly,  April
; Robert Kuttner has remarked on how political agendas lurk just beneath development’s
technical vocabulary: Were a Latin American government to propose a development program
involving “public works spending, land reform, social welfare, domestic industrial development,
redistributive taxation, and controls on capital exports – just what Western Europe did in the s
– [it] would be judged technically incompetent by the IMF technicians and denied funds.” Robert
Kuttner, The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy after the Cold War (New York,
), .
. C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca, ), .
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language, development projects can expand state power, provide a point of

entry to closed societies, or inventory resources for later exploitation, but
without any of these “side effects” being observed or remarked upon by
bureaucrats or scholars.
Those on the receiving end of modernization initiatives have long com-
plained that development is a moving target. It is redefined as sustainable,
ecologically sound, woman-centered, or conducive to a civil society depending
on the latest fashion in Europe and the United States. The old measures are
discarded just as quickly. China makes more steel than the United States does,
but that no longer counts. The definitions shift as Europeans and North
Americans change their assessments of the characteristics that indicate their
own advancement in relation to other peoples. To be developed is to be
Euro-American.
As commonplace as these objections are, historians are still drawn to the
narrative of modernization. Two recent examples, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs,
and Steel (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty
of Nations, assess the “success” and “failure” of societies with Spencerian
prepossession. Diamond and Landes measure a culture’s advancement by its
material acquisitions, not by the lifespan of its people, the durability of its
traditions, the quality of its art, music, or law. Reviewers like to describe these
books as unabashedly Eurocentric, and for good reason. Landes notes that “as
the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe has been the
prime mover of development and modernity.” Small wonder, since it has also
been the prime definer of development and modernity. But the rise of the West
is not the only history stamped from a modernization template. Writing about
China, Prasenjit Duara suggests that a “preoccupation with the utopia of
modernity” is inseparable from narratives of the nation, since modernity is the
nation’s final goal and justification. Histories in which nations measure them-
selves against one another and vie for advantage fall easily into narrative
patterns that imply linearity and convergence.
This is why, despite decades of debunking, modernization theory comes
back like a bad habit. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob explain

. On this point see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in the Third World (New York, ), –.
. Or in Daniel Lerner’s words “what the West is . . . the Middle East Seeks to become.”
Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, .
. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, ); David S.
Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (New York, ).
. Diamond got his thesis in  from a Papuan who asked him “Why is it that you white
people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little
cargo of our own?” Diamond, Guns, Germs, .
. J. Bradford DeLong, a U.C. Berkeley economist, explains that “a history oriented toward
understanding the wealth and poverty of nations today must be Eurocentric.” DeLong, “How the
Rich Got Richer,” Washington Post Weekly,  March .
. Landes, Wealth and Poverty, xxi.
. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China
(Chicago, ), , .
 It’s History : 

that in common with the other social sciences “professional history in the
twentieth century has been usually written under the sign of ‘modernization.’”
Ideas of linear progress, stages, and a paradigmatic West pervade scientific
history, whether inspired by Marx, Braudel, or Ranke. They show in the titles
of books (Modernizing China) and in historical periodization (early modern
France). Neither comparative history nor world history would be imaginable
without the same modeling, quantifying, and universalizing techniques that
development specialists use. Modernization and its cliches cannot be avoided
simply by staying away from that section of the library. History is filled with it.
These grooves of thought were worn deep during the decades in which a
particular vision of human progress dominated the social sciences. In the late
s, two sets of events, one politico-economic, the other intellectual, jolted
researchers onto another track. The simultaneous end of the Cold War and
triumph of the market persuaded some that the moment of convergence had
arrived. These ultramodernists, of whom Francis Fukuyama is the best known,
insisted that economic laws had been proven valid and that interventions by
the state in the name of development could only produce distortions. The role
of agencies like the IMF ought to be limited to “structural adjustment,” the
systematic dismantling of the institutions and practices that development
experts had devised in the past.
Social scientists, too, concluded that the era of development had passed, but
for different reasons. Applying Michel Foucault’s technique of discourse analy-
sis, Edward Said and V. Y. Mudimbe implicated the social sciences in colonial-
ism, pointing out ways that the categories and methods used by researchers
justified imposing improvement schemes on backward “natives.” Anthropol-
ogy, the discipline that defined and enforced the binary classifications of
colonialism – tradition vs. modernity, primitive vs. civilized, underdeveloped
vs. developed – came under an attack that fractured some departments.
Mudimbe argued that the discipline had turned the world’s peoples into a
collection of historyless native cultures that Eddie Bauer-clad “contemporary

. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York,
), .
. In , J. B. Bury noted that “within the last forty years nearly every civilized country has
produced a large literature on social science, in which indefinite Progress is generally assumed as
an axiom.” Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York, ), .
. The taxonomy of ultra- and post-modernism is drawn from Frederick Cooper and Randall
Packard, “introduction,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and
Politics of Knowledge, ed. Cooper and Packard (Berkeley, ), –. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of
History,” The National Interest  (Summer ): –. For the most recent restatement of the market
triumphalist creed see Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, ).
. Edward Said, “Orientalism,” The Georgia Review  (Spring ): –; V. Y. Mudimbe,
The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, ).
. Ann Gibbons, “Cultural Divide at Stanford,” Science,  June ; Christopher Shea, “Tribal
Skirmishes in Anthropology,” Chronicle of Higher Education,  September . Stanford’s anthro-
pology department broke apart over the issue of tenure for Akhil Gupta, a scholar who applied
historical methods to the study of development in India.
 :                 

students can interrogate from the viewpoint of their modernity.” Anthropolo-

gists responded with their own analysis of the modernization discourse. In a
 article in Cultural Anthropology, Arturo Escobar described the emergence in
 of development as “a mode of thinking and a source of practices” that
subjected poor countries to “an endless number of programs and interventions
that seemed to be inescapable and that ensured their control.” Others soon
joined in this postmodern critique.
“Postmodernism” has been overused to the point that it now signifies only a
vague claim to (or accusation of) academic trendiness, but here it has a specific
meaning: the rejection of both the core ideas of modernization and the ultra-
modernist contention that convergence has been reached. Postmodernists see
development as a “knowledge-power regime,” an implement for surveillance
and control whose effects are so pervasive that even failures reinforce the system
by defining relationships between target populations and sources of expertise.
By boxing up development and shoving it into the attic of discredited, outdated
discourses, postmodernists argued that we could clear our minds for new things.
“The idea of development stands today like a ruin in the intellectual landscape,”
Wolfgang Sachs wrote in . It was time “to push the rubble aside and open
up new ground.”
The point of all this ground clearing may have been to uncover new answers
to the problem of global poverty, but some social scientists took more interest
in the rubble. Accepting the conception of development as discourse, they have
examined its past, producing studies of development that put the context,
personalities, and politics back in. This historicist literature is not only more
congenial to history, it applies its methods, combing archives for clues and
emphasizing the variable historical circumstances through which events must
be interpreted. Pioneering works by Michael Adas, Timothy Mitchell, and
James C. Scott fit this description, as do the recently published interdisciplinary
collections edited by Noam Chomsky, Christopher Simpson, and Frederick
Cooper and Randall Packard, which take up subjects ranging from Project Troy
to Robert McNamara’s stewardship of the World Bank.

. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, .

. Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management
of the Third World,” Cultural Anthropology  (November ): –.
. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . . Postmodern,” Chronicle
of Higher Education,  September .
. For an anthology of postmodern takes on development see Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The
Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London, ). See also Lummis, Radical
Democracy; Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Delhi, );
Marc DuBois, “The Governance of the Third World: A Foucaldian Perspective on Power Relations
in Development,” Alternatives , no.  (): –; and Frédérique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A.
Marglin, Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance (Oxford, ). There is a shade
of Gandhian anti-modernism in most of these works, an affinity for rurality, “local knowledge,”
and eco-primitivism.
. Wolfgang Sachs, “The Archaeology of the Development Idea,” INTERculture  (Fall ): –.
. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western
Dominance (Ithaca, ); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, ); James C. Scott, Seeing
 It’s History : 

Like postmodernists, historicists look for power in the meanings of words.

Avoiding ideology and its suggestion of the durability of fixed ideas, they prefer
to analyze discourse, a fluid exchange of signifiers and meanings. Historicists
scrutinize the vocabulary of development in the same way that diplomatic
historians watch for subtle shifts in the meaning of credibility or national
security. Packard observes that in the late s, development specialists began
to see Africans as “consumers” instead of workers, resulting in a new cure for
malaria. While workers could be shielded behind wire screens, protecting
consumers required mosquito eradication – with DDT – and justified a huge,
destructive, and unsuccessful spraying campaign. Martha Finnemore has
shown how the World Bank redefined poverty in the late s and initiated an
invasive strategy that targeted poor groups within nations instead of poor
countries as a whole. In each case, new locutions indicated changes in
perception that warranted new strategies and outcomes, much as “contain-
ment” or “rollback” did for threat perception.
While employing similar methods, historicists disagree with postmodernists
on a number of points, beginning with the desirability of scrapping the
development idea. To Escobar and Sachs, modernization was a fraud inflicted
on the periphery by the center, and the sooner it is exposed and dispensed with
the better. Echoing Michael Hunt and others, they contend that development
recirculated old racial hierarchies under new labels. Historicists reply that the
discourse also gave poor nations and peoples a claim on the resources and
attention of the wealthy. It offered, according to Frederick Cooper, “a device
that could itself be challenged and seized, used for different ends by a Nehru
or by an ambitious young man in a remote village.”

Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, ); Noam
Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New
York, ); Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences
during the Cold War (New York, ); Cooper and Packard, eds., International Development and the
Social Sciences. Another noteworthy contribution is Michael P. Cowen and Robert W. Shenton,
Doctrines of Development (New York, ).
. On development as ideology see Michael Latham, “Ideology, Social Science, and Destiny:
Modernization and the Kennedy Era Alliance for Progress,” Diplomatic History  (Spring ):
–.
. Randall M. Packard, “Malaria Dreams: Postwar Visions of Health and Development in the
Third World,” Medical Anthropology , no.  (): –; Randall M. Packard and Paulo Gadhela,
“A Land filled with Mosquitoes: Fred L. Soper, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Anopheles
Gambiae Invasion of Brazil,” Medical Anthropology , no.  (): –.
. Martha Finnemore, “Redefining Development at the World Bank,” in Cooper and
Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences, –.
. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, ), –. Sean P. Duffy
describes a development discourse imposed by the United States on the rest of the world after
. Duffy, “The Construction of Inequality: U.S. Foreign Policy, Development Discourse, and
the Postwar Expansion of the International System” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, ).
. Cooper and Packard, “introduction,” in Cooper and Packard, eds., International Development
and the Social Sciences, .
 :                 

Historicists note that the discourse had plural origins. Chinese intellectu-
als used the language of modernity in the s, and Indian nationalists
articulated rival visions of national development decades before Galbraith’s
colleagues at Harvard held their first seminar. Despite its paternalism and
illogic, the development discourse mobilized humanitarianism on a global scale
and established an entitlement to a better future. Parts of it may be worth saving,
and historicists argue that the way to find them is to understand this self-con-
tained system of reasoning in context. With Appleby and Co., they believe that
“historicizing any moment need not, should not, sacrifice the truths people
discovered in it.” They propose replacing the development idiom with a
reformed, self-conscious, and humanized discourse. Rather than a single,
integrated, global modernity, they imagine a freer world with room for diver-
gent, idiosyncratic modernities.
The historicist literature treats Point IV and the succession of aid initiatives
that followed as extensions of the Enlightenment project of ordering and
rationalizing society, imperatives amplified and globalized by Cold War con-
cerns about Communist subversion. Michael Adas and James C. Scott identify
two key inheritances from nineteenth-century rationalism: a tendency to meas-
ure progress against the yardstick of technology, and a drive to make human
society legible. While eighteenth-century observers could discern areas of life
– such as government, literature, and the arts – where Asian civilizations seemed
ahead of Europe, Adas notes that by the s Europeans regarded technical
achievement as virtually the sole measure of human worth. The locomotive
symbolized the unbridgeable gap between the civilized and the savage, just as
for Harry S. Truman, seventy years later, the United States’s superiority would
rest on “our imponderable resources in technical knowledge.” In the literature
on modernization, Escobar writes, “technology was theorized as a sort of moral
force” that would educate and transform but that was at the same time “neutral
and inevitably beneficial.” Such ideas underlay the Kennedy administration’s
backward diagnosis of global poverty: since capital and technology were what

. Stacey Leigh Pigg describes how the categories of development are disrupted by its
“traditional” subjects, who anticipate and manipulate the process before it begins. Pigg, “‘Found
in Most Traditional Societies’: Traditional Medical Practitioners Between Culture and Develop-
ment,” in Cooper and Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences, –.
. Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York, ) appeared seven years
before Britain’s first Colonial Development Act. For decades before independence, Indian nation-
alists sought to seize the development process and fashion a uniquely Indian modernity. See Gyan
Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, ); Sugata Bose,
“Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s Historical Experience
in Comparative Perspective,” in Cooper and Packard, eds., International Development and the Social
Sciences, –; and Duara, Rescuing History, .
. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth, .
. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men.
. Harry S. Truman, inaugural address,  January , Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry
S. Truman,  (Washington, ), .
. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton, ), .
 It’s History : 

the United States had to offer, Galbraith observed, “poverty was seen to be the
result of a shortage of capital, an absence of technical skills. . . . Having vaccine,
we identified smallpox.”
The developers’ love for statistics and replicable models can be traced to the
Enlightenment’s search for a legible society that could be known and controlled
from the center. European republics, according to Scott, systematically dis-
pelled the mysteries that gave citizens autonomy, assigning surnames to the
anonymous, laying boulevards over unmapped slums, using censuses, land
surveys, and standardized measures to create a transparent and governable
populace. Modernism ordered society according to a visual aesthetic that
allowed rulers to govern by manipulating abstractions (unemployment, literacy,
resource utilization) instead of the messy singularities of real life. The
project peaked in the mid-twentieth century in a phase Scott calls “high
modernism,” a mania for colossal, centrally designed social landscapes – Le
Corbusier’s planned cities, Stalin’s collective farms, the Tennessee Valley
Authority – where nearly every aspect of human and natural life could be
supervised by experts.
It was at this moment of modernist optimism that Truman’s Point IV speech
proposed a complicated merger between development and the Cold War.
Foreign aid was never simply a weapon against Soviet influence; even without
a superpower confrontation the United States would have needed some means
to manage the transition to a postcolonial world. The Cold War skewed aid
priorities, certainly, but development shifted the Cold War onto entirely new
ground. In just a few paragraphs in Truman’s  inaugural address, Gilbert
Rist explains, the principal axes of global opposition – communist/noncom-
munist, colonial/anti-colonial – were enfolded within the overspreading
categories of development and underdevelopment. Nationalists, commu-
nists, expansionists, pan-Africanists – everyone, in fact, except developmen-
talists – lost the power to define their struggle, their own version of progress.
They “were now forced to travel the ‘development path’ mapped out for
them by others.”
The high modernism of plan and mastery quickly fell from fashion among
the makers of U.S. domestic policy, but it took root in the newly independent
states and international development agencies that shared a passion for com-
prehensive planning. The invention of national income accounting in the s
along with advances in demography and economics provided a means to deploy
this administrative logic on a global scale. Fear of subversion supplied a motive.
Although the United States and newly independent regimes eyed each other
with suspicion, development provided room for collaboration. Govern-
ments, weak or strong, shared a need for legibility. Officials in Washington,

. Galbraith, Nature of Mass Poverty, vi.

. This concept has been called “visual modernism.” See Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, –.
. Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London, ), .
 :                 

Johannesburg, and Rangoon had an equal interest in mapping unexploited

resources, in capturing peasantries and subnational groups, in “seeing like a state.”
For almost a decade after Truman’s pronouncement, the methods and
techniques for “making men modern” were themselves underdeveloped. In a
remarkable dissertation, Nils Gilman has chronicled the invention of the
modernization canon. Building on the work of Talcott Parsons, MIT’s Center
for International Studies and the Social Science Research Council’s Committee
on Comparative Politics codified a body of modernization theory that guided
policy and thought from  on. Never have social scientists enjoyed so much
trust or had such faith in their own art. Gabriel Almond felt he should “know
just about everything there was to know, and to write with apodictic confidence
about its meaning.” His certainty rested on the undisputed place of his country
in the eye atop the development pyramid. It took the riots in Watts, Detroit,
and Newark to throw modernization theory into crisis. By the late s, it was
harder for the United States to claim that a stable, ordered modernity had
already been achieved.
This epistemological context illuminates the motives and methods of the
U.S. foreign aid effort in richer detail than dependency or world systems
theories can. If national security was the sum of our fears, a nightmare vision
of an American garrison state cowering before a hostile Eurasia, development
spoke our dreams: a transparent, modernizing world mastering man and the
environment with American technology. “A TVA in the Yangtze Valley and the
Danube,” Truman explained to David Lilienthal. “These things can be done,
and don’t let anybody tell you different. When they happen, when millions and
millions of people are no longer hungry and pushed and harassed, then the
causes of war will be less by that much.” The stakes of the Cold War must be
measured against the grandeur of that vision, not simply against George
Kennan’s criteria for minimal victory.
Treating modernization as a subject instead of a methodology repositions
the Cold War at the center of the economic history of this century. In the vast
literature on modernization, when the Cold War is discussed at all it is as an
interruption. Nations were headed toward convergence when East-West strug-
gles (“a misallocation of resources due to involvement in a regional conflict”)
sidetracked them. The idea of economic convergence may be the last remnant
of the high modernist ideal. The twentieth century fostered many dreams of
approaching union – one worldism, ecumenism, unified field theories – but
none have survived so long on such scant evidence. Once one stops looking

. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

. Quoted in Nils Gilman, “Paving the World With Good Intentions: The Genesis of
Modernization Theory, –” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, ).
. Quoted in Alonzo Hanby, Liberalism and its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (New York, ), –.
. Even Landes, a true believer, admits that “optimistic number crunchers point to overall
mini-convergence, but . . . only the special success of East Asia yields this optical illusion.” Landes,
Wealth and Poverty, .
 It’s History : 

for convergence it is easier to see that forms of political economy have become
more varied, not less, and that the Cold War had something to do with it.
East-West conflict obscured differences between market economies, even
while it made them more pronounced. As long as capitalism stood in opposition
to communism, it was easy to imagine that all market economies were in some
sense the same. But Taiwan’s Guomindang Party, which owns plastics factories
and shipyards, France’s etatisme, crony capitalism in the Philippines or Russia,
and the Archer Daniels Midland Company all defy neat categories like state,
corporation, capitalism, and market. The past fifty years have been marked by
an expanding divergence of social, political, and economic arrangements within
market economies, in part because the Cold War created openings for experi-
mentation. The imperatives of U.S. security allowed some countries the
freedom to fashion new forms of ownership, control, and exchange, to shape
their own modernity. Economics has little to say about how to understand or
reconcile competing modernities, the task before American diplomats today
and in the future. History can say a great deal, and it should.

. Examples of this variation include crony capitalism, state capitalism, Japanese/Ko-
rean/Taiwanese guided capitalism, European-style social-market economies, and Anglo-Saxon
individualistic market economies, as well as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the
unnamed types found in Russia and the former Soviet states. See Robert Wade, Governing the Market:
Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, ); Stephan
Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca,
); and Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed (New York, ), –.