The Routledge Handbook on the History of Development

Corinna R. Unger, Iris Borowy, Corinne A. Pernet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000602050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This bold and ambitious handbook is the first systematic overview of the history of development ideas, themes, and actors in the twentieth century. Taking stock of the field, the book reflects on blind spots, points out avenues for future research, and brings together a greater plurality of regions, actors, and approaches than other publications on the subject.

The book offers a critical reassessment of how historical experiences have shaped contemporary understandings of development, demonstrating that the seemingly self-evident concept of development has been contingent on a combination of material conditions, power structures, and policy choices at different times and in different places. Using a world history approach, the handbook highlights similarities in development challenges across time and space, and it pays attention to the meanings of ideological, cultural, and economic divides in shaping different understandings and practices of development. Taking a thematic approach, the book shows how different actors – governments, non-governmental organizations, individuals, corporations, and international organizations – have responded to concerns regarding the conditions in their own or other societies, such as the provision of education, health, or food; approaches to infrastructure development and industrialization; the adjustment of social conditions; population policies and migration; and the maintenance of stability and security.

Bringing together a range of voices from across the globe, this book will be perfect for advanced students and researchers of international development history.

PART 1
Introduction

1 THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENTA critical overview

Corinna R. Unger, Iris Borowy, and Corinne A. Pernet

DOI: 10.4324/9780429356940-2

What is development?

What is development? Is it the effort to propel allegedly underdeveloped societies into modernity by means of technical assistance? Is it what happens in all societies at all times, as individuals and social groups react to political, economic, environmental, and cultural conditions around them and take deliberate steps to change them in ways they consider advantageous? Should we consider the construction of a production site for semiconductors in Switzerland or Canada the way we consider the building of a hydroelectric dam in Uganda or Colombia? Is the nation state a suitable category to use when we think about development? Don’t all countries have some “more developed” and some “less developed” regions? Also, does it require a certain level of underdevelopment or non-development to allow for development to happen, and if so, how is that level determined, and does it matter in which sector it exists? Can a society be economically developed but socially or culturally underdeveloped? Does any society ever stop developing? If the answer is no, what does that mean for our understanding of “developing countries”? What is the threshold that separates developed countries from those that are, supposedly, less developed, undeveloped, underdeveloped, or least developed?

These are, to a degree, philosophical or, arguably, ideological questions. They touch on core considerations of how humans organize their relations with each other and with their environment. They are also crucial questions for historians, who are inevitably interested in change, and in how and why it happens. They want to know, for example, why some actors at a certain point in time believed that it was better to live in a planned economy than to give free reign to the market, why others made the opposite choice, and how these decisions affected social relations at the time and in later years. Some historians are interested in how leaders of formerly colonized and newly independent countries imagined the future, why they favored some visions over others, and how their decision to pursue one specific path of development translated into practical politics. Other colleagues investigate why some countries have been more successful in achieving economic prosperity than others, or whether “success” is even a useful concept for historians. Yet again others study the establishment of international organizations and the ways in which they complemented or challenged the development-related activities of national governments.

In doing so, historians do not necessarily endorse one specific definition of development. In fact, they rarely even define what they mean by “development” but keep some constructive ambiguity by working with whatever implicit or explicit definition the historical actors of their analyses have adopted. Similarly, there is little agreement about the starting point of the history of development. Is it the moment some unnamed person millennia ago built a wheel? Or is it the Enlightenment with its ideas of progress and improvement? Or Sun Yat-sen’s call for the establishment of an “international development organization” in 1922? Or the Point Four Speech by US President Harry Truman in 1949? Or an altogether different date?¹

All of these questions show that it is far from clear what “development” means, let alone its history. At this point, some readers may have begun wondering whether it makes sense to publish (or, for that matter, to read) a handbook on the history of development if the object of that volume is so eminently indistinct. We understand such doubts but obviously disagree. It is precisely the ambiguity of development that makes studying the concept and its practices so important. The fact that the term can mean so many different things to different actors is what makes the history of development such a fascinating and important field of research. After all, these various understandings shape not only our views about the record of past human efforts but also our perspectives on the central current and future challenges, what they are, who is responsible for their existence, what needs to be done to meet them, and who should accept the largest burden in implementing solutions. At a time when people across the globe are facing climate change, rampant biodiversity loss, socioeconomic polarization, and rising threats of pandemics, an awareness of the underlying decisions, long-term patterns, value systems, and path dependencies that have shaped our history so far seems indispensable for making informed choices about the future.

Approaching the history of development

We are not alone in our interest in development. The field of development history has been exceptionally productive in recent years, providing theoretical and conceptual analyses, intellectual histories as well as a growing body of empirical studies.² However, as of now there is no volume on the history of development that takes stock of the state of the field, reflects on its blind spots, and points out avenues for future research. This is what our handbook aims to do. By bringing together a range of perspectives and interpretations of development in its various forms and spaces, the volume offers the basis for a critical reassessment of how historical experiences have shaped contemporary understandings of development. Reviewing these historical processes reveals how the current, predominantly economic, understanding of development has been contingent on a combination of material conditions, power structures, and policy choices at different times and in different places. Despite such contingencies, specific notions of development have at times made it difficult to imagine alternative pathways, much less pursue them against established interests and path dependencies.

Using a world history approach, the handbook highlights similarities in development challenges across time and space. The contributions pay attention to the roles of ideological, cultural, and economic divides in shaping different understandings and practices of development. Probing into parallels as well as differences in varying contexts allows us to break up hardened (if limited) notions of development and to see their position in a historical context. Moreover, the volume takes into consideration global and regional entanglements, as development-related decisions and initiatives in one place often had (unexpected) repercussions in different parts of the world, at times decades or even centuries later.

When conceptualizing the volume, we decided not to impose any specific definition of development on the authors, leaving it up to them which concept to adopt as a working definition, be it implicitly or explicitly. We considered such constructive ambiguity the only workable approach for a handbook that is designed to incorporate a broad spectrum of views. Nevertheless, our decisions regarding which topics to include and which to leave out were necessarily based on an underlying understanding of the subject matter. As readers of this volume will easily recognize, we have approached the topic with a conception of development as a multi-dimensional phenomenon, of which the economy is merely one component among many, though an important one. We have also acted on the assumption that development is a global experience, of which, again, the North-South dimension is only one, albeit important, component. Finally, we have assumed that, regardless of whether development has been a modern invention or a human ambition at work since time immemorial (or something in between), the form it has taken since the twentieth century has been sufficiently distinctive to justify focusing on that time period. Within this general frame, we have tried to give room to a variety of perspectives, voices, and approaches.

Furthermore, we have avoided structuring the handbook according to periods, ideologies, or political blocks, opting instead for a thematic approach. This choice reflects our premise that most (or all?) actors involved in development efforts in some form or another responded to a series of perceived concerns about which there was remarkably little disagreement: They involved health and living conditions; resources and the infrastructures required for making use of them; population sizes; education; problems resulting from environmental degradation; the emerging urban-rural divide; migration; excessive inequality; as well as political stability, security, and effective governance. However, while the perceived challenges and goals were similar, the cultural and economic circumstances, the political interests involved, and the mindsets with which people approached them often differed substantially, sometimes leading to radically different policies. By structuring the volume around themes, we hope to reveal the rich diversity of how various people, organizations, and groups have come to understand and “do” development at different times and in different places in world history from the late nineteenth century until the present.

Writing the history of development

Scholars working in the field of the history of development are continuously faced with the challenge of how to avoid reproducing the categories that have shaped development thinking and practice for so long. Existing research, for all its merits, mirrors the fact that it has been predominantly produced by scholars in industrial countries in the Global North who have eloquently written about concepts and manifestations of development, including and especially in so-called developing countries in the Global South. The authors all face the challenge of writing critical histories on the basis of sources that, by and large, provide more insight into the perspectives of the “providers” of development assistance (colonial administrations, missionary and humanitarian organizations, national governments, international organizations) than into the viewpoints of those considered in need of assistance. Archives, by and large, are organized in ways that privilege the perspectives of those in power. It is much easier to find sources that document how a national government in Western Europe in the 1960s used development assistance as a foreign policy instrument vis-à-vis a country that used to be its former colony than it is to find documents that speak to the experiences of the inhabitants of that country. Frequently, what these people considered their most important development goals, and how they felt about financial or technical support coming from the former colonial power remain vague.

Apart from the archival situation, the imbalance in terms of perspectives is also a result of the way in which the history of development came to be a field of research. In our reading, this process involved the merging of originally separate but increasingly overlapping and intersecting strands of research in other fields. These crucial fields include global economic history, the history of empire and colonialism, and the history of development assistance. Each of these strands brought its own perspectives and sources to the table.

Global economic history

The first strand – global economic history – is often not included in overviews of development history, and publications in this field do not usually reference development in their titles or even in their texts. Yet they try to explain a core question of development: Why and how Northwestern Europe came to experience a socioeconomic development that set it apart from the rest of the world, substantially improving the living standards of its population and dramatically changing global power relations.

This separation of historiographies reflects popular constructions of the world that assign the term “development” to “developing” countries only and categorize similar topics in the Global North as “economy.” Furthermore, early studies by scholars from the Global South who pointed out how much economic modernization in Europe was built on contributions from the Global South were slow in gaining acceptance in (Northern) mainstream academia. Crucially, they portrayed capitalism not as a source of wealth but as a driver of regional impoverishment. A case in point is Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, an expansion of his 1938 Oxford PhD thesis. Williams, a black student from the crown colony of Trinidad, argued, among other points, that the profits from slave labor in Caribbean sugar plantations had been a major, possibly a necessary factor for British industrialization.³ Soon after, Williams went into politics to become the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, but his argument kept being extensively debated for decades, with conferences and edited volumes marking the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the original publication.⁴ By the 1990s, a broad consensus had emerged that colonial slavery had indeed fueled industrialization in Britain, though the precise extent was still debated.

A similar case was made in the 1969 article on “The Development of Underdevelopment” by André Gunder Frank. A German-American economist and sociologist who spent more than ten years teaching in Brazil and Chile, Frank took up long-standing Latin American critiques of capitalist economic development to pioneer the world systems approach: He argued that Latin America’s forced integration into global capitalist structures that began during the colonial period led to its underdevelopment. The “core” countries exploited both the inexpensive labor as well as the natural resources of the “peripheries,” undermining their prospect of autonomous economic development.⁵ While Frank revised his work considerably in later years, he established the notion that underdevelopment in certain world regions was not to be understood as lack of capitalist development, but rather a consequence thereof. These ideas were taken up and developed into an elaborate world systems theory by US sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein.⁶ The theory retained an important Southern basis with authors like Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose Dependency and Development in Latin America was published in Spanish in 1969 – the same year as Frank’s ess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Concepts and ideas of development
• PART 3 Themes
• PART 4 Actors of development
• PART 5 Transversal perspectives
• Index