Suchergebnisse

The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire. Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the str.

In Part 2 of this extended essay on writing the history of development, I examine the most important historiographical trends of recent years. If the demise of the Cold War and the "crisis" of development first led historians and other social scientists in the 1990s to study development as history , then the events of September 11, 2001 set the stage for the newer literature on development. Since 9/11, scholars have moved beyond the binary and homogenous depictions that marked the "first wave" of historical writing, offering instead more contextualized, complex, and ambiguous narratives of development's past. The Cold War timeframe has been jettisoned in favor of the longue durée , pivoting more to the earlier origins and colonial precedents of the postwar project. The earlier importance of metropolitan-centered ideas and discursive frameworks has been replaced by concern for actual development practices and impacts on the people who inhabit the territories of the global south. The most significant realignment, I argue, and one that has only just begun, is towards conceptualizing development as a global and transnational enterprise, one that encompassed more than the American and Western European experiences and included a diversity of historical actors and trajectories.

The rise of neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War ushered in a prolonged crisis of "development" as applied to the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Faced with an impasse, historians and other social scientists set out on a novel journey to examine development as history . They proposed using history as the methodology for understanding development, rather than constructing development theories to explain history and model the future. In this first of a two-part article, some of the most important contributions to the "first wave" of writing the history of development are examined. Poststructuralist analysts were the first to lay out a genealogical framework, but they were soon followed by scholars in the field of U.S. diplomatic history who initiated a parallel investigation of the history of modernization. Much of the scholarship produced in the 1990s centered on the importance of discourse, particularly high policy statements, theories, and ideologies. The concern with discourse shaped the new field in crucial ways: researchers fixed their attention on conceptual or intellectual frameworks, and perceived development from a Western and elitist perspective. Consequently, development's totalizing claims and undifferentiated impact were accepted largely at face value. The limitations of this type of approach had become manifest by the end of the decade.