In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Expertise, Development, and the State at the Climax of Empire One thing is certain: world population is increasing today at a rate which threatens the future of mankind. Food production is limping behind the expansion of population . . . What is needed is a spectacular increase in food production on a scale that exceeds the increase of populations and thus makes possible a higher standard of living . . . The facts of world poverty and the danger of growing crisis by starvation should be sufficient to convince even the most selfish and insular of the need for an all-out crusade for world development. The dangers to world peace are equally obvious. The dragons’ teeth of poverty and hunger inevitably produce violence, for hungry men are dangerous men. —Harold Wilson,  IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN fifty years since Harold Wilson made his memorable appeal to the conscience of mankind for a war on world poverty .1 Viewed through the “Cold War lens,” Wilson’s crusade can be seen as part of a new postcolonial strategy that gained international currency among Western policymakers in the s and s as they grappled with the pressing problem of transforming the newly emergent nations of the third world into productive, modern economies.2 Today, the passing of the Cold War and the resurgence of neoliberal economics have exposed the apparently flawed and defunct principles of the development era and ushered in, in its place, a new age of globalization. A barrage of critical reassessments of contemporary development theory and policy has appeared in recent years, attesting to the sense of moral and intellectual impasse .3 At the same time, historians and other social scientists have shown growing interest in unearthing the broader historical, political, and institutional context in which this pervasive set of ideas and practices was first set in motion. For many, that context began at the end of the Second World You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. War with the emergence of the United States as the dominant world power and the rise of anticolonial nationalist movements, which hastened the end of European rule in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.4 For poststructuralist analysts in particular, the discourse of development is presented as the outcome of a specific historical conjuncture, formally inaugurated by President Harry Truman’s Point Four Program in , when the “discovery” of mass poverty in the third world came to occupy a prominent place in the minds of U.S. and other Western power elites.5 The offer of technical and financial assistance as part of a new deal for the former colonies is invariably tied to the U.S.-led campaign to counteract communist influence in the newly emerging nations. “Development ,” as Arturo Escobar relates, “became the grand strategy for advancing [East-West] rivalry and, at the same time, the designs of industrial civilization. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union thus lent legitimacy to the enterprise of modernization and development ; to extend the sphere of political and cultural influence became an end in itself.”6 Despite its countless failures and the many twists and reincarnations of recent years, postdevelopment scholars argue that the dominance of Western knowledge and power have enabled the central tenets of this discourse to persist, seemingly impervious to criticism and incapable of meaningful reform. We are left with a paradigm that is totalizing and undifferentiated in scope, an all-encompassing knowledgepower regime seeking to impose an unwanted modernity on the rest of the world. Development as theory and practice, from this standpoint, began sometime in the decade following the Second World War, and from its inception it has always been and remains in essence a project synonymous with the globalizing of Western capitalism and the modernizing of nonWestern cultures. This book offers a different narrative, shifting our gaze to connections and debates that not too long ago were regarded in the literature on development as largely irrelevant. Building on several important studies, it examines the way development as a framework of ideas and practices emerged out of efforts to manage the social, economic, and ecological crises of the late colonial world.7 The severe economic depression of the early s and the rising social unrest in the form of strikes, riots, and disturbances that followed in its wake marked a critical turning...

Share