The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present by Michael E. Latham (review)

The last decade has seen an outpouring of groundbreaking studies on the themes of modernization and development in the history of U.S. foreign relations. One can date the beginning of this wave to two publications that came out in the year 2000. The first was Nick Cullather's influential essay "Development? It's History," published in Diplomatic History (Vol. 24, No. 4). The other was Michael E. Latham's first seminal work on the history of modernization in U.S. foreign policy, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2000).

Latham's book, which convincingly placed modernization theory at the center of American social science and U.S. foreign policy in the early 1960s, heralded a remarkable outpouring of studies centered on the themes of modernization and development in the history of U.S. foreign relations, including important contributions by David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Bradley Simpson, David Ekbladh, and others. A pioneering work published in 1998 by Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945-1965, which looked at international organizations dealing with global health issues, broadened the scope of the literature. Matthew Connelly's Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2007), on the history of the movement to control global population growth, showed how transnational networks of non-state actors worked to reshape government policies around the globe. Nick Cullather's The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (2011) showed how agricultural science, theories of development, and ColdWar pressures combined to revolutionize global food production.

Now Latham has returned to the field he helped launch more than a decade ago, this time to provide an authoritative, indeed magisterial, synthesis of what we have learned to date. He offers a wide-ranging narrative of how the theory of modernization evolved in the United States and how the pursuit of development abroad profoundly shaped U.S. foreign relations for much of the last century. His illuminating analysis combines temporal, geographic, and thematic breadth with an in-depth examination of carefully chosen case studies.

Latham lays out the ideological origins of modernization and development in Progressive and New Deal thinking and, no less importantly, in the rise of the social sciences in U.S. academia, from the foundational theories of Franz Boas and Talcott Parsons to the iconic exposition of modernization theory in the work of W. W. Rostow. Latham then analyzes several case studies. One chapter, focusing on India, Egypt, and Ghana, considers how U.S. efforts to guide the development of emerging states failed to sway postcolonial leaders, who zealously guarded their independence and found in the Soviet Union a more inspiring and relevant model for growth. Another chapter focuses on a set of cases—Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam—in which development was overshadowed in U.S. policy by perceived military and strategic imperatives that justified U.S. support for oppressive regimes. Another chapter—based heavily on Connelly and Cullather's recent work—deals with efforts to control global population and food supplies in the context of apocalyptic fears of global famine and environmental calamities.

Latham's account is compelling, and his judgments are balanced. U.S. advocates of modernization, he tells us, sincerely sought to transcend racism and imperialism even as they replicated some of their sensibilities and offered policy prescriptions that were deeply flawed in both theory and practice. In addition, Latham is not content to present the developing world as a mere arena for U.S. action but rather emphasizes the agency of postcolonial leaders in accepting or (more often) resisting U.S. cajolements and pressures. Finally, among the book's most original and illuminating sections is the discussion in...