Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider)

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 The earlier importance of metropolitan-centered ideas and discursive frameworks has been replaced by concern for actual development practices and impacts on the people who inhabit the territories of the global south.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.