Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave)

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.