CIW213 | Improvement, Welfare, Growth? A Critical History of the Many Lives of Development

This course will look at the contested origins, visions, and practices of development from a historical perspective. It will probe the colonial legacies of development and track the evolution of developmental ideas across the post-War world order—against the backdrop of waning European imperialism and ascending nationalist movements. The readings will introduce students to certain key historical processes which have shaped the limits and possibilities of development in twentieth century such as the long-term implications of the Great Depression, histories of debt and global financial panics, Cold War modernizing missions, Green Revolution policies, the making of postcolonial developmental states, and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism. In the classroom, we will unpack the concept of development and its accompanying visions of economic upliftment and social welfare within the context of these historical processes. Primarily, the course will introduce students to various competing visions of development, their historical origins, and their critics. We will further examine how these visions of development have conceptualized structures of socio-economic inequality and dispossession across various geographical/regional scales and sociological categories. Along the way, we will also ask who was/is the primary agent of development in these visions: is it the state, NGOs, civil society, market, global multilateral institutions such as the UN, local communities? What do these different visions of development tell us about histories of capitalism, postcolonial politics and state-building, welfarism, social movements, etc? The readings and classroom discussions will allow students to think of development not as a self- evident socio-economic fact but as a historically complex phenomenon which acquired salience over the long twentieth century. Although the focus of this course is on understanding development’s past rather than shaping its future, students are encouraged to make connections with the contemporary dilemmas of developmental practice.