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University of California Press

About the Book

During the past fifty years, colonial empires around the world have collapsed and vast areas that were once known as "colonies" have become known as "less developed countries" or "the third world." The idea of development—and the relationship it implies between industrialized, affluent nations and poor, emerging nations—has become the key to a new conceptual framework. Development has also become a vast industry, involving billions of dollars and a worldwide community of experts. These essays—written by scholars in many fields—examine the production, transmission, and implementation of ideas about development within historical, political, and intellectual contexts, emphasizing the changing meanings of development over the past fifty years.

The concept of development has come under attack in recent years both from those who see development as the imperialism of knowledge, imposing on the world a modernity that it does not necessarily want, and those who see development efforts as a distortion of the world market. These essays look beyond the polemics and focus on the diverse, contested, and changing meanings of development among social movements, national governments, international agencies, foundations, and scholars.

About the Author

Frederick Cooper is Charles Gibson Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (California, 1997) and Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996). Randall Packard is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and International Health at Emory University. He is the author of White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (California, 1989).

Table of Contents

PREFACE
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Introduction
Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard

PART ONE • THE END OF EMPIRE AND
THE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK
1. Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development:
India's Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective
Sugata Bose
2. Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Mricans, and the Development Concept
Frederick Cooper
3· Visions of Postwar Health and Development and Their Impact on Public
Health Interventions in the Developing World
Randall Packard

PART TWO • INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITIES
AND CONNECTIONS
4· Intellectual Openings and Policy Closures: Disequilibria in
Contemporary Development Economics
Michael R Carter
5· Anthropology and Its Evil Twin: "Development" in the
Constitution of a Discipline
James Ferguson
6. Population Science, Private Foundations, and Development Aid: The
Transformation of Demographic Knowledge in the United States, 1945-1965
John Sharpless

PART THREE • IDEAS AND DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTIONS
7. Redefining Development at the World Bank
Martha Finnemore
8. Development Ideas in Latin America: Paradigm Shift and the Economic
Commission for Latin America
Kathryn Sikkink

PART FOUR•DEVELOPMENT LANGUAGE AND
ITS APPROPRIATIONS
g. "Found in Most Traditional Societies": Traditional Medical Practitioners
between Culture and Development
Stacy Leigh Pigg
10. Senegalese Development: From Mass Mobilization to Technocratic Elitism
Mamadou Diouf
11. Agrarian Populism in the Development of a Modern Nation (India)
Akhil Gupta

INDEX

Reviews

"This superb collection assembles a number of stimulating and theoretically current contributions by outstanding scholars."—Angelique Haugerud, author of The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya