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Chapter 2
Instituting the Development Project
Chapter Summary:
This chapter examines how the idea and practice of development emerged during the colonial era.
Colonialism disorganized non-European societies by reconstructing labor systems around specialized and
ecologically degrading export production and disorganizing the social psychology of subjects. Exposure to
European liberal discourse on rights fueled anti-colonial movements for independence
The political independence of nation-states from colonialism gave rise to the development project, a plan
for national political-economic development. The development project was also intended to secure Cold War
perimeters and make the “free world” safe for business.
In development, Westernization was promoted in politics, economics and culture. As the non-European
world emulated Europe, sovereignty and diversity were limited.
Chapter Outline:
I.
What is development?
a. It emerged during the colonial era
b. 19th Century Europeans saw development as specifically European, but over time it came to be
viewed as a universal necessity
c. The social engineering impulse framed European colonization
i. Extraction of colonial resources facilitated European industrialization
ii. Europeans took on “white man’s burden” of managing subject populations that were
adjusting to extractive economy and monocultures, administering colonial rule for their
masters, and experiencing physical and/or psychic displacement
d. Non-European cultures were irrevocably changed through colonialism, and the post-colonial
context was founded on inequality.
e. This chapter examines the emergence of an unequal international framework not of the making of
newly independent states but through which their governments acquired political legitimacy
II.
Colonialism
a. Definition: The subjugation by physical and psychological force of one culture by another—a
colonizing power—through military conquest of territory and stereotyping the relation between
the two cultures.
i. Predates the era of European expansion (15 th to 20th centuries) and extends to Japanese
colonialism in the 20th century and, most recently, Chinese colonization of Tibet.
ii. Two main forms:
1. Colonies of settlement, which often eliminate indigenous people (such as
Spanish destruction of Aztec and Inca civilizations in the Americas)
2. Colonies of rule, where colonial administrators reorganize existing cultures by
imposing new inequalities to facilitate their exploitation (such as British creation
of local landlords, zamindars, to rule parts of India; the confiscation of personal
and common land for cash cropping; depriving women of their customary
resources; and the elevation of ethnoracial differences (such as privileging
certain castes or tribes in the exercise of colonial rule)
iii. Outcomes of colonialism
1. Cultural genocide or marginalization of indigenous people
2. Introduction of new tensions around class, gender, race, and caste that continue
to disrupt postcolonial societies
3. Extraction of labor, cultural treasures, and resources to enrich the colonial power
4. The elaboration of ideologies justifying colonial rule, including notions of
racism, and backwardness
5. Various responses by colonial subjects, ranging from death to submission and
internalization of inferiority to a variety of resistances—from everyday forms to
sporadic uprisings to mass political mobilization
iv. Misinterpretation of European cultural superiority:
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The assumption that colonial subjects were “backward” resulted from
comparing non-Europeans to Europeans through the lens of Europe’s powerful
missionary and military-industrial apparatus.
2. Europeans saw difference as “progress,” which they could impart to subjects.
3. Europeans devalued indigenous cultures
a. Saw native Americans and Australian Aborigines as people who did
not “work” the land and believed they had no right of “property”—a
European concept in which property is private and alienable
b. Saw African peoples as static and only occupying, not “improving” the
land
c. Viewed themselves as “bearing civilization”
4. Europeans compromised spiritual life of non-Europeans, ruptured the unity of
the human and natural world (characterizing non-European cultures)
a. Non-Europeans lost control of their land
b. Converted land, water, plants and food into economic categories
c. Post-colonial African saying: “When the white man came he had the
Bible and we had the land. When the white man left, we had the Bible
and he had the land.”
5. Development came to be seen as destiny; non-European scientific, ecological,
and moral achievements, and legacies in European culture, were ignored
Characteristics of pre-colonial cultures
i. All had own was of satisfying material and spiritual needs
ii. Cultures varied by differentiation among members according to ecological endowments
and contact with other cultures
1. Subsistence producers, such as some aboriginal cultures of Australia or the
Amazon
a. Organized by kin relations
b. Subdivided social tasks between men and women
c. Skilled in resource management and production
d. Did not produce a surplus beyond their immediate needs
e. Organized cooperatively, not according to leadership hierarchies
f. Were not prepared for self-defense and often wiped out by colonizers
2. Extensive kingdoms or states, such as the complex hierarchical Mogul empire in
17th century India
a. Organized in local chiefdoms
b. Surpluses (monetary taxes and produce) delivered to central court and
“high culture”
c. Village and urban artisans produced goods
d. Caste distinctions corresponded to divisions of labor
e. Colonizers adapted social and political hierarchies to their own ends,
incubating tensions that have been inherited by postcolonial states
1.
b.
III.
The Colonial Division of Labor
a. From 16th Century on, European colonial powers – Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and Britain –
and their merchant companies, exchanged manufactured goods for slaves, raw materials and
primary products, and in the process, reorganized the world
i. Colonies forced to specialize in production and extraction of raw materials and primary
commodity unavailable in Europe
ii. These products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its
industrial labor force.
iii. On a world scale, this specialization between European economies and their colonies
came to be termed the colonial division of labor
iv. This specialization transformed social and environmental relationships: unequal
ecological exchange, in which colonies exported sustainability
b. Non-European cultures and ecologies were exposed to profound disorganization
i. Mixed farming systems were converted to specialized export monocultures
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1.
2.
c.
Local farmers produced a single crop, such as peanuts or coffee, for export
Plantations (sugar, cotton, tea, rubber, bananas) were imposed on land
appropriated from those who became plantation laborers
3. Systems of export agriculture interrupted centuries-old patterns of diet and
cultivation and created a commercial food economy
ii. Local handcrafts were deliberately destroyed
1. Example: Through tariffs of 70 to 80 percent against Indian finished goods,
British traders used industrial technology (textile machinery and steam engine)
with political power to undermine India’s export luxury cotton cloth production
so that India would export raw cotton to Manchester’s mills
2. In turn, British traders flooded India with cheap cloth manufactured in
Manchester, undermining a time-honored craft.
Social Reorganization Under Colonialism
i. European development was realized through a racialized global relationship,
“underdeveloping” colonial cultures
ii. While native industries declined, local farming cultures lost their best lands to specialized
commercial export agriculture
1. Legacy today: For example, Mali (ranked 160th out of 169 on the UN Human
Development Index) derives half of its export revenues from cotton, with 40
percent of its population depending on this crop for their livelihoods
iii. Colonies lost resources and craft traditions as colonial subjects were forced to work in
mines, fields and plantations – as slave, convict or indentured laborers – to sustain
European factories
iv. Colonialism created new gender inequalities with men’s entry into cash cropping and the
displacement of women’s customary land user rights that circumscribed food production
by new private property systems
v. Food security was destroyed: while production of commercial crops grew, local food
crop production declined
1. In India, grain became an export commodity feeding Londoners, undermining
village-level grain reserves, a shift that spread hunger, famine, and social unrest
vi. In India, the “commons” were turned into private property or state monopolies, rupturing
“the ancient ecological interdependence of pastoralists and farmers” and age-old practices
of extensive crop rotation and long fallow, to replenish soils
1. Indigenous irrigation systems displaced with canals, blocking natural drainage,
exacerbating water salinity and pooling water in swamps, as host for the dreaded
malarial anopheline mosquito.
vii. As European industrial society matured, exploding urban populations demanded
increasing imports of sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco and vegetable oils from colonies and the
expanding factories demanded increasing raw materials (cotton, timber, rubber, and jute).
More subjects were forced to work in cash-cropping through enslavement, taxation, land
grabbing and recruitment for indentured labor contracts.
viii. As the African slave trade subsided, Europeans created new schemes of forced, or
indentured, labor, creating most notably African, Indian and Chinese Diasporas.
ix. Colonial racialized rule contradicted the secular-modernist ideal of the state.
1. Produced resistances among subject populations that fed the politics of
decolonization.
x. Summary statement: “We focus here on the colonial division of labor because it isolates a
key issue in the development puzzle. Unless we see the interdependence created through
this division of world labor, it is easy to take our unequal world at face value and view it
as a natural continuum, with an advanced European region showing the way for a
backward, non-European region. But viewing world inequality as relational
(interdependent) rather than as sequential (catch-up), calls the conventional modern
understanding of “development” into question… development historically depended on
the unequal relationships of colonialism, which included an unequal division of labor and
unequal ecological exchanges—both of which produced a legacy of “underdevelopment”
in the colonial and postcolonial worlds.”
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IV.
Decolonization
a. Colonial subjects engaged the European paradox – a discourse of rights and sovereignty
juxtaposed against their own subjugation.
b. The late 18th century Haitian “Black Jacobin” revolt turned the rhetoric of the French Revolution
successfully against French colonialism. As the first successful independence movement, Haiti’s
slave revolution sent tremors throughout the slaveholding lands of the New World.
c. Resistance to colonialism evolved from the early 19th century independence of Latin American
republics to the dismantling of South African apartheid in the early 1990s. Decolonization peaked
as World War II sapped the power of the French, Dutch, British, and Belgian states to withstand
anticolonial struggles.
d. The nation-state offered formal political independence, although the sovereignty of independent
states was shaped by cultural and economic legacies of colonialism.
V.
Colonial Liberation
a. Freedom required colonists and colonized to overcome social-psychological scars of colonialism,
including legacy of racism
b. In The Colonizer and the Colonized (1967), Tunisian philosopher Albert Memmi described the
unchanging nature of colonial racism
c. In response, West Indian psychiatrist Franz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, a manifesto
calling people of former colonies (the Third World) to transcend the mentality of enslavement and
forge a new path for humanity.
d. Decolonization was rooted in a liberatory upsurge, expressed in mass political resistance
movements
i. In Algeria, the independence movement struck at the French. Colonizers and colonized
used terror. See Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers
ii. Militarized national liberation struggles in Portuguese African Colonies, French IndoChina
iii. Colonial labor unrest in West Indian and African colonies in 1930s
e. Development was a pragmatic effort to preserve colonies by improving material conditions;
colonial subjects demanded development as an entitlement.
f. A new world order was in the making: the era of development
i. 105 new states joined the United Nations from 1945 to 1981, swelling UN ranks from 51
to 156
ii. Political sovereignty extended to millions of non-Europeans (more than half of humanity)
iii. Idealism: First and Third World governments and people coordinated efforts to stimulate
economic growth, social improvements and promote political citizenship
iv. Leaders of new nation-states appropriated idealism and proclaimed equality as a domestic
and international goal, informed by the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1. Fundamental human rights of freedom, equality, life, liberty, and security to all,
without distinction by race, color, sex, language, religion, political opinion,
national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.
2. Citizenship rights—that is, citizens’ rights to the social contract
VI.
Decolonization and Development
a. Decolonization gave development new meaning
i. Linked to ideal of sovereignty
ii. Possibility of converting subjects into citizens
iii. Economic development for social justice
b. Influence of French and U.S. ideologies of liberal-nationalism (nation building via national
education systems, national languages and currencies, and modern armies and voting citizens)
i. On Latin American republics (independent as of 1820s)
ii. On 20th century decolonization movements in Africa and Asia
c. Eager to reconstruct post–World War II world to expand markets and flow of raw materials, the
United States led an international project that viewed development as a national enterprise
d. The U.S. development model proposed an ideal division of labor
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i. More “inner-directed” than the “outer-directed” British imperial model
1. Division of labor between agricultural and industrial sectors internalized
ii. Topsoil was consumed unsustainably and reached ecological limits in 1930s “dustbowl”
crisis when the U.S. began to promote publicly supported agro-industrialization,
commodity stabilization programs, and industrial inputs (such as chemical fertilizers)
iii. U.S. export of capital-intensive industrial farming has defined agricultural modernization,
with global ecological consequence.
VII.
Postwar Decolonization and the Rise of the Third World
a. In era of decolonization, after World War II (1939–1944) during the Cold War, the world
subdivided into three geopolitical segments:
i. First World – capitalist, Western
ii. Second World – communist, Soviet bloc
iii. Third World – postcolonial bloc, most still food-growing rural dwellers, impoverished
iv. Considerable inequality across and within these subdivisions, as well as within their
national units
b. Economic disparity between First and Third Worlds
i. First World had 65% of world income with only 20% of world’s population
ii. Third World had 67% of world population with only 18% of its income
c. Vision of development would energize political and business elites in each world
i. President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 speech proclaimed development program calling for
“helping the least fortunate”
1. Suggested a new paradigm: the division of humanity into developed and
undeveloped regions
2. Development/ modernity became the discursive benchmark
3. Gustavo Esteva: On this day, “two billion people became underdeveloped.”
ii. Development required restoring capitalist world markets to sustain First World wealth
through access to strategic natural resources and opportunity for Third World nations to
emulate First World civilization and living standards
d. The Development Project
i. The power of this new paradigm was in its ability to present itself as universal, natural
and uncontentious; obliterated its colonial roots
ii. Third World states could not repeat the European experience of development by
exploiting labor and resources of other societies
iii. The inevitability of development devalued non-European cultures and discounted what
the West learned from the non-European world
VIII.
Ingredients of the Development Project
a. A political and intellectual response to world conditions at time of decolonization; understood
social change as economic (reductionist)
b. Development could be universalized as a market culture common to all, driven by the nation-state
and economic growth
c. The Nation-State was the framework of the development project
i. Nation-states were territorially defined political systems based on the government-citizen
relationship that emerged in 19th century Europe
1. Colonialism exported this political model (with its military shell), framing the
politics of the decolonization movement, even where national boundaries made
little sense.
ii. In spite of efforts of African anti-colonialists who advocated pan-African federalism,
colonial powers insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of
decolonization
iii. Borders were arbitrarily drawn, separating peoples and creating states divided by conflict,
suggesting foresight of pan-Africanism
d. Economic Growth: institutionalized through a universal quantifiable measure of national
development
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i. Objective of UN Charter of 1945 was “rising standard of living,” measured by gross
national product (GNP) or national average of per capita income
ii. Western economists believed development required “jump start” in Third World to
overcome “traditional obstacles” such as wealth sharing and cooperative labor.
iii. Solution was to introduce market system based on private property and accumulation of
wealth. Required introduction of banking, accounting, education, stock markets, legal
systems, and public infrastructure.
iv. Using economic growth as measure of development is problematic
1. Average indices of per capita income obscure inequalities among social groups
and classes
2. Aggregate indices such as rising consumption measures do not reflect
improvement in quality of life
3. Rising consumption includes environmentally harmful activities
4. Economic criteria marginalize other criteria for evaluating quality of life and
discount social wealth of nonmaterial activities
IX.
Framing the Development Project
a. Both Cold War blocs understood development as destiny
i. West identified free-enterprise capitalism as the endpoint of development, based on
Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy of common good arising from pursuit of
individual self-interest
ii. Communist bloc orthodoxy identified the abolition of private property and central
planning as the goal of social development, deriving from Karl Marx’s collectivist
dictum: “from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs.”
iii. Both blocs shared the same modernist paradigm and saw national industrialization as
vehicle of development
b. National Industrialization: Ideal and Reality
i. Assumed that agrarian civilization would be displaced by urban-industrial society.
Policies deliberately transferred people and resources from agrarian sectors with the idea
that Industrial growth would ideally feed back and technify agriculture
ii. Also assumed a linear direction for development – catch-up with the West.
iii. Development is not just a goal; it is a method of rule.
c. Economic Nationalism
i. Is the effort of Third World governments to build development states to organize national
economic growth by mobilizing money and people, using individual and corporate taxes,
export and sales taxes to finance transportation systems and state enterprises
ii. Sought to reverse the colonial division of labor by protecting domestic industrialization
with tariffs and public subsidies and reducing dependence on primary exports
iii. Was associated with Raul Prebisch, adviser to the Argentine military government in the
1930s and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America.
iv. Import-Substitution Industrialization (ISI) was the framework for the initial economic
development strategies in the Third World as governments subsidized “infant industries.”
The goal was a cumulative process of domestic industrialization.
v. Ironically, ISI resulted in encouraging direct foreign investment.
1. Brazil redistributed private investment from export sectors to domestic
production.
2. By contrast, South Korea centralized control of national development, relied less
on foreign investment and more on export markets for the country’s growing
range of manufactured goods, carried out land reform and distribute wealth
among urban classes and between urban and rural populations.
vi. To secure an expanding industrial base, Third World governments constructed political
coalitions among different social groups to support rapid industrialization—such as the
Latin American development alliance.
vii. Latin American development alliance
1. Social constituency included commercial farmers, public employees, urban
industrialists, merchants, and organized industrial workers
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2.
3.
X.
Was a vehicle of political patronage for governments to manipulate electoral
support
Example: Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) created corporatist
institutions to channel patronage downward and loyalty upward
Summary
a. Idea of development emerged during , and within the terms of, the colonial era
b. Colonialism disorganized non-European societies by reconstructing labor systems around
specialized and ecologically degrading export production and disorganizing the social psychology
of subjects. Exposure to European liberal discourse on rights fueled anti-colonial movements for
independence
c. Political independence from colonialism gave rise to the development project, a plan for national
political-economic development as well as a “protection racket” to secure Cold War perimeters
and make the “free world” safe for business
d. In development, Westernization was promoted in politics, economics and culture. As the nonEuropean world emulated Europe, sovereignty and diversity were limited It also rejected the panAfrican insight into alternative political organization. Both of these ideas have re-emerged
recently, and they have a growing audience.
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