Perspectives on the History of Global Development - Hardcover

by Corinna R. Unger (Editor), Nicholas Ferns (Editor), Jack Loveridge (Editor)

The Yearbook for the History of Global Development (YHGD) aims to bring together scholars from a range of regional and academic backgrounds and to facilitate dialogue among the different fields and approaches.

The YHGD is centrally dedicated to the study of past developmental theories, policies and practices, including those with a direct bearing on present-day challenges, making historical insight into the challenges and opportunities of development work in the twenty-first century more readily available to practitioners interested in earlier experiences with development. Furthermore, the yearbook provides a forum for a variety of historical perspectives on and understandings of development. It integrates scholarship that conceives of development as a long-term process of different countries that determined their trajectories in world history; as a field of international and global political, economic, technological, cultural, and intellectual interaction; as an aspect of North-South and East-West relations in the context of imperialism, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization; as a significant domain of international, non-governmental, and research organizations; and, most generally, as the study of the entire spectrum of concepts, discourses and policies related to ways in which countries or regions could and should evolve. This scholarship includes approaches as divergent as Marxism, capitalism, and liberalism, as well as alternative frameworks such as sustainable development, green growth or degrowth. While the central discipline is history, contributions from neighboring disciplines will also be relevant. These include sociology, anthropology, law, area studies, cultural studies, public health, science and technology studies, and economics.

The YHGD provides a forum for academic studies that integrates all of these approaches as components of the overriding question of how various observers and stakeholders have imagined the world to develop and how they have acted on those ideas, and with which consequences.

Within this general framework, the yearbook addresses the following range of issues:

- The actors of development, including governments, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, social movements, individuals, and others;

- The concepts of development, including modernization theory, redistributive approaches, basic needs, development as freedom, sustainable development, degrowth, etc. Discussions of the concepts also include ways in which concepts changed through adaptation to evolving circumstances or new ideas, through hybridization and/or through selective adoption;

- The practices of development, including industrialization, infrastructure projects, rural development, agricultural improvement, grassroots approaches, technical development assistance programs, etc.

- The role of knowledge in development debates, including the relevant input of science and technology and the transregional and transnational circulation and adaptation of different types of knowledge;

- The underlying norms and values of developmental thinking, including perceived prosperity, justice, equality, freedom, democracy, happiness, or lack thereof;

- Seeming winners and losers of developmental processes, unequal access to developmental resources and promises, unexpected or unintended side-effects of development projects, and the use of coercive and violent practices in the name of development as well as trade-offs between different, potentially contradictory effects on different groups, or the same groups at different times.

Editorial Board

Michele Alacevich - University of Bologna

Nitsan Chorev - Brown University

Frederick Cooper - New

Author Biography

Iris Borowy, Shanghai University, China; Corinna Unger, European University Institute, Firenze, Italy.