Development Century

This anthology offers a cutting-edge perspective on how development has shaped the history of the modern world. Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela have gathered together leading historians to examine development on the international, regional, and national levels, as well as local manifestations of development initiatives and transnational organizing on behalf of alternative approaches. Themes include the relationship between empire and development, the role of international institutions, the influence of the Cold War, decolonization and post-colonial development strategies, reform and resistance to development, development and global health, and the ecological effects of development. The Development Century examines how ideas and discourses about development have shaped its practices on the ground; explores the ways in which policymakers and experts attempted to implement development through specific institutions and policies; and analyzes development initiatives and their effect of local environments and people.

Stephen J. Macekura is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2015). Erez Manela is Professor of History at Harvard University, Massachusetts where he also serves as Director of Graduate Programs at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and co-chairs the Harvard International and Global History Seminar (HIGHS). He is the author of the prize-winning book The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) and co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010) and Empires at War, 1911–1923 (2014).