Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

by Philip McMichael

development paradox, where poverty accompanies economic growth.

A Commodity Chain for Athletic Shoes

Development, conventionally associated with economic growth, is a recent phenomenon.

European rulers pursued economic growth to finance their needs for military protection and political legitimacy.

became so only in the mid-twentieth century, as newly independent governments embraced development a...

The globalization project (1970s–2000s) superimposed open markets across national boundaries, liberalizing trade and investment rules and privatizing public goods and services. Corporate rights gained priority over the social contract

Polanyi’s double movement is alive and well.

an incipient sustainability project, heavily influenced by the climate change emergency, may be forming, with China leading the green technology race and a myriad of environmental and justice movements across the world, pushing states, business leaders, and citizens toward a new formulation of development as “managing the future” sustainably (in contrast to “improving on the past,” as in modernization).

development, as we know it, is not the same across time,

This book seeks to make sense of this by emphasizing development paradoxes and providing students with a “birds-eye” (global) perspective on development controversies not easily seen from the ground.

(Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

Instituting

“development” emerged as a comparative construct, in context of European colonization of the non-European world.

Colonialism is the subjugation by physical and psychological force of one culture by another—a colonizing power—through military and economic conquest of territory and stereotyping the subordinated cultures.

idea of development emerged during, and within the terms of, the era of the colonial project.

Exposure of non-European intellectuals, workers, and soldiers to the European liberal discourse on rights fueled anticolonial movements for political independence.

political independence of the colonial world gave birth to the development project,

“protection racket,” insofar as international aid, trade, and investment flows were calibrated to Western military aid to secure Cold War perimeters an...

Third World states became at once independent, but were collectively defin...

pursuit of rising living standards, via industrialization, inevitably promoted Westernization in political, economic, and cultural terms as the non-Europ...

Frantz Fanon’s call for a non-E...

remainder of this book explores how these ideals have worked out in practice and how they have been reformulated.

When colonies became independent nation-states,

economies continued to depend on primary exports.

US Bilateralism: The Marshall Plan (Reconstructing the First World)

United States focused on European reconstruction as the key to stabilizing the Western world and securing capitalism.

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

newly industrializing countries (NICs)

development project was multilayered,

Third World as a whole was incorporated into a singular project,

Military and economic-aid programs shaped the geopolitical contours of the “free world,”

Third World countries into the Western orbit.

shaped patterns of development through technologi...

food subsidies to industrializati...

Foo...

securing geopolitical ...

global rural–urban exchange.

focus is on understanding how the development project set in motion a global dynamic, embedding national policies within an international institutional and ideological framework.

theoretically in the service of national economic growth policies,

proved to be ultimately interna...

social differentiation among men and women and among rural producers, laborers, and capitalist farmers.

migrated to the cities,

massive relocation of industrial tasks to the Third World, reshaping the international division of labor.

This chapter focuses on the socioeconomic dimensions of this transformation, anticipating the process and politics of globalization, as the development project gave way to the globalization project.

postwar reconstruction of the world market,

achieving deve...

Cold War marked the rise of a US-centered capitalist world economy in which the US government deployed military and economic largesse to secure a...

freedom of enterprise

US dollar as the international currency.