Whitman Rostow. Rostow – an academic who moonlighted as a foreign policy adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower – argued that underdevelopment was not a political problem, but a technical one. It had nothing at all to do with colonialism or Western intervention, but rather to do with internal problems. If poor countries wanted to develop, all they needed to do was accept Western aid and advice, implement free-market policies and follow the West’s path to ‘modernisation’. By telling a story of poverty that focused on domestic policies, Rostow’s theory not only sought to pull people’s attention
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