later realized, was because it recalled the language of modernization theory, whose intellectual proponents thought of postcolonial nations as rebellious adolescents. According to Nils Gilman, the image of foreign nations as “‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout the literature on modernization.” At the time of my interview with Kalyvas I hadn’t known anything about modernization theory. But I hadn’t needed to. Mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, a million television news broadcasts, likely even most of my college history courses all used the same language of the maturity and
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