“Modernization” would end up being the Americans’ cleverest euphemism for empire building after 1950, and though the history of “modernization theory” has been deconstructed in countless academic books—Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future, Hemant Shah’s The Production of Modernization, among many others—this most indestructible of American Cold War mentalities still seems to underpin Americans’ fundamental sense of reality.
