Development Historiography in a Global Age

Currently, historians seem to discover the history of the post-colonial development endeavour. Several research projects have just been completed or are still under way, which focus on one of the many aspects of this global phenomenon. We see two reasons for this rise in academic interest.
First, foreign aid and development has indeed become historical. The optimistic drive of the early years, i.e. the 1950s and 1960s, has vanished in view of the rather poor record of the venture. Many authors, including Colin Leys in 1996, have declared development dead, in the sense that the idea of speeding up economic change in poor countries through financial, technological or informational input has lost its former glory. Meanwhile, aid has become a knowledge industry that easily survives its own obituaries but that does not happily embrace its past. Whenever practitioners of the field look back they are confronted with an enormous difference between what once were future prospects and/or fears and what effectively did emerge. The “Development Machine” (James Ferguson) has become part and parcel of the actually existing condition of globality as described by Michael Geyer and Charles Bright. Like other agents of global convergence, it bears witness of the high degree of global cultural and economic integration that has been achieved in the last decades while it is one prominent arena for asserting difference and rejecting sameness around the planet. Development has come to denote many contradictory things, but it is this plurality that makes for its historical reality, paradoxical and wanting, as it may seem. In this situation historians can reconstruct the many development experiences and locate them in past spaces of action and frames of expectations.
A second reason for the new historiographic interest lies in the historians’ recent attention towards phenomena of global interaction and connectedness. The history of foreign aid and development surely offers many opportunities to inquire into transnational and global connections. While the bulk of aid was organized bilaterally, the context of international development at the same time gave rise to many new institutions, which challenged the agency of the nation state through supranational or non-governmental associations. Aid has become a powerful element within the socio-economic reality of almost all recipient countries while the fundraising activities of the aid agencies have strongly influenced the public image of the Third World within donor societies.

Aim of the Workshop

The workshop takes advantage of the fact that many research projects of different focus and scope are under way. Donor politics and fund raising, development discourse, international agencies, expert cultures and social change in recipient countries are under scrutiny. The workshop wants to engage the isolated undertakings in a dialogue and enhance discussion and exchange, where they already take place. We aim at a survey of the field, however without searching for a synthesis. Rather, the heterogeneity of the collected approaches shall be articulated and discussed. We are interested in the question, what notions and assumptions different researchers are sharing. Is development just a common starting point of the research projects or are there instances of analytic convergence? In what ways can the perspectives of economic, political, or social history be combined with approaches from cultural history or the history of science and technology? The results of the workshop shall be collected in a published volume in order to promote these debates in a wider audience.

Leading Assumptions

We are convinced that the historical development experience is so manifold that it cannot be summarised in one dominant account. Neither the telos of enlightened universalism nor the particularism of tiers-mondistes, who defend an alleged authenticity of non-Western cultures, can convincingly account for the phenomenon. Two leading assumptions are proposed. First, we assume that the multitude of approaches reflects the complexity of the topic. Development is a global phenomenon that touches economical, political, social and cultural questions alike. The empirical facts of economic gaps and differences in wealth are inextricably intertwined with cultural and scientific representations of inequality. Researching into foreign aid and development inevitably brings up aspects of poverty, oppression and hegemonic rule and leads to ethical questions of equality and justice. At the same time, one has to envision the genesis of late modern expert cultures and reflect upon the advent of a knowledge society. Both, matters of fact and their interpretations, material sources of power as well as knowledge claims, accounted for the political dimension of foreign aid and development and shaped their historical contours.
The second assumption concerns the globality of the phenomenon. Development discourse has always tended to encompass and annihilate the worlds’ diversity by promoting universalistic concepts. This totalizing stance must not necessarily be repeated when the history of development is taken into view globally. On the contrary: it seems interesting to ask, in what ways different actors in different positions within the development endeavour have conceptualized the world as one and how these global imaginations influenced social change locally. Development historiography needs to be complemented by a genealogy of these world-views. Reducing the phenomenon to a unidirectional flow of financial aid and technical know-how from North to South seems rather simplistic, because such a perspective does not account for the productive reinterpretations of modernization and development in the recipient context. In fact, one is confronted with a multilayered global connection, which most probably cannot be reduced to a “hidden transcript” (James C. Scott) of neo-colonial dominance of an active West over the passive rest. Emphasizing agency on all sides of the North-South-relation allows for a detailed historical analysis of dependency and exploitation in the unfolding of multiple and interwoven modernities.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions of papers on global aspects of the history of foreign aid and development along the above-sketched lines of inquiry, irrespective of their geographical focus. Contributions on recipient countries are of special interest. While Decolonization and the Cold War will form the main temporal frame, we also welcome papers that look further backwards into colonial rule, or put more recent times under scrutiny. Presentations should not exceed twenty minutes each. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2008, and abstract should not exceed 400 words.

Please send your abstracts to the event’s communication address via e-mail:

development@live.de

We thank the sponsers:

DFG, SNF, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, ETH Zurich

Dr. Daniel Speich, ETH Zürich, Institut für Geschichte, Technikgeschichte, Auf der Mauer 2 (ADM), CH-8092 Zürich, http://www.tg.ethz.ch/forschung/mitarbeiter/DanielSpeich.htm, speich@history.gess.ethz.ch

Dr. Hubertus Büschel, Historisches Institut der Universität Potsdam, Am Neuen Palais 10, D-14469 Potsdam, http://www.zzf-pdm.de/site/492/default.aspx, hubertus_bueschel@web.de