1) First, read the following statement by Frank.

“[O]ur ignorance of the underdeveloped countries’ history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of the history of the now developed countries. This ignorance and this assumption lead us into serious misconceptions about contemporary underdevelopment and development. Further, most studies of development and underdevelopment fail to take account of the economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout the history of the world-wide expansion and development of the mercantilist and capitalist system.”

(Random note from prof: In the last 3 weeks, you read multiple summaries of this very history “of the world-wide expansion and development of the mercantilist and capitalist system.” Therefore, you should be able to envision some of this history Frank references!)

Frank was one of the first academics to directly challenge narratives that “development” was a pathway to affluence for postcolonial (underdeveloped) countries. In your own words, what are the “economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies” that Frank says created the conditions of underdevelopment in South America? (Give one example from the text.)

2) According to McMichaels, how is the concept of “development” (or human development) related to colonialism? In your opinion, do you think he would argue that our global focus on development (popularized after decolonization) is better than colonialism?

3) First, read the following statement.

“But as the contemporary African material shows so vividly, the ‘global’ does not ‘flow,’ thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces; it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the network while excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie between the points.”

According to Ferguson, what “hops” and does not flow? (Hint: it is not water and not just “global”. Be specific.) Why is this relevant to the social life of people in African countries? (Give one example from the text.) Also, can you see how Ferguson’s vision and Frank’s vision of capitalism are similar?

4) In your opinion, do you think that Sassen would attribute some of Covid’s disproportionate impact on people of color to globalization?
Explain why or why not. Please see the data here for reference:

https://data.newamericaneconomy.org/en/immigrant-workers-at-risk-coronavirus/

The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change

,
Second Edition. Edited by J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Global Cities and Survival
Circuits (2002)

Saskia Sassen

When today’s media, policy, and economic analysts define globalization, they
emphasize hypermobility, international communication, and the neutralization of
distance and place. This account of globalization is by far the dominant one. Central
to it are the global information economy, instant communication, and electronic
markets – all realms within which place no longer makes a difference, and where the
only type of worker who matters is the highly educated professional. Globalization
thus conceived privileges global transmission over the material infrastructure that
makes it possible; information over the workers who produce it, whether these be
specialists or secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the other
jobs upon which it rests, including many of those held by immigrants. In brief, the
dominant narrative of globalization concerns itself with the upper circuits of global
capital, not the lower ones, and with the hypermobility of capital rather than with
capital that is bound to place.

The migration of maids, nannies, nurses, sex workers, and contract brides has
little to do with globalization by these lights. Migrant women are just individuals
making a go of it, after all, and the migration of workers from poor countries to
wealthier ones long predates the current phase of economic globalization. And yet it
seems reasonable to assume that there are significant links between globalization
and women’s migration, whether voluntary or forced, for jobs that used to be part of
the First World woman’s domestic role. Might the dynamics of globalization alter the
course or even reinscribe the history of the migration and exploitation of Third

23

Original publication details: Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits,” in B. Ehrenreich and
A. R. Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (H. Holt,
2002), pp. 254–74, 310–16. Reproduced with permission from S. Sassen.

374 Saskia Sassen

World laborers? There are two distinct issues here. One is whether globalization has
enabled formerly national or regional processes to go global. The other is whether
globalization has produced a new kind of migration, with new conditions and
dynamics of its own.

Global Cities and Survival Circuits

When today’s women migrate from south to north for work as nannies, domestics,
or sex workers, they participate in two sets of dynamic configurations. One of these
is the global city. The other consists of survival circuits that have emerged in response
to the deepening misery of the global south.1

Global cities concentrate some of the global economy’s key functions and resources.
There, activities implicated in the management and coordination of the global economy
have expanded, producing a sharp growth in the demand for highly paid professionals.
Both this sector’s firms and the lifestyles of its professional workers in turn generate a
demand for low-paid service workers. In this way, global cities have become places
where large numbers of low-paid women and immigrants get incorporated into stra-
tegic economic sectors. Some are incorporated directly as low-wage clerical and service
workers, such as janitors and repairmen. For others, the process is less direct, operating
instead through the consumption practices of high-income professionals, who employ
maids and nannies and who patronize expensive restaurants and shops staffed by low-
wage workers. Traditionally, employment in growth sectors has been a source of
workers’ empowerment; this new pattern undermines that linkage, producing a class of
workers who are isolated, dispersed, and effectively invisible.

Meanwhile, as Third World economies on the periphery of the global system
struggle against debt and poverty, they increasingly build survival circuits on the
backs of women – whether these be trafficked low-wage workers and prostitutes or
migrant workers sending remittances back home. Through their work and remit-
tances, these women contribute to the revenue of deeply indebted countries.
“Entrepreneurs” who have seen other opportunities vanish as global firms entered
their countries see profit-making potential in the trafficking of women; so, too, do
longtime criminals who have seized the opportunity to operate their illegal trade
globally. These survival circuits are often complex; multiple locations and sets of
actors constitute increasingly far-reaching chains of traders and “workers.”

Through their work in both global cities and survival circuits, women, so often
discounted as valueless economic actors, are crucial to building new economies and
expanding existing ones. Globalization serves a double purpose here, helping to
forge links between sending and receiving countries, and enabling local and regional
practices to assume a global scale. On the one hand, the dynamics that converge in
the global city produce a strong demand for low-wage workers, while the dynamics
that mobilize women into survival circuits produce an expanding supply of migrants
who can be pushed – or sold – into such jobs. On the other hand, the very techno-
logical infrastructure and transnationalism that characterize global industries also

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 375

enable other types of actors to expand onto the global stage, whether these be money
launderers or people traffickers.2 It seems, then, that in order to understand the
extraction from the Third World of services that used to define women’s domestic
role in the First, we must depart from the mainstream view of globalization.

Toward an Alternative Narrative about Globalization

The spatial dispersal of economic activities and the neutralization of place constitute
half of the globalization story. The other half involves the territorial centralization
of  top-level management, control operations, and the most advanced specialized
services. Markets, whether national or global, and companies, many of which have
gone global, require central locations where their most complex tasks are accom-
plished. Furthermore, the information industry rests on a vast physical infrastruc-
ture, which includes strategic nodes where facilities are densely concentrated. Even
the most advanced sectors of the information industry employ many different types
of workplaces and workers.

If we expand our analysis of globalization to include this production process, we
can see that secretaries belong to the global economy, as do the people who clean
professionals’ offices and homes. An economic configuration very different from the
one suggested by the concept of an “information economy” emerges – and it is one
that includes material conditions, production sites, and activities bounded by place.

The mainstream account of globalization tends to take for granted the existence
of a global economic system, viewing it as a function of the power of transnational
corporations and communications. But if the new information technologies and
transnational corporations can be operated, coordinated, and controlled globally, it’s
because that capacity has been produced. By focusing on its production, we shift our
emphasis to the practices that constitute economic globalization: the work of pro-
ducing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production
system and a global marketplace for finance.

This focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the
analysis of economic globalization. In so broadening our analysis, we do not deny
the importance of hypermobility and power. Rather, we acknowledge that many of
the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are,
on the contrary, deeply embedded in place, including such sites as global cities and
export processing zones. Global processes are structured by local constraints,
including the work culture, political culture, and composition of the workforce
within a particular nation state.3

If we recapture the geography behind globalization, we might also recapture its
workers, communities, and work cultures (not just the corporate ones). By focusing
on the global city, for instance, we can study how global processes become localized
in specific arrangements, from the high-income gentrified urban neighborhoods of
the transnational professional class to the work lives of the foreign nannies and
maids in those same neighborhoods.

376 Saskia Sassen

Women in the Global City

Globalization has greatly increased the demand in global cities for low-wage workers
to fill jobs that offer few advancement possibilities. The same cities have seen an
explosion of wealth and power, as high-income jobs and high-priced urban space
have noticeably expanded. How, then, can workers be hired at low wages and with
few benefits even when there is high demand and the jobs belong to high-growth
sectors? The answer, it seems, has involved tapping into a growing new labor supply –
women and immigrants – and in so doing, breaking the historical nexus that would
have empowered workers under these conditions. The fact that these workers tend
to be women and immigrants also lends cultural legitimacy to their non-empowerment.
In global cities, then, a majority of today’s resident workers are women, and many of
these are women of color, both native and immigrant.

At the same time, global cities have seen a gathering trend toward the informaliza-
tion of an expanding range of activities, as low-profit employers attempt to escape the
costs and constraints of the formal economy’s regulatory apparatus. They do so by
locating commercial or manufacturing operations in areas zoned exclusively for res-
idential use, for example, or in buildings that violate fire and health standards; they
also do so by assigning individual workers industrial homework. This allows them to
remain in these cities. At its best, informalization reintroduces the community and
the household as important economic spaces in global cities. It is in many ways a low-
cost (and often feminized) equivalent to deregulation at the top of the system. As with
deregulation (for example, financial deregulation), informalization introduces flexi-
bility, reduces the “burdens” of regulation, and lowers costs, in this case of labor.
In the cities of the global north – including New York, London, Paris, and Berlin –
informalization serves to downgrade a variety of activities for which there is often a
growing local demand. Immigrant women, in the end, bear some of the costs.

As the demand for high-level professional workers has skyrocketed, more and
more women have found work in corporate professional jobs. These jobs place
heavy demands on women’s time, requiring long work hours and intense engage-
ment. Single professionals and two-career households therefore tend to prefer urban
to suburban residence. The result is an expansion of high-income residential areas
in global cities and a return of family life to urban centers. Urban professionals want
it all, including dogs and children, whether or not they have the time to care for
them. The usual modes of handling household tasks often prove inadequate. We can
call this type of household a “professional household without a ‘wife,’” regardless of
whether its adult couple consists of a man and a woman, two men, or two women. A
growing share of its domestic tasks are relocated to the market: they are bought
directly as goods and services or indirectly through hired labor. As a consequence,
we see the return of the so-called serving classes in all of the world’s global cities, and
these classes are largely made up of immigrant and migrant women.

This dynamic produces a sort of double movement: a shift to the labor market of
functions that used to be part of household work, but also a shift of what used to be

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 377

labor market functions in standardized workplaces to the household and, in the case of
informalization, to the immigrant community.4 This reconfiguration of economic
spaces has had different impacts on women and men, on male-typed and female-typed
work cultures, and on male- and female-centered forms of power and empowerment.

For women, such transformations contain the potential, however limited, for
autonomy and empowerment. Might informalization, for example, reconfigure
certain economic relationships between men and women? With informalization, the
neighborhood and the household reemerge as sites for economic activity, creating
“opportunities” for low-income women and thereby reordering some of the hierar-
chies in which women find themselves. This becomes particularly clear in the case
of immigrant women, who often come from countries with traditionally male-
centered cultures.

A substantial number of studies now show that regular wage work and improved
access to other public realms has an impact on gender relations in the lives of immi-
grant women. Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence, while
men lose ground. More control over budgeting and other domestic decisions
devolves to women, and they have greater leverage in requesting help from men in
domestic chores. Access to public services and other public resources also allows
women to incorporate themselves into the mainstream society; in fact, women often
mediate this process for their households. Some women likely benefit more than
others from these circumstances, and with more research we could establish the
impact of class, education, and income. But even aside from relative empowerment
in the household, paid work holds out another significant possibility for women:
their greater participation in the public sphere and their emergence as public actors.

Immigrant women tend to be active in two arenas: institutions for public and
private assistance, and the immigrant or ethnic community. The more women are
involved with the migration process, the more likely it is that migrants will settle in
their new residences and participate in their communities. And when immigrant
women assume active public and social roles, they further reinforce their status in
the household and the settlement process.5 Positioned differently from men in rela-
tion to the economy and state, women tend to be more involved in community
building and community activism. They are the ones who will likely handle their
families’ legal vulnerabilities as they seek public and social services. These trends
suggest that women may emerge as more forceful and visible actors in the labor
market as well.

And so two distinct dynamics converge in the lives of immigrant women in global
cities. On the one hand, these women make up an invisible and disempowered class
of workers in the service of the global economy’s strategic sectors. Their invisibility
keeps immigrant women from emerging as the strong proletariat that followed ear-
lier forms of economic organization, when workers’ positions in leading sectors had
the effect of empowering them. On the other hand, the access to wages and salaries,
however low; the growing feminization of the job supply; and the growing feminiza-
tion of business opportunities thanks to informalization, all alter the gender hierar-
chies in which these women find themselves.

378 Saskia Sassen

New Employment Regimes in Cities

Most analysts of postindustrial society and advanced economies report a massive
growth in the need for highly educated workers but little demand for the type of labor
that a majority of immigrants, perhaps especially immigrant women, have tended to
supply over the last two or three decades. But detailed empirical studies of major cit-
ies in highly developed countries contradict this conventional view of the postindus-
trial economy. Instead, they show an ongoing demand for immigrant workers and a
significant supply of old and new low-wage jobs that require little education.6

Three processes of change in economic and spatial organization help explain the
ongoing, indeed growing, demand for immigrant workers, especially immigrant
women. One is the consolidation of advanced services and corporate headquarters
in the urban economic core, especially in global cities. While the corporate head-
quarters-and-services complex may not account for the majority of jobs in these
cities, it establishes a new regime of economic activity, which in turn produces the
spatial and social transformations evident in major cities. Another relevant process
is the downgrading of the manufacturing sector, as some manufacturing industries
become incorporated into the postindustrial economy. Downgrading is a response
to competition from cheap imports, and to the modest profit potential of manufac-
turing compared to telecommunications, finance, and other corporate services. The
third process is informalization, a notable example of which is the rise of the sweat-
shop. Firms often take recourse to informalized arrangements when they have an
effective local demand for their goods and services but they cannot compete with
cheap imports, or cannot compete for space and other business needs with the new
high-profit firms of the advanced corporate service economy.

In brief, that major cities have seen changes in their job supplies can be chalked
up both to the emergence of new sectors and to the reorganization of work in sectors
new and old. The shift from a manufacturing to a service-dominated economy, par-
ticularly evident in cities, destabilizes older relationships between jobs and economic
sectors. Today, much more than twenty years ago, we see an expansion of low-wage
jobs associated with growing sectors rather than with declining ones. At the same
time, a vast array of activities that once took place under standardized work arrange-
ments have become increasingly informalized, as some manufacturing relocates
from unionized factories to sweatshops and private homes. If we distinguish the
characteristics of jobs from those of the sectors in which they are located, we can see
that highly dynamic, technologically advanced growth sectors may well contain
low-wage, dead-end jobs. Similarly, backward sectors like downgraded manufac-
turing can reflect the major growth trends in a highly developed economy.

It seems, then, that we need to rethink two assumptions: that the post-industrial
economy primarily requires highly educated workers, and that informalization and
downgrading are just Third World imports or anachronistic holdovers. Service-
dominated urban economies do indeed create low-wage jobs with minimal educa-
tion requirements, few advancement opportunities, and low pay for demanding

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 379

work. For workers raised in an ideological context that emphasizes success, wealth,
and career, these are not attractive positions; hence the growing demand for immi-
grant workers. But given the provenance of the jobs these immigrant workers take,
we must resist assuming that they are located in the backward sectors of the economy.

The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy

Low-wage workers accomplish a sizable portion of the day-to-day work in global
cities’ leading sectors. After all, advanced professionals require clerical, cleaning,
and repair workers for their state-of-the-art offices, and they require truckers to
bring them their software and their toilet paper. In my research on New York and
other cities, I have found that between 30 and 50 percent of workers in the leading
sectors are actually low-wage workers.7

The similarly state-of-the-art lifestyles of professionals in these sectors have
created a whole new demand for household workers, particularly maids and nannies,
as well as for service workers to cater to their high-income consumption habits.
Expensive restaurants, luxury housing, luxury hotels, gourmet shops, boutiques,
French hand laundries, and special cleaning services, for example, are more labor-in-
tensive than their lower-priced equivalents. To an extent not seen in a very long
time, we are witnessing the reemergence of a “serving class” in contemporary high-
income households and neighborhoods. The image of the immigrant woman serv-
ing the white middle-class professional woman has replaced that of the black female
servant working for the white master in centuries past. The result is a sharp ten-
dency toward social polarization in today’s global cities.

We are beginning to see how the global labor markets at the top and at the bottom
of the economic system are formed. The bottom is mostly staffed through the efforts
of individual workers, though an expanding network of organizations has begun to get
involved. (So have illegal traffickers, as we’ll see later.) Kelly Services, a Fortune 500
global staffing company that operates in twenty-five countries, recently added a home-
care division that is geared toward people who need assistance with daily living but
that also offers services that in the past would have been taken care of by the mother
or wife figure in a household. A growing range of smaller global staffing organizations
offer day care, including dropping off and picking up school-children, as well as com-
pletion of in-house tasks from child care to cleaning and cooking. One international
agency for nannies and au pairs (EF Au Pair Corporate Program) advertises directly to
corporations, urging them to include the service in their offers to potential hires.

Meanwhile, at the top of the system, several global Fortune 500 staffing companies help
firms fill high-level professional and technical jobs. In 2001, the largest of these was the
Swiss multinational Adecco, with offices in fifty-eight countries; in 2000 it provided firms
worldwide with 3 million workers. Manpower, with offices in fifty-nine different coun-
tries, provided 2 million workers. Kelly Services provided 750,000 employees in 2000.

The top and the bottom of the occupational distribution are becoming internation-
alized and so are their labor suppliers. Although midlevel occupations are increasingly

380 Saskia Sassen

staffed through temporary employment agencies, these companies have not interna-
tionalized their efforts. Occupations at the top and at the bottom are, in very different
but parallel ways, sensitive. Firms need reliable and hopefully talented professionals,
and they need them specialized but standardized so that they can use them globally.
Professionals seek the same qualities in the workers they employ in their homes. The
fact that staffing organizations have moved into providing domestic services signals
both that a global labor market has emerged in this area and that there is an effort afoot
to standardize the services maids, nannies, and home-care nurses deliver.

Producing a Global Supply of the New Caretakers:
The Feminization of Survival

The immigrant women described in the first half of this chapter enter the migration
process in many different ways. Some migrate in order to reunite their families;
others migrate alone. Many of their initial movements have little to do with global-
ization. Here I am concerned with a different kind of migration experience, and it is
one that is deeply linked to economic globalization: migrations organized by third
parties, typically governments or illegal traffickers. Women who enter the migration
stream this way often (though not always) end up in different sorts of jobs than
those described above. What they share with the women described earlier in this
chapter is that they, too, take over tasks previously associated with housewives.

The last decade has seen a growing presence of women in a variety of cross- border
circuits. These circuits are enormously diverse, but they share one feature: they pro-
duce revenue on the backs of the truly disadvantaged. One such circuit consists in
the illegal trafficking in people for the sex industry and for various types of labor.
Another circuit has developed around cross-border migrations, both documented
and not, which have become an important source of hard currency for the migrants’
home governments. Broader structural conditions are largely responsible for form-
ing and strengthening circuits like these. Three major actors emerge from those
conditions, however: women in search of work, illegal traffickers, and the govern-
ments of the home countries.

These circuits make up, as it were, countergeographies of globalization. They are
deeply imbricated with some of globalization’s major constitutive dynamics: the
formation of global markets, the intensifying of transnational and translocal
networks, and the development of communication technologies that easily escape
conventional surveillance. The global economic system’s institutional support for
cross-border markets and money flows has contributed greatly to the formation and
strengthening of these circuits.8 The countergeographies are dynamic and mobile; to
some extent, they belong to the shadow economy, but they also make use of the reg-
ular economy’s institutional infrastructure.9

Such alternative circuits for survival, profit, and hard currency have grown at least
partly in response to the effects of economic globalization on developing countries.
Unemployment is on the rise in much of the developing world; small and medium-sized

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 381

enterprises oriented to the national, rather than the export, market have closed; and
government debt, already large, is in many cases rising. The economies frequently
grouped under the label “developing” are often struggling, stagnant, or even shrinking.
These conditions have pressed additional responsibilities onto women, as men have lost
job opportunities and governments have cut back on social services. In other words, it
has become increasingly important to find alternative ways of making a living, pro-
ducing profits, and generating government revenues, as developing countries have
faced the following concurrent trends: diminishing job prospects for men, a falloff in
traditional business opportunities as foreign firms and export industries displace
previous economic mainstays, and a concomitant decrease in government revenues,
due both to the new conditions of globalization and to the burden of servicing debts.10

The major dynamics linked to economic globalization have significantly affected
developing economies, including the so-called middle-income countries of the
global south. These countries have had not only to accommodate new conditions
but to implement a bundle of new policies, including structural adjustment pro-
grams, which require that countries open up to foreign firms and eliminate state
subsidies. Almost inevitably, these economies fall into crisis; they then implement
the International Monetary Fund’s programmatic solutions. It is now clear that in
most of the countries involved, including Mexico, South Korea, Ghana, and Thailand,
these solutions have cost certain sectors of the economy and population enormously,
and they have not fundamentally reduced government debt.

Certainly, these economic problems have affected the lives of women from devel-
oping countries. Prostitution and migrant labor are increasingly popular ways to
make a living; illegal trafficking in women and children for the sex industry, and in
all kinds of people as laborers, is an increasingly popular way to make a profit; and
remittances, as well as the organized export of workers, have become increasingly
popular ways for governments to bring in revenue. Women are by far the majority
group in prostitution and in trafficking for the sex industry, and they are becoming
a majority group in migration for labor.

Such circuits, realized more and more frequently on the backs of women, can be
considered a (partial) feminization of survival. Not only are households, indeed
whole communities, increasingly dependent on women for their survival, but so too
are governments, along with enterprises that function on the margins of the legal
economy. As the term circuits indicates, there is a degree of institutionalization in
these dynamics; that is to say, they are not simply aggregates of individual actions.

Government Debt: Shifting Resources from Women
to Foreign Banks

Debt and debt-servicing problems have been endemic in the developing world since
the 1980s. They are also, I believe, crucial to producing the new countergeographies
of globalization. But debt’s impact on women, and on the feminization of survival,
has more to do with particular features of debt than with debt tout court.

382 Saskia Sassen

A considerable amount of research indicates that debt has a detrimental effect on
government programs for women and children, notably education and health care.
Further, austerity and adjustment programs, which are usually implemented in
order to redress government debt, produce unemployment, which also adversely
affects women11 by adding to the pressure on them to ensure household survival. In
order to do so, many women have turned to subsistence food production, informal
work, emigration, and prostitution.12

Most of the countries that fell into debt in the 1980s have found themselves unable
to climb out of it. In the 1990s, a whole new set of countries joined the first group in
this morass. The IMF and the World Bank responded with their structural adjust-
ment program and structural adjustment loans, respectively. The latter tied loans to
economic policy reform rather than to particular projects. The idea was to make
these states more “competitive,” which typically meant inducing sharp cuts in var-
ious social programs.

Rather than becoming “competitive,” the countries subjected to structural adjust-
ment have remained deeply indebted, with about fifty of them now categorized as
“highly indebted poor countries.” Moreover, a growing number of middle-income
countries are also caught in this debt trap. Argentina became the most dramatic
example when it defaulted on $140 billion in debt in December 2001 – the largest
ever sovereign default. Given the structure and servicing of these debts, as well as
their weight in debtor countries’ economies, it is not likely that many of these coun-
tries will ever be able to pay off their debts in full. Structural adjustment programs
seem to have made this even less likely; the economic reforms these programs
demanded have added to unemployment and the bankruptcy of many small, nation-
ally oriented firms.

It has been widely recognized that the south has already paid its debt several
times over. According to some estimates, from 1982 to 1998, indebted countries
paid four times their original debts, and at the same time their debt increased four
times.13 Nonetheless, these countries continue to pay a significant share of their
total revenue to service their debt. Thirty-three of the officially named forty-one
highly indebted poor countries paid $3 in debt service to the north for every $1
they received in development assistance. Many of these countries pay more than 50
percent of their government revenues toward debt service, or 20 to 25 percent of
their export earnings.

The ratios of debt to GNP in many of the highly indebted poor countries exceed
sustainable limits; many are far more extreme than the levels considered unmanage-
able during the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Such ratios are especially
high in Africa, where they stand at 123 percent, compared with 42 percent in Latin
America and 28 percent in Asia.14 Such figures suggest that most of these countries
will not get out of their indebtedness through structural adjustment programs.
Indeed, it would seem that in many cases the latter have had the effect of intensifying
debt dependence. Furthermore, together with various other factors, structural
adjustment programs have contributed to an increase in unemployment and in
poverty.

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 383

Alternative Survival Circuits

It is in this context – marked by unemployment, poverty, bankruptcies of large num-
bers of firms, and shrinking state resources to meet social needs – that alternative
circuits of survival emerge, and it is to these conditions that such circuits are articu-
lated. Here I want to focus on the growing salience of the trafficking of women as a
profit-making option and on the growing importance of the emigrants’ remittances
to the bottom lines of the sending states.

Trafficking, or the forced recruitment and transportation of people for work, is a
violation of human, civil, and political rights. Much legislative effort has gone into
addressing trafficking: international treaties and charters, U.N. resolutions, and
various bodies and commissions have all attempted to put a stop to this practice.15
Nongovernmental organizations have also formed around this issue.16

Trafficking in women for the sex industry is highly profitable for those running
the trade. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people were trafficked in
1998, producing a profit of $7 billion for criminal groups.17 These funds include
remittances from prostitutes’ earnings as well as payments to organizers and facilita-
tors. In Poland, police estimate that for each woman delivered, the trafficker receives
about $700. Ukrainian and Russian women, highly prized in the sex market, earn
traffickers $500 to $1,000 per woman delivered. These women can be expected to
service fifteen clients a day on average, and each can be expected to make about
$215,000 per month for the criminal gang that trafficked her.18

It is estimated that in recent years, several million women and girls have been traf-
ficked from and within Asia and the former Soviet Union, both of which are major
trafficking areas. The growing frequency of trafficking in these two regions can be
linked to increases in poverty, which may lead some parents to sell their daughters to
brokers. In the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, unemployment has
helped promote the growth of criminal gangs, some of which traffic women.
Unemployment rates hit 70 percent among women in Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria,
and  Croatia after the implementation of market policies; in Ukraine, the rate was
80  percent. Some research indicates that need is the major motivation for entry into
prostitution.19

The sex industry is not the only trafficking circuit: migrant workers of both
sexes can also be profitably trafficked across borders. According to a U.N. report,
criminal organizations in the 1990s generated an estimated $3.5 billion per year in
profits from trafficking migrants. Organized crime has only recently entered this
business; in the past, trafficking was mostly the province of petty criminals. Some
recent reports indicate that organized-crime groups are creating strategic inter-
continental alliances through networks of coethnics in various countries; this
facilitates transport, local distribution, provision of false documents, and the like.
These international networks also allow traffickers to circulate women and other
migrants among third countries; they may move women from Burma, Laos,
Vietnam, and China to Thailand, while moving Thai women to Japan and the

384 Saskia Sassen

United States.20 The Global Survival Network reported on these practices after it
conducted a two-year investigation, establishing a dummy company in order to
enter the illegal trade.21

Once trafficked women reach their destination countries, some features of immi-
gration policy and its enforcement may well make them even more vulnerable.
Such women usually have little recourse to the law. If they are undocumented,
which they are likely to be, they will not be treated as victims of abuse but as viola-
tors of entry, residence, and work laws. As countries of the global north attempt to
address undocumented immigration and trafficking by clamping down on entry at
their borders, more women are likely to turn to traffickers to help them get across.
These traffickers may turn out to belong to criminal organizations linked to the sex
industry.

Moreover, many countries forbid foreign women to work as prostitutes, and this
provides criminal gangs with even more power over the women they traffic. It also
eliminates one survival option for foreign women who may have limited access to
jobs. Some countries, notably the Netherlands and Switzerland, are far more tolerant
of foreign women working as prostitutes than as regular laborers. According to
International Organization for Migration data, in the European Union, a majority of
prostitutes are migrant women: 75 percent in Germany and 80 percent in the Italian
city of Milan.

Some women know that they are being trafficked for prostitution, but for
many the conditions of their recruitment and the extent of the abuse and bond-
age they will suffer only become evident after they arrive in the receiving
country. Their confinement is often extreme – akin to slavery – and so is their
abuse, including rape, other forms of sexual violence, and physical punishment.
Their meager wages are often withheld. They are frequently forbidden to protect
themselves against AIDS, and they are routinely denied medical care. If they
seek help from the police, they may be taken into detention for violating immi-
gration laws; if they have been provided with false documents, there will be
criminal charges.

With the sharp growth of tourism over the last decade, the entertainment sector
has also grown, becoming increasingly important in countries that have adopted
tourism as a strategy for development.22 In many places, the sex trade is part of the
entertainment industry, and the two have grown in tandem. Indeed, the sex trade
itself has become a development strategy in some areas where unemployment and
poverty are widespread, and where governments are desperate for revenue and hard
currency. When local manufacturing and agriculture no longer provide jobs, profits,
or government revenue, a once marginal economic wellspring becomes a far more
important one. The IMF and the World Bank sometimes recommend tourism as a
solution to the troubles of poor countries, but when they provide loans for its
development or expansion, they may well inadvertently contribute to the expansion
of the entertainment industry and, indirectly, of the sex trade. Because it is linked to
development strategies in this way, the trafficking of women may continue to expand
in these countries.

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 385

Indeed, the global sex industry is likely to expand in any case, given the involve-
ment of organized crime in the sex trade, the formation of cross-border ethnic net-
works, and the growing transnationalization of tourism. These factors may well lead
to a sex trade that reaches out to more and more “markets.” It’s a worrisome possi-
bility, especially as growing numbers of women face few if any employment options.
Prostitution becomes – in certain kinds of economies – crucial to expanding the
entertainment industry, and thereby to tourism as a development strategy that will
in turn lead to increased government revenue. These links are structural; the signif-
icance of the sex industry to any given economy rises in the absence of other sources
of jobs, profits, and revenues.

Women, and migrants generally, are crucial to another development strategy
as  well: the remittances migrant workers send home are a major source of hard-
currency reserves for the migrant’s home country. While remittances may seem
minor compared to the financial markets’ massive daily flow of capital, they are
often very significant for struggling economies. In 1998, the latest year for which we
have data, the remittances migrants sent home topped $70 billion globally. To under-
stand the significance of this figure, compare it to the GDP and foreign currency
reserves in the affected countries, rather than to the global flow of capital. For in-
stance, in the Philippines, a major sender of migrants generally and of women for
the entertainment industry in particular, remittances were the third largest source of
foreign currency over the last several years. In Bangladesh, which sends significant
numbers of workers to the Middle East, Japan, and several European countries,
remittances totaled about a third of foreign-currency transactions.

Exporting workers is one means by which governments cope with unemployment
and foreign debt. The benefits of this strategy come through two channels, one of
which is highly formalized and the other a simple by-product of the migration pro-
cess. South Korea and the Philippines both furnish good examples of formal labor-
export programs. In the 1970s, South Korea developed extensive programs to
promote the exports of workers, initially to the Middle Eastern OPEC countries and
then worldwide, as an integral part of its growing overseas construction industry.
When South Korea’s economy boomed, exporting workers became a less necessary
and less attractive strategy. The Philippine government, by contrast, expanded and
diversified its labor exports in order to deal with unemployment and to secure
needed foreign-currency reserves through remittances.

The Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) has played an
important role in the emigration of Filipina women to the United States, the Middle
East, and Japan. Established by the Filipino government in 1982, POEA organized
and supervised the export of nurses and maids to high-demand areas. Foreign debt
and unemployment combined to make the export of labor an attractive option.
Filipino workers overseas send home an average of almost $1 billion a year. For their
parts, labor-importing countries had their own reasons to welcome the Filipino gov-
ernment’s policy. The OPEC countries of the Middle East saw in the Filipina migrants
an answer to their growing demand for domestic workers following the 1973 oil
boom. Confronted with an acute shortage of nurses, a profession that demanded

386 Saskia Sassen

years of training yet garnered low wages and little prestige, the United States passed
the Immigration Nursing Relief Act of 1989, which allowed for the importation of
nurses. And in booming 1980s Japan, which witnessed rising expendable incomes
but marked labor shortages, the government passed legislation permitting the entry
of “entertainment workers.”

The largest number of migrant Filipinas work overseas as maids, particularly in
other Asian countries.23 The second largest group, and the fastest growing, consists
of entertainers, who migrate mostly to Japan. The rapid increase in the number of
women migrating as entertainers can be traced to the more than five hundred
“entertainment brokers” that now operate in the Philippines outside the state
umbrella. These brokers provide women for the Japanese sex industry, which is basi-
cally controlled by organized gangs rather than through the government-sponsored
program for the entry of entertainers. Recruited for singing and entertaining, these
women are frequently forced into prostitution as well.

The Filipino government, meanwhile, has also passed regulations that permit
mail-order-bride agencies to recruit young Filipinas to marry foreign men. This
trade rapidly picked up pace thanks to the government’s organized support. The
United States and Japan are two of the most common destinations for mail-order
brides. Demand was especially high in Japan’s agricultural communities in the
1980s, given that country’s severe shortage of people in general and of young
women in particular, as the demand for labor boomed in the large metropolitan
areas. Municipal governments in Japanese towns made it a policy to accept Filipina
brides.

A growing body of evidence indicates that mail-order brides frequently suffer
physical abuse. In the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has
recently reported acute domestic violence against mail-order wives. Again, the law
discourages these women from seeking recourse, as they are liable to be detained if
they do so before they have been married for two years. In Japan, foreign mail-order
wives are not granted full legal status, and considerable evidence indicates that many
are subject to abuse not only by their husbands but by their husbands’ extended fam-
ilies as well. The Philippine government approved most mail-order-bride brokers
before 1989, but during Corazon Aquino’s presidency, the stories of abuse by foreign
husbands led the Philippine government to ban the mail-order-bride business.
Nonetheless, such organizations are almost impossible to eliminate, and they con-
tinue to operate in violation of the law.

The Philippines may have the most developed programs for the export of its
women, but it is not the only country to have explored similar strategies. After its
1997–1998 financial crisis, Thailand started a campaign to promote migration
for work and to encourage overseas firms to recruit Thai workers. Sri Lanka’s
government has tried to export another 200,000 workers in addition to the 1 mil-
lion it already has overseas; Sri Lankan women remitted $880 million in 1998,
mostly from their earnings as maids in the Middle East and Far East. Bangladesh
organized extensive labor-export programs to the OPEC countries of the Middle
East in the 1970s. These programs have continued, becoming a significant source

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 387

of foreign currency along with individual migrations to these and other coun-
tries, notably the United States and Great Britain. Bangladesh’s workers remitted
$1.4 billion in each of the last few years.24

Conclusion

Globalization is not only about the hypermobility of capital and the ascendance of
information economies. It is also about specific types of places and work processes. In
order to understand how economic globalization relates to the extraction of services
from the Third World to fulfill what was once the First World woman’s domestic role, we
must look at globalization in a way that emphasizes some of these concrete conditions.

The growing immiserization of governments and economies in the global south is
one such condition, insofar as it enables and even promotes the migration and traf-
ficking of women as a strategy for survival. The same infrastructure designed to facil-
itate cross-border flows of capital, information, and trade also makes possible a range
of unintended cross-border flows, as growing numbers of traffickers, smugglers, and
even governments now make money off the backs of women. Through their work
and remittances, women infuse cash into the economies of deeply indebted coun-
tries, and into the pockets of “entrepreneurs” who have seen other opportunities van-
ish. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of
actors, which altogether constitute increasingly global chains of traders and “workers.”

But globalization has also produced new labor demand dynamics that center on
the global cities of the north. From these places, global economic processes are
managed and coordinated by increasing numbers of highly paid professionals. Both
the firms and the lifestyles of these professionals are maintained by low-paid service
workers, who are in growing demand. Large numbers of low-wage women and
immigrants thus find themselves incorporated into strategic economic sectors in
global cities. This incorporation happens directly, as in the case of low-wage clerical
and blue collar workers, such as janitors and repair workers. And it happens indi-
rectly, through the consumption practices of high-income professionals, which gen-
erate a demand for maids and nannies as well as low-wage workers in expensive
restaurants and shops. Low-wage workers are then incorporated into the leading
sectors, but under conditions that render them invisible.

Both in global cities and in survival circuits, women emerge as crucial economic
actors. It is partly through them that key components of new economies have been
built. Globalization allows links to be forged between countries that send migrants
and countries that receive them; it also enables local and regional practices to go
global. The dynamics that come together in the global city produce a strong demand
for migrant workers, while the dynamics that mobilize women into survival circuits
produce an expanding supply of workers who can be pushed or sold into those types
of jobs. The technical infrastructure and transnationalism that underlie the key
globalized industries also allow other types of activities, including money- laundering
and trafficking, to assume a global scale.

388 Saskia Sassen

Notes

1 For more detailed accounts of each of these configurations please see my “Towards a
Feminist Analytics of Globalization,” in Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents:
Essays on the Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998); and my
article, “Women’s Burden: Countergeographies of Globalization and the Feminization of
Survival,” Journal of International Affairs, vol. 53, no. 2 (spring 2000) pp. 503–24.

2 In my larger research project, I also focus on a range of liberating activities and practices
that globalization enables; for example, some aspects of the human-rights and environ-
mental movements, as well as of the antiglobalization network. In this sense, globaliza-
tion enables the production of its own countergeographies, some of which are exploit-
ative, others emancipatory.

3 By emphasizing that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories,
such a focus introduces new variables into current conceptions of economic globalization
and the shrinking regulatory role of the state. That is to say, new transnational economic
processes do not necessarily occur within the global/national spatial duality that many
analysts of the global economy presuppose. That duality suggests two mutually exclusive
spaces, one beginning where the other ends. National states play a role in the implemen-
tation of global economic systems, and this role can assume different forms, depending
on the level of development, political culture, and mode of articulation with global
processes. By reintroducing the state into our analysis of globalization, we open the way
toward examining how this transformed state articulates the gender question. One way in
which states have been reconfigured is through the political ascendance of ministries of
finance and the decline of departments dealing with social concerns, including housing,
health, and welfare.

4 I have developed this at length in Globalization and Its Discontents.
5 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sarah Mahler, American Dreaming:
Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).

6 Frank Munger, ed., Laboring Under the Line (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002);
Laurance Roulleau-Berger, ed., Youth and Work in the Postindustrial City of North
America and Europe (Leiden and New York: Brill, 2002); Hector R. Cordero-Guzman,
Robert C. Smith, and Ramon Grosfoguel, eds., Migration, Transnationalization, and Race
in a Changing New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); see generally for
data and sources, Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2001), chapters 8 and 9.

7 For evidence and multiple sources, see Sassen, 2001, chapters 8 and 9.
8 I have argued this for the case of international labor migrations (e.g., Saskia Sassen, Guests

and Aliens [New York: The New Press, 1999]). See also Max Castro, ed., Free Markets,
Open Societies, Closed Borders? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and
Frank Bonilla, Edwin Melendez, Rebecca Morales, and Maria de los Angeles Torres, eds.,
Borderless Borders (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

9 Once there is an institutional infrastructure for globalization, processes that have previ-
ously operated at the national level can scale up to the global level, even when they do
not need to. This phenomenon contrasts with processes that are by their very nature
global, such as the network of financial centers underlying the formation of a global
capital market.

Global Cities and Survival Circuits 389

10 In many of these countries, a large number of firms in traditional sectors oriented to the
local or national market have closed, and export-oriented cash crops have increasingly
often replaced survival agriculture and food production for local or national markets.

11 See Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty (London: Zed/TWN, 1997);
Guy Standing, “Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited,”
World Development, vol. 27, no. 3 (1999), pp. 583–602; Aminur Rahman, “Micro-credit
Initiatives for Equitable and Sustainable Development: Who Pays?” World Development,
vol. 27, no. 1 (1999), pp. 67–82; Diane Elson, Male Bias in Development, 2nd ed. (Man-
chester, 1995). For an excellent overview of the literature on the impact of the debt on
women, see Kathryn Ward, “Women and the Debt,” paper presented at the Colloquium
on Globalization and the Debt, Emory University, Atlanta (1999). On file with author.

12 On these various issues, see Diana Alarcon-Gonzalez and Terry McKinley, “The Adverse
Effects of Structural Adjustment on Working Women in Mexico,” Latin American Per-
spectives, vol. 26, no. 3 (1999), 103–17; Claudia Buchmann, “The Debt Crisis, Structural
Adjustment and Women’s Education,” International Journal of Comparative Studies, vol.
37, nos. 1–2 (1996), pp. 5–30; Helen I. Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women
and Industrialization in the Caribbean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Nilufer
Cagatay and Sule Ozler, “Feminization of the Labor Force: The Effects of Long-term
Development and Structural Adjustment,” World Development, vol. 23, no. 11 (1995),
pp. 1883–94; Erika Jones, “The Gendered Toll of Global Debt Crisis,” Sojourner, vol. 25,
no. 3, pp. 20–38; and several of the references cited in the preceding footnotes.

13 Eric Toussaint, “Poor Countries Pay More Under Debt Reduction Scheme?” (July 1999),
www.twnside.org.sg/title/1921-cn.htm. According to Susan George, the south has paid
back the equivalent of six Marshall Plans to the north (Asoka Bandarage, Women,
Population, and Crisis [London: Zed, 1997]).

14 The IMF asks HIPCs to pay 20 to 25 percent of their export earnings toward debt ser-
vice. In contrast, in 1953 the Allies canceled 80 percent of Germany’s war debt and only
insisted on 3 to 5 percent of export-earnings debt service. These general terms were also
evident as Central Europe emerged from communism. For one of the best critical exam-
inations of globalization, see Richard C. Longworth, Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis
for First World Nations (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1998).

15 See Janie Chuang, “Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Par-
adigms, and Contexts,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 10 (winter 1998). Traffick-
ing has become sufficiently recognized as an issue that it was addressed in the G8 meet-
ing in Birmingham in May 1998, a first for the G8 (Trafficking in Migrants, International
Office of Migration quarterly bulletin, Geneva: IOM, 1998). The heads of the eight
major industrialized countries stressed the importance of cooperating against interna-
tional organized crime and people trafficking. President Clinton issued a set of direc-
tives to his administration in order to strengthen efforts against trafficking in women
and girls. This in turn generated a legislative initiative by Senator Paul Wellstone, which
led to a Senate bill in 1999. (For a good critical analysis, see Dayan, “Policy Initiatives in
the U.S. against the Illegal Trafficking of Women for the Sex Industry,” Department of
Sociology, University of Chicago, 1999, on file with the author).

16 The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has centers and representatives in Australia, Ban-
gladesh, Europe, Latin America, North America, Africa, and Asia Pacific. The Women’s Rights
Advocacy Program has established the Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons to combat the
global trade in persons. Other organizations are referred to throughout this article.

www.twnside.org.sg/title/1921-cn.htm

390 Saskia Sassen

17 See, generally, the Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV) and the Global
Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). For regularly updated sources of
information on trafficking, see http://www.hrlawgroup.org/site/programs/traffic.html.
See also Sietske Altink, Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery (New York:
Harrington Park Press, 1995); Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, Global Sex Workers:
Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (London: Routledge, 1998); Susan Shannon, “The
Global Sex Trade: Humans as the Ultimate Commodity,” Crime and Justice International
(May 1999), pp. 5–25; Lap-Chew Lin and Wijers Marjan, Trafficking in Women, Forced
Labour and Slavery-like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour and Prostitution
(Utrecht: Foundation Against Trafficking in Women [STV], and Bangkok: Global Alli-
ance Against Traffic in Women [GAATW], 1997); Lin Lim, The Sex Sector: The Economic
and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Geneva: International Labor Office,
1998).

18 For more detailed information, see the STV-GAATW reports; IOM 1996; CIA,
“International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifesta-
tion of Salvery and Organized Crime,” prepared by Amy O’Neill Richard (Washington,
D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2000).

19 There is also a growing trade in children for the sex industry. This has long been the case
in Thailand, but it is now present in several other Asian countries, eastern Europe, and
Latin America.

20 There are various reports on trafficking routes. Malay brokers sell Malay women into
prostitution in Australia. Women from Albania and Kosovo have been trafficked by
gangs into prostitution in London. Teens from Paris and other European cities have
been sold to Arab and African customers; see Susan Shannon, “The Global Sex Trade:
Humans as the Ultimate Commodity,” Crime and Justice International (May 1999),
pp. 5–25.

21 See Global Survival Network, “Crime and Servitude: An Expose of the Traffic in Women
for Prostitution from the Newly Independent States.”

22 Nancy A. Wonders and Raymond Michalowski, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism in a
Globalized World: A Tale of Two Cities – Amsterdam and Havana,” Social Problems, vol.
48, no. 4 (2001), pp. 545–71. See also Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, The Tourist City
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

23 Brenda Yeoh, Shirlena Huang, and Joaquin Gonzalez III, “Migrant Female Domestic
Workers: Debating the Economic, Social and Political Impacts in Singapore,”
International Migration Review, vol. 33, no. 1 (1999), pp. 114–136; Christine Chin,
“Walls of Silence and Late 20th-Century Representations of Foreign Female Domestic
Workers: The Case of Filipina and Indonesian Houseservants in Malaysia,” International
Migration Review, vol. 31, no. 1 (1997), pp. 353–85; Noeleen Heyzer, The Trade in
Domestic Workers (London: Zed Books, 1994).

24 Natacha David, “Migrants Made the Scapegoats of the Crisis,” ICFTU Online
(International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, 1999). www.hartford-hwp.com/
archives/50/012.html

http://www.hrlawgroup.org/site/programs/traffic.html

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/50/012.html

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/50/012.html

The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Globalization and Development: Recurring Themes

Why Are the Poor Countries Poor? Diverging Opinions
Social Turmoil and the Classical Thinkers
Becoming Modern
Dependency Theory and World-Systems Analysis
From Development to Globalization
Notes

• Part I Formative Approaches to Development and Social Change

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 1 Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Alienated Labour (1844)
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Alienated Labour
Chapter 2 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Chapter 3 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
The Five Stages-of-Growth – A Summary
Notes
Chapter 4 Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (1962)
The Elements of Backwardness
The Banks
The State
The Gradations of Backwardness
Ideologies of Delayed Industrializations
Conclusions
Note
Chapter 5 A Study of Slum Culture: Backgrounds for La Vida (1968)
The Culture of Poverty
Notes
Chapter 6 Political Participation: Modernization and Political Decay (1968)
Modernization and Political Consciousness
Modernization and Violence
Notes

• Part II Dependency and Beyond

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 7 The Development of Underdevelopment (1969)
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Notes
Chapter 8 Dependency and Development in Latin America (1972)
Lenin’s Characterization of Imperialism
Imperialism and Dependent Economies
New Patterns of Capital Accumulation
New Forms of Economic Dependency
Some Political Consequences
Notes
Chapter 9 The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis (1979)
notes
Chapter 10 Taiwan’s Economic History: A Case of Etatisme and a Challenge to Dependency Theory (1979)
Introduction
The Colonial Period: 1895–1945
Land to the Tiller
Agriculture 1953–1968
Industrialization
The Taiwan Case and Dependency Theory
A Special Case
A Crisis of Labor
Notes
References
Chapter 11 Rethinking Development Theory: Insights from East Asia and Latin America (1989)
Introduction
Theoretical Perspectives on East Asian and Latin American Development: Perceptions and Misconceptions
The NICs in Historical and World-Systems Context
The Dynamic Interplay of Inward- and Outward-Oriented Industrialization
Dependent Development in Latin America and East Asia
The Emergent Global Manufacturing System: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis
Editors’ Note
References
Chapter 12 Interrogating Development: Feminism, Gender and Policy (1998)
Feminist Analysis versus Women and Development
Commonalities and Difference
Gender Interests and Emancipatory Projects
Domestic Groups: Cooperation, Conflict and Struggle
Feminisms and Green Fundamentalism
Gendered Economies: Relations of Production and Reproduction
Feminism as Deconstruction
Note
References
Chapter 13 Why Is Buying a “Madras” Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis (2004)
A Critique of Realist Commodity Chains and the Feminist Alternative
Distant Lands, Moral Ends
Producing Cotton: Changing Wage and Labor Relations in South India
Producing Femininities and Masculinities
Conclusion
Notes

• Part III What Is Globalization?

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 14 The New International Division of Labour in the World Economy (1980)
The Phenomenon
Main Tendencies in the Contemporary World Economy
Notes
Chapter 15 In Defense of Global Capitalism (2003)
Introduction
Poverty Reduction
Hunger
Democratization
Oppression of Women
Global Inequality
Reservations
Notes
Chapter 16 It’s a Flat World, After All (2005)
Chapter 17 The Financialization of the American Economy (2005)
Introduction
Two Views of Economic Change
Evidence for Financialization
Financialization and the Reorganization of Corporate Activity
Financialization and the Globalization of Production
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 18 The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of Globalization (2000)
Introduction
The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)
The Disclosure of Capitalist Globalization: Competitiveness
The Corporate Capture of Sustainable Development
Notes
Chapter 19 The Washington Consensus as Transnational Policy Paradigm: Its Origins, Trajectory and Likely Successor (2012)
The Washington Consensus as a Transnational Policy Paradigm
The Rise of the Washington Consensus
The Influence of the Washington Consensus
Notes
References
Chapter 20 The Crises of Capitalism (2010)

• Part IV Development after Globalization

Introduction
Note
Chapter 21 Global Crisis, African Oppression (2001)
The African Crisis Continues
Notes
Chapter 22 Agrofuels in the Food Regime (2010)
Introduction
Food Regimes and Development
The Twenty-First Century Agrarian Question
Corporate Food Regime Developments
Food Regime Ecology
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 23 Global Cities and Survival Circuits (2002)
Global Cities and Survival Circuits
Toward an Alternative Narrative about Globalization
Women in the Global City
New Employment Regimes in Cities
The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy
Producing a Global Supply of the New Caretakers: The Feminization of Survival
Government Debt: Shifting Resources from Women to Foreign Banks
Alternative Survival Circuits
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 24 What Makes a Miracle:: Some Myths about the Rise of China and India (2008)
Chapter 25 Foreign Aid (2006)
Introduction
Donors and recipients
Aid, Growth and Development
Donor Relationships with Recipient Countries
Summary and conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 26 The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2011)
The Political Trilemma of the World Economy
Designing Capitalism 3.0
Notes

• Part V Global Themes Searching for New Paradigms

Introduction
Chapter 27 A New World Order (2004)
Regulators: The New Diplomats
Notes
References
Chapter 28 Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998)
What Is a Transnational Advocacy Network?
Why and How Have Transnational Advocacy Networks Emerged?
The Boomerang Pattern
The Growth of International Contact
How Do Transnational Advocacy Networks Work?
Under What Conditions Do Advocacy Networks Have Influence?
Issue Characteristics
Actor Characteristics
Toward a Global Civil Society?
Notes
Chapter 29 Multipolarity and the New World [Dis]Order: US Hegemonic Decline and the Fragmentation of the Global Climate Regime (2011)
Introduction
Copenhagen and Climate Justice
Multipolarity and the New World (Dis)Order
US Hegemonic Decline: Applying the Lens of Arrighi and Silver
Discussion and Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 30 Changing Global Norms through Reactive Diffusion: The Case of Intellectual Property Protection of AIDS Drugs (2012)
Making and Remaking of Global Norms: Current Views
Reactive Diffusion and Accumulated Experiences
From TRIPS to Doha and Beyond
Discussion
Notes
References
Chapter 31 Development as Freedom (1999)
Introduction: Development as Freedom
The Perspective of Freedom
The Ends and the Means of Development
Poverty as Capability Deprivation
Markets, State and Social Opportunity
Notes
Chapter 32 From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labor Studies (2010)
False Optimism
Grounding Globalization
Reconstructing Polanyi
Notes
Chapter 33 The Developmental State: Divergent Responses to Modern Economic Theory and the Twenty-First-Century Economy (2014)
The Recent Evolution of Development Theory
The Twentieth-Century Developmental State
A Historical Shift in the Character of Development
The Programmatic Implications of New Theory and New Circumstances
Does the Twenty-First Century Spell the Transformation or the Demise of the Developmental State?
Notes
References

• Index
• End User License Agreement

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10

.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640
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1

GlobalizingAfrica?

OBSERVATIONS FROM AN

INCONVENIENT CONTINENT

The enormous recent literatureonglobalization so far has had re-

markably little tosayaboutAfrica.Astonishingly, theentireconti-

nent isoftensimplyignoredaltogether,eveninthemostambitious

andostensiblyall-encompassingnarratives.Popularbestsellersthat

seek toexplain thenew‘‘global’’world—whether incelebrationor

critique—havemuch to sayabout thenewly industrializing coun-

tries of Asia, the manufacturing boom in China, the European

Union, the causes of MiddleEastern ‘‘terrorism,’’ jobs gained and

lost in theUnited States, theNorthAmerican Free TradeAgree-

ment (nafta) and its effects in Mexico, and the spread of Dis-

neyland and McDonald’s to France. But they manage to charac-

terize ‘‘the globe’’ and ‘‘the entireworld’’ inways that say almost

nothing at all about a continent of some 800 million people that

takesupfully20percentoftheplanet’s landmass.Academicblock-

bustershavenotbeenverydifferent in this respect. SaskiaSassen’s

Globalization and Its Discontents(1999), for instance,hasnothingto
say aboutAfrica, except to note thatAfricanmigrants sometimes

showupin ‘‘globalcities’’ likeLondonandNewYork. JosephStig-

litz’s influential book, also titled Globalization and Its Discontents
(2003), deals almost entirely with the operations of the Interna-

tionalMonetaryFund(imf) andWorldBank inAsia andEastern

Europe, with only a few pages devoted to the African countries

that have arguably suffered themost from the lethal imf dogma-

tismhe isconcernedaboutdocumenting.1 Fromtheself-described

radical left,meanwhile,MichaelHardtandAntonionNegri’s cele-

brated tome Empire (2001), despite itsnearly 500pagesof text and
abundant concern forwhat theauthors term ‘‘themultitude,’’ can-

not muster even a paragraph’s worth of analysis concerning the

continent. Again and again, it seems, when it comes to global-

ization, Africa just doesn’t fit the story line. It is an inconvenient

case.

This neglect is perhapsunderstandable at the level of real-world

politics. Defenders of neoliberal structural-adjustment programs

naturally findAfrica an inconvenient example; they prefer to talk

aboutAsian tigers andSoutheastAsiandragons, since theyhave a

hard time finding any lions among themanyAfrican nations that

have taken the imf medicine and liberalized their economies in

recent years. ButAfrican examples are equally awkward for those

termed‘‘anti-globalization’’ critics,whooftenequateglobalization

with an expanding capitalism in search of new cheap labor for its

factories andnewmarkets for its consumergoods (stereotypically,

Nike sweatshops and McDonald’s hamburgers). Here, of course,

the inconvenient fact is thatAfrica’shardshipshavevery little todo

withbeingoverrunwithWestern factoriesandconsumergoods. It

is hard to find evidence of the depredations of runaway capitalist

expansion in countries that are begging in vain for foreign invest-

mentofanykindandunable toprovideasignificantmarket for the

consumer goods stereotypically associatedwithglobalization.

But if Africa is an awkward case for globalization’s polemical

boosters and detractors, it seems equally inconvenient for more

analytical theorists of globalization,whoaspire toplanetary ‘‘cov-

erage’’ but somehow do not quite know what to do with Africa

(cf.Paolini1997).Here,AnthonyGiddens’sapproachistypical.He

begins his short bookof lectures onglobalization (Giddens 2002)

with an anecdote that claims a planetwide scope for the analysis

to follow.A friend,he explains,was conductingfieldwork in avil-

lagewhose locationhedescribesonlyasa ‘‘remotearea’’of ‘‘central

Africa.’’Shewas invitedtoahomeforaneveningofentertainment,

but insteadofthetraditionalpastimessheexpected,shediscovered

26 GlobalizingAfrica?

that the familywas towatch a video of a newHollywoodmovie

that at that point ‘‘hadn’t even reached the cinemas in London’’

(Giddens 2002: 24). The point, clearly, is that even the ends of

the earth—that is, the remotest villages of (what is identifiedonly

as) ‘‘central Africa’’—are today swept up within a globalized so-

cial order.Yet the rest ofGiddens’s book does notmake somuch

as a passing reference to Africa. Instead, the narrative repeatedly

describes theworld in termsof a traditional ‘‘before’’ andaglobal-

ized ‘‘after’’ that leavesnoplace formostcontemporaryAfricanso-

cial realities except in the putative past.The collaborative volume

onglobalizationbyDavidHeld,AnthonyMcGrew,DavidGold-

blatt,andJonathanPerraton(1999)isamorescholarlyaccount,but

it builds on a similar slippage. The volume’s introduction claims

to explicate a globalization explicitly defined bywhat the authors

term ‘‘worldwide interconnectedness’’ (Held et al. 1999: 2; empha-
sismine), but this is followed by substantive chapters that are ex-

plicitly restricted to what they call ‘‘states in advanced capitalist

societies’’ (and it soonbecomes clear thatAfrican societies arenot

‘‘advanced’’enoughtoqualify). Interconnectednessamongsixrich

countries is documentedmost effectively, but the reader is left to

wonderwhat, exactly, is ‘‘worldwide’’ about it.

Africa’s inconvenience isnot surprising ifweconsider thatmost

of thedominant theoriesofglobalizationhavebeentheoriesabout

worldwide convergence of one sort or another. From the earli-
est European projects of colonization to the latest structural-

adjustment programs, Africa has proved remarkably resistant to

a range of externally imposed projects that have aimed to bring

it into conformity with Western or ‘‘global’’ models. It is strik-

ing thatAfrica today is the onlyworld regionwhere onewill find

hugepopulated swathsof theearth that areunder theeffective au-

thorityof no central, nation-state government (includingmost of

the Democratic Republic of the Congo [drc] at present, huge

areasof southernSudan,andnearlyallofSomalia). It isworthem-

phasizing that these are not odd little patches but truly vast areas.

As I like to remind undergraduate students, if you put the map

of Europe inside the drc, with London at thewest coast, Mos-

cow would liewithin the eastern border; in southern Sudan, the

GlobalizingAfrica? 27

area that was until recently out of the reach of even major relief

agencies spannedanareabigger thanFrance.Nor is thisaquestion

of brief or transitorypolitical circumstances.Theweakgripof the

central state in countries like theCongoandAngolagoesback for

manydecades,whilemuchof southernSudanhas beenout of the

controlof itsnationalgovernmentalmostcontinuouslysinceitbe-

cameindependent in1956.Evenwherenation-statesdoenjoysome
measure of effective control of their hinterlands, formal similari-

ties inpolitical institutionsbetraystarkdifferences inactualmodes

of functioning, as recent work on African states (discussed later)

shows.Meanwhile, theproperty laws thatare sometimes taken for

granted as the bedrock of capitalism in itsmost familiar form are

only very precariously institutionalized in many African settings

(asmightbeattestedbya foreign investor inNigeriaoracommer-

cial farmer inZimbabwe). Finally, aswe know, in perhaps a score

ofAfrican countries, a host of standarddevelopment indicators—

fromgdp per capita to access to health care and schooling to life

expectancy—have in recent years been falling, not rising. This is

true not only of countries wracked by war but also of many that

haveseennothingbutpeace.InZambia, for instance—thecountry

Ihave studiedmost—poverty rates are today reckonedat some73

percent.Diseases likemalaria,cholera,andmeaslesareresurgentas

public-health countermeasures have collapsed. School attendance

has dropped below 50 percent in some areas, and the population

is said to be less educated than at any time since independence in

1964. Estimated life expectancy at birth, meanwhile, has fallen—

mostly, but not entirely, due toaids—fromaround 50 in 1980 to

just 32.4 years, the lowest in theworld.2

All of this poses a profound challenge for global convergence

narratives. It does not necessarilymean that such accounts are in

any simpleway ‘‘wrong.’’ Indeed, inmanydomains, convergence

arguments areoften stronger thananthropologists (perhapswish-

fully) allow.But the recenthistoryofAfricadoespose aprofound

challenge to ideas of global economic and political convergence.

If theworld’s societies are truly converging on a single, ‘‘global’’

model, how is it possible to account forAfrica’s different, difficult

trajectory? Is it simplya ‘‘development failure,’’ tobeplaced at the

28 GlobalizingAfrica?

door of morally culpable elites? A ‘‘lag’’ that we need only wait

to seeovercome?Ahorrible accident,predicatedoncontingencies

such as the aids pandemic?What is themeaning—theoretically—
ofwhat presents itself as a vast continental anomaly?

WhererecentglobalizationtheoristshaveaddressedAfrica, ithas

typicallybeenasanegativecase:anexampleof thepriceof the fail-

ure toglobalize, as the imfwouldhave it; a ‘‘global ghetto’’ aban-

doned by capitalism, as the geographerNeil Smith (1997)would

insist;acontinentof ‘‘wastedlives’’ofnousetothecapitalistworld

economy, as ZygmuntBauman (2004) has recently suggested; or

‘‘the black hole of the information society,’’ as Manuel Castells

(2000) would have it. Such negative characterizations risk ignor-

ing the social, political, and institutional specificity of Africa and

reinventingAfrica as a twenty-first-century ‘‘dark continent.’’ For

contemporary Africa is clearly not a featureless void defined only
by its exclusion from the benefits of global capitalism, nor is it an

informational ‘‘blackhole.’’

Instead,Isuggest thatareadingofrecent interdisciplinaryschol-

arshiponAfrica canhelp to reveal thequite specificways inwhich

Africa is, and is not, ‘‘global’’ and thereby shed surprising new

light on our understanding of what ‘‘globalization’’ may mean at

present.What we see (as anthropologists have long insisted) de-

pends onwherewe are looking from.Looking at ‘‘globalization’’

from the vantage point provided by recent research focused on

Africa brings into visibility things that might otherwise be over-

lookedandforcesus tothinkharderabout issues thatmightother-

wise bepassedoveror left unresolved.

Inahighly schematicway, then, this essay reviews insights from

recent Africanist scholarship concerning three elements usually

identified as central aspects of ‘‘globalization’’: first, the question

of culture (and the related question of alternative modernities);

second, ‘‘flows’’ of private capital (especially foreigndirect invest-

ment); andthird, transformations ingovernanceandthechanging

role of the nation-state. It argues that attention to the undoubt-

edly extreme situation in some parts of Africa can help to clarify

what is, and isnot, ‘‘global’’ about thecontemporary transnational

political economy.

GlobalizingAfrica? 29

CULTURE

Anthropologists first confrontednotionsof cultural globalization

in relation to thequestion (or, for anthropologists, the specter) of

cultural homogenization.Whatwas the fate of cultural difference

in aworldwhere fewer and fewer people lived in conditions that

could be understood as those of pristine isolation; aworldwhere

ever increasing proportions of people lived in cities, drove cars,

andwatchedtelevision;aworldwheresuchemblemsofanexpand-

ing U.S. culture as the English language, pop music, blue jeans,

and McDonald’s seemed to be expanding across the globe? Was

the cultural future of theworld a sort of Westernized or Ameri-

canized global monoculture—the ‘‘Coca-Cola-ization’’ of the en-

tireplanet?And if so,whatwas the fateof thedisciplineof anthro-

pology itself in such auniformculturalworld?

Fortunately—at least for the field of anthropology—it soon

emerged that culturalglobalizationwasnota simplematterof ho-

mogenization. As anthropologists like Ulf Hannerz (1987, 1992,

1996)begantoremindus,transnationalexchangesofculturalprod-

ucts, forms, and ideas were hardly a new phenomenon, and ex-

perience showed that such traffic in meaning was not incompat-

iblewithenduringformsofculturaldifference.Culturaldifferences

were produced, thrived, and took on their significancewithin so-

cial relations of interconnection, not in primordial isolation. For

people in Calcutta to drink Coca-Cola would no more spell the

end of Indian culture than the colonial adoption of the Indian

drink tea by Londoners abolished Englishness. And onewas en-

titled towonder, as Clifford Geertz (1994) pointed out, whether

thegreatcuisinesofAsiawerereally inmortaldangerof beingout-

competed by the likes of Kentucky FriedChicken. In fact, a host

of local studies began to show that transnational traffic in mean-

ing lednot to aglobalmonoculture, but to complex formsof cul-

tural creativity—what Hannerz called ‘‘creolization’’—whose re-

sult was not a numbing uniformity but a dynamic ‘‘cut-and-mix’’

world of surprisingborrowings, ironic reinventions, anddazzling

resignifications.

The idea that logically emerged fromthiswas that societies and

cultureswere not to be understood as located along a continuum

30 GlobalizingAfrica?

between a ‘‘premodern’’ tradition, on the one hand, and a Euro-

centrically conceivedmodernityon the other. Instead,ArjunAp-

padurai and others suggested that it was necessary to rethink our

understandings of modernity to take account of the many differ-

ent sorts of modern cultural trajectories that anthropologistswere
documenting. If non-Western cultures were not necessarily non-

modern ones, then it would be necessary to develop a more plu-

ralizedunderstandingofmodernity:notmodernity inthesingular

(where thequestion is,Areyou thereyetornot?)butmodernities

in the plural, a variety of different ways of being modern: ‘‘alter-
nativemodernities’’ (seeAppadurai 1996; Daedalus 2000;Gaonkar
2001;Holston 1999).

This is undoubtedly a very appealing idea, but it immediately

raises anumberofproblems,which critics havenot failed topoint

out.Oneproblemisthemeaningoftheterm‘‘modernity.’’Oncewe

giveupthebenchmarkofasingularmodernity, thenwhatdoesthe

termmean,analytically?IfCameroonianspracticingwitchcraftare

in factbeing ‘‘modern,’’ asPeterGeschiere (1997)has recently sug-

gested, thenonewonders:Whatwouldcountasnon-modern?Or

is everyaspectof thecontemporaryworldbydefinitionmodern—

inwhich case, the term risks losing allmeaning by encompassing

everything.Anothersetofcriticismshaspointedoutthatthefocus

on cultural flows and their creative reinterpretation can lead to an

insufficient appreciationof the force of global norms andof insti-

tutional and organizational domainswhere one does indeed find,

if not homogenization, at least a high degree of standardization.

Sociologistsof education, for instance,have shownsuchstandard-

izationinat least theformalaspectsofschooling(see,e.g.,Boliand

Ramirez1986;Meyeretal. 1992).HereIwanttopoint toaslightly

different problemwith the idea,which derives from theway that

regions matter for themodernitydiscussion.
InEast andSoutheastAsia, the ideaofmultipleor ‘‘alternative’’

tracks throughmodernityhas for someyearshadconsiderablecur-

rency, even outside of academic discussions.There, the pluraliza-

tion of modernity has been linked to the possibility of a parallel

trackalongwhichAsiannationsmightdevelopinawaythatwould

be economically analogous to theWest but culturally distinctive.

SuchnewlyindustrializingAsiancountriesasMalaysia,Singapore,

GlobalizingAfrica? 31

andTaiwan, inthisview,canachieve ‘‘FirstWorld’’economies,and

the superhighways, skyscrapers, and consumer conveniences that

comewith them,without therebybecoming ‘‘Westernized.’’ They

can thus retainwhat are sometimes thought of as cultural or even

racial virtues that theWest lacks,while making their own, ‘‘alter-

native’’way throughmodernity and enjoying a standard of living

equal toor better than that of ‘‘theWest’’ (Ong 1999: 55–83).

In Africa, however, such an economic convergencewith ‘‘First

World’’ living standards hardly seems to be in the offing. For this

reason, a recent tendency for scholars of Africa to adopt the lan-

guage of ‘‘modernities’’ in the plural has very different implica-

tions andproceeds fromdifferentmotives.3 In the face of decades

of scholarship that insisted on seeingAfrican societies as in some

sense located in the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ past, contempo-

raryAfricanistsareunderstandablydrawntoawayofthinkingthat

insists on placingAfrican societies in the same (‘‘coeval’’) time as

theWest (Fabian 1983) andonunderstandingAfricanways of life

not as anahistorical ‘‘tradition,’’ but aspart andparcelof themod-

ernworld. It is this that leadsGeschiere to insist on ‘‘themoder-

nity ofwitchcraft’’: the desire to show thatwhat is called ‘‘witch-

craft’’ is not simply a holdover from the past but, rather, a set of
contemporary practices that respond to such ‘‘modern’’ contem-

porary forces as the cash economy, class formation, and the state.

Mamadou Diouf (2000) makes a related, and similarly convinc-

ing, argument for the ‘‘modernity’’ of the transnational networks

of SenegaleseMourid traders.

Yet in Africa, modernity has always been a matter not simply

of past and present, but also of up and down. The aspiration to

modernityhasbeen an aspiration to rise in theworld in economic

and political terms; to improve one’s way of life, one’s standing,

one’s place-in-the-world.Modernity has thus been away of talk-

ingaboutglobal inequalityandaboutmaterialneedsandhowthey

might be met. In particular, it has indexed specific aspirations to

such primary ‘‘modern’’ goods as improved housing, health care,

andeducation.Yetnow,anthropologists,havingdeclaredmodern-

ization theorydefunct and development discourse passé, proudly

announce that Africa, notwithstanding all its problems, is in fact

32 GlobalizingAfrica?

just as modern as anyplace else. It just has its own, ‘‘alternative’’

versionofmodernity.

As I point out in chapter 7, Africans are often puzzled by such

claims. Africa’s lack of modernity seems, to many people there,
all too palpable in the conditions that surround them—in the

bad roads, poor health care, crumbling buildings, and precari-

ously improvised livelihoods that one cannot avoid encountering

in the continent’s ‘‘less developed’’ countries.Where anthropolo-

gists proclaim Africa always already modern, local discourses on

modernitymoreoften insistonseeingacontinuing lack (seechap-

ter5andchapter7)—alackthat isunderstoodintermsnotofacul-

tural inferioritybutofapolitical-economicinequality.Forthisrea-

son, thequestionofmodernity iswidelyapprehended inAfrica in

relationtotheconceptof ‘‘development’’andtheissueofsocialand

economicstandardsof living.Forall theirmanifoldfailings,thede-

velopmental narratives that have long dominated thinking about

Africa’s place-in-the-world—narratives that explicitly rank coun-

tries fromhigh to low, frommore to less ‘‘developed’’—doat least

acknowledge (andpromise to remedy) the grievances of political-

economic inequality and low global status in relation to other

places.Theanthropologist’s evenhandedassessmentof ‘‘moderni-

ties,’’ however, by pluralizing without ranking the different rela-

tions to ‘‘modernity’’ of different world regions, runs the risk of

deemphasizingoroverlooking the socioeconomic inequalities and

questionsofglobal rank that loomso large inAfricanunderstand-

ings of the modern. In this way, a well-meaning anthropological

urgetotreatmodernityasacultural formationwhosedifferentver-

sions may be understood as both coeval and of equal value ends

up looking like an evasion of the demands of those who instead

see modernity as a privileged and desired socioeconomic condi-

tionthatisactivelycontrastedwiththeirownradicallyunequalway

of life.

The point I want to make here (one that is elaborated more

fully in chapter 7) is not that anthropologists have been wrong

to historicize cultural practices or to call into question the as-

sumed linearities of Eurocentric progress narratives. It is, rather,

that there is an unappreciated danger—which becomes especially

GlobalizingAfrica? 33

visible in the African context—that a culturalized and relativized

notion of modernity tends to allow the material and social in-

equalities thathave longbeenat theheartofAfricanaspirations to

modernity to drop out of the picture. In their eagerness to treat

African people as (cultural) equals,Western anthropologists have

sometimes too easily sidestepped the harder discussion about the

economic inequalities and disillusionments that threaten to make
any such equality amerely ideal or sentimental one.

Letusturntotheeconomicdomainandconsiderthequestionof

thecontinent’s relationtowhat isoftencalled ‘‘global capital.’’ It is

strikinghoweasyit is forAfricatofigureinaccountsofaglobalized

culturalworld, incontrast toitsnearabsencefrommostpicturesof

a global economy.No surveyofworldmusic, for instance,would

be conceivable without a major section on Africa, yet it is com-

mon for surveys of the global economy to contain only themost

cursory reference toSub-SaharanAfrica.Yetoneof thekeyclaims

ofdominant accountsof globalization is that deregulatedmarkets

andfootloosecapitaltodayroamtheentireglobe.HowdoesAfrica

figure in this?Consider thequestionof private capital flows.

CAPITAL FLOWS

Itwasoneof theorthodoxies of post–WorldWar II development

theorythat thepoorestcountrieswouldnaturallyserveasmagnets

forcapital,andthat investmentinthosecountrieswouldyieldsuch

highratesofeconomicgrowththattheywouldsoonconvergeeco-

nomicallywith the rich industrial countries. Both assumptions, it

is nowwidely agreed, proved to bewrong.The poorest countries

todayattractverylittleprivatecapitalofanykind.Accordingtothe

formerWorldBankeconomistWilliamEasterly, thecountries that

make up the richest 20 percent of theworld population received

88percentof private gross capital inflows in 1990; those countries

makingupthepoorest20percentreceived1percent(Easterly2001:

58–59).4 The increase in transnational capital flows, of which we

have heardmuch in recent years, has been ‘‘mostly a rich–rich af-

fair,’’ as theeconomistsMauriceObstfeldandAlanTaylorhaveput

it, amatter less of ‘‘development’’ than of diversification. Indeed,

34 GlobalizingAfrica?

theygoontoobservethat ‘‘today’s foreigninvestment inthepoor-

est developing countries lags far behind the levels attained at the

start of the last century’’ (Obstfeld andTaylor 2002: 59).

As for economic growth, recent studies show no tendency for

the poorest countries to converge toward the rich ones. On the

contrary, the data appear to show a strong tendency for the gap

towiden, as rich countries have grown rapidlywhilemost of the

poorest have, in terms of economic growth, stood still or even

lost ground. It is not a story about economic convergence, then,

but—as the economistLantPritchett put it in the title of an influ-

ential paper—‘‘Divergence, Big Time’’ (Pritchett 1997). In recent

years,manyofthepoorestAfricancountrieshaveput inplace imf-

sponsored reforms (chiefly,openingmarkets andprivatizing state

assets)thatwereintendedtoproduceafloodofcapital investment.

But theresult formosthasnotbeenaboominforeign investment.

More often, it has been a collapse of basic institutions (including

major industries aswell as social infrastructure suchas schools and

health care) and an explosionof official illegality.

Whencapital has cometoAfrica inrecentyears, ithasbeenover-
whelminglyintheareaofmineral-resourceextraction.Inthemidst

of what generally have been very hard times onmost of the con-

tinent, mining and oil extraction have boomed in several coun-

tries.Again, this is amatter that isdiscussedat somelength later in

this volume (see chapter 8).What needs to be highlighted for the

present is only the extent towhich this economic investment has

been concentrated in secured enclaves, oftenwith little impact on

thewider society.The clearest case (andnodoubt themost attrac-

tivefortheforeigninvestor) isprovidedbyoff-shoreoilextraction,

as inAngola,whereneither theoilnormostof themoney itbrings

in ever touchesAngolan soil.But evennon-petroleummineral ex-

traction today very often takes place in capital-intensive enclaves

that are substantially insulated fromthe local economy,oreven in

guarded fiefdoms protected by private armies and security forces

(see chapter 8).

In an earlier period, mining investment often brought with it

a far-reaching social investment. In the ZambianCopperbelt, for

instance, investment in copper mining brought the construction

of vast ‘‘company towns’’ fornearly 100,000workers.These towns

GlobalizingAfrica? 35

eventually came to include not only company-provided housing,

schools,andhospitals,butevensocialworkers,recreationalameni-

ties,anddomestic-educationprograms(Ferguson1999).Here, the

businessofmininginvolvednotonlyextraction,butalsoabroader

long-term social project. Its presencewas, we might say, socially

‘‘thick.’’ Butnowadays,mining (and evenmore so,oil production)
is socially thin; it has becomemuchmore capital intensive and re-
lies onmuch smaller groups of highly skilledworkers (sometimes

foreignworkers on short-term contracts). It depends ever less on

wider societal investments.Today, enclaves of mineral-extracting

investment in Africa are usually tightly integrated with the head

officesofmultinational corporationsandmetropolitancentersbut

sharplywalledoff fromtheirownnational societies (often literally

walledoffwithbricks, razorwire, and security guards).

Consider the case of gold mining in Ghana. The privatization

of the gold mines in that country, combined with generous tax

incentives, has done just what it was supposed to do: bring in

large amounts of private investment.Thanks to such investment,

Ghana’s gold industry has undergone a massive transformation

since themid-1980s. Foreign direct investment (fdi) of about $5

billion has flowed in, probably exceeding the value of fdi in all

other sectors combined,while production has risen from 300,000

ounces in 1985 to 2,336,000 ounces in 2001 (WorldBank 2003: 2).

Goldhasnowreplaced cocoa asGhana’smain export.Yet a recent

World Bank report voices doubt about what the ‘‘true net bene-

fits’’ of this ‘‘development’’ might be. As the report points out,

capital-intensiveminingbyforeignfirmshasahighimportcontent

and produces ‘‘only modest amounts of net foreign exchange for

Ghanaafteraccountingforall itsoutflows’’ (WorldBank2003:23).

Tax revenues are also slight, due to the ‘‘various fiscal incentives’’

offered to attract foreign investors in the first place.Most impor-

tant (and in contrast to earlier, more labor-intensivemining ven-

tures), therehasbeen little creationof employment forGhanaians

because of the ‘‘highly capital intensive nature ofmodern surface

mining techniques’’ (WorldBank2003: 23).5

The report tellinglydescribes a ‘‘field visit’’ byWorldBank staff

to the centerof the gold-mining country inWassaDistrict,which

found ‘‘competition between mining and agriculture for arable

36 GlobalizingAfrica?

land, [a] poor state of local infrastructure, inadequate public ser-

vices, and high unemployment’’ (World Bank 2003: 21). It con-

cludes that ‘‘the local economy . . . does not appear to have bene-

fited from large-scalemining through sustainedeconomicgrowth

and improved public services,’’ and that ‘‘local people feel no per-

ceptible benefit from the resources extracted from ‘their’ land’’

(WorldBank2003: 21).Unemployedyouth, the report notes, had

recentlyattackedlocalchiefsanddestroyedtheirpalacesoutoffrus-

trationover ‘‘lackof jobsand insufficientaccess to land forcultiva-

tion’’ (WorldBank2003: 21).

Some other forms of mining on the continent—notably, for

alluvial diamonds—are both less capital intensive and less spa-

tially concentrated and thus harder to insulate from thewider so-

ciety throughenclavemethods.But thatdoesnot stopavarietyof

powerful and well-armed interests from attempting (with mixed

success) to carve out such exclusionary spatial enclaves. In the

richdiamond-producing regionofMbuji-Mayi in thedrc, for in-

stance, private companies routinelyusemilitary force in efforts to

monopolize the collection of alluvial diamonds.The partly state-

owned firmSociétéminière de Bakwanga (known as miba) uses

both private security firms andwhat are termeddrc ‘‘police offi-

cers’’ (who nonetheless report to miba’s head of security, not to

any police superiors) to shoot, arrest, and beat up ‘‘trespassers.’’

The partly Zimbabwean-owned firm Sengamines enjoys similar

protection from the Zimbabwean armed forces. It is unclear, as

a recent human-rights report notes, ‘‘what legal framework, if

any, they are operatingwithin’’ (Amnesty International 2002: 8).

Bothcompanieshabitually shootandkill localpeopleunfortunate

enough to attempt to dig diamonds on the companies’ claimed

‘‘concessions,’’ eventhoughboththeboundariesof theconcessions

andtheir legalbasis areoftenhighlyunclear (seeAmnestyInterna-

tional 2002; see alsoGlobalWitness2004,whichprovides auseful

overviewof the use of violence to secure natural resources in the

drc in recent years).

Muchmore couldbe said about all this (see chapter 8), but here

I emphasize only two points. First, themovement of capital that

suchenterprises entail does indeedcrisscross theglobe,but itdoes

notencompassorcover it.Themovementsofcapitalcrossnational

GlobalizingAfrica? 37

borders, but they jump frompoint topoint, andhuge regions are

simply bypassed.Capital does not ‘‘flow’’ fromNewYork toAn-

gola’s oil fields, or fromLondon toGhana’s goldmines; it hops,

neatly skippingovermost ofwhat lies in between. Second,where

capital has been coming to Africa at all, it has largely been con-

centratedinspatiallysegregated,socially ‘‘thin’’mineral-extraction

enclaves.Again, the ‘‘movementofcapital’’heredoesnotcoverthe

globe; it connectsdiscretepointsonit.Capital is globe-hopping,not
globe-covering. The significance of this social fact for understand-
ingpatternsofpolitical orderanddisorderon the continent is dis-

cussed in thenext section.

GOVERNANCE

The reformsdemandedby ‘‘structural adjustment’’were—accord-

ing to theirneoliberal proponents—supposed to roll backoppres-

sive and overbearing states and to liberate a newly vital ‘‘civil so-

ciety.’’The resultwas tobeanewsortof ‘‘governance’’ thatwould

bebothmoredemocratic andmoreeconomicallyefficient.Formal

democratization has indeed swept over much of the continent

(though far from all of it), and multiparty elections have invigo-

rated thepolitical life of a numberof countries.At the same time,

swarms of new ‘‘nongovernmental organizations’’ (ngos) have

arisen, taking advantage of the shift in donor policies thatmoved

funding forprojects away frommistrusted statebureaucracies and

intowhatwereunderstoodasmore ‘‘direct’’ or ‘‘grassroots’’ chan-

nels of implementation (see chapter 4).

But rather than setting inmotion a general liberation, the best

scholarship on recent African politics (as noted in the introduc-

tion) suggests that this ‘‘rolling back’’ of the state has provoked

or exacerbated a far-reaching political crisis. As more and more

of the functions of the state have been effectively ‘‘outsourced’’

to ngos, state capacity has deteriorated rapidly—unsurprisingly,

as Joseph Hanlon has pointed out, since the higher salaries and

better terms of employment offered by ngos quickly ‘‘decapaci-

tated’’ governments by luring all the best civil servants out of the

governmentministries (Hanlon2000).Thosewho remainedwere

38 GlobalizingAfrica?

often paid less than subsistence salaries, with the inevitable con-

sequences of corruption and an explosionof ‘‘parallel businesses.’’

Deprived both of capable staff and of economic resources, states

quicklybecame ‘‘hollowedout,’’ in thewordsofChristopherClap-

ham(1996),andstateofficials setaboutona ‘‘privatizationplan’’of

theirown—what Jean-FrançoisBayart,StephenEllis, andBéatrice

Hibou(1999)havecalled ‘‘thecriminalizationof thestate.’’Along-

side, and interpenetratedwith, the formal institutionsof the state,

informal networks of officials, local power brokers or warlords,

arms traders, and internationalfirms inmanycountries formwhat

Reno(1999)has termeda ‘‘shadowstate’’ that leaves the formal in-

stitutions of government littlemore than an empty shell. In such

environments, ithasbeeneasy tomobilize irregulararmies forpri-

vateeconomicgain, andavigorous transnational trade inarmshas

beenoneof the feweconomic areasof consistentgrowth. It is not

that states have disappeared, or even simply that they are, as it is

often put, ‘‘weak.’’ It is, rather, that they have increasingly gotten

outofthebusinessofgoverning,evenasthey(or, rather, thepoliti-

ciansandbureaucratswhooccupytheiroffices)retaina lively inter-

est inother sortsof business. In thisnewera, it isnot theorganiza-

tionsof ‘‘civil society’’ that are ‘‘nongovernmental’’—it is the state

itself.

For much of Africa, such a new political order has meant not

‘‘less state interference and inefficiency,’’ asWestern neoliberal re-

formers imagined, but simply less order, less peace, and less secu-

rity. In anumberof countries (now includingeven such tradition-

ally ‘‘stable’’ states as Côte d’Ivoire), it has meant civil war. At

the same time, the role of private security companies and profes-

sionalmercenaries in securing economically valuable enclaves has

mushroomed,as isnowincreasinglywelldocumented(Lock1998;

Musah and Fayemi 2000; Reno 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Singer 2003;

see also chapter 8).

In fact, the picture that seems to emerge from the recent schol-

arly literature isof twoquitedifferentkindsofgovernance,applied

to the two different Africas that French colonialism once distin-

guishedas ‘‘Afrique utile’’ and ‘‘Afrique inutile’’—or ‘‘usable/useful
Africa’’and‘‘unusable/uselessAfrica,’’asReno(1999)hasreminded

us. Usable Africa gets secure enclaves—noncontiguous ‘‘useful’’

GlobalizingAfrica? 39

bits that are secured, policed, and, in a minimal sense, governed

throughprivate or semiprivatemeans.These enclaves are increas-

ingly linked up, not in a national grid, but in transnational net-

works that connect economically valued spaces dispersed around

theworld in apoint-to-point fashion.

The rest—the vast terrain of ‘‘unusable Africa’’—gets increas-

inglynongovernmental states, and an arrayof extra-state formsof

control and regulation that range from revitalized forms of local

politicalauthority(oftenstyled‘‘traditional’’)toopenbanditryand

warlordism. This state of affairs is often violent and disorderly,

but it should not be understood simply as an absence of govern-

ment. As Janet Roitman has recently pointed out for the Chad

Basin (2004), even banditry has its own intricate forms of social

andmoralorder, and its formsof ‘‘regulation’’ oftenfindpointsof

attachmentwith the interests of both state officials and variously

militarized illegal traffickers (forwhomthe ‘‘inutile’’ areas that are
of little interesttoforeigninvestorsmayturnouttobequite ‘‘utile’’
indeed).At the same time, areas inwhich states no longer project

bureaucratic control are often effectively ‘‘governed’’ in a transna-

tional humanitarian or developmentalmode, as a hodgepodge of

transnationalprivatevoluntaryorganizationscarryouttheday-to-

daywork of providing rudimentary governmental and social ser-

vices, especially in regions of crisis and conflict. I have elsewhere

described such ‘‘government-by-ngo’’ as a formof ‘‘transnational

governmentality’’ (Ferguson andGupta 2002). Like the privately

secured mineral extraction enclave, the humanitarian emergency

zone is subject to a form of government that cannot be located

within anational grid, but is instead spread across a patchworkof

transnationally networked, noncontiguousbits. (See chapter 4.)

Perhaps themost surprisingfindingof the recent literature con-

cernstherelationbetweentheWorldBankandInternationalMon-

etaryFund(imf)projects forpolitical reformandthedesiredgoal

of attracting capital and achieving economic growth. For the fact

is that the countries that are (in the termsofWorldBankand imf

‘‘governance’’ reformers) the biggest ‘‘failures’’ have been among

the most successful at developing capital-attracting enclaves. Afri-
can countries where peace, democracy, and some measure of the

40 GlobalizingAfrica?

rule of lawobtain have had verymixed records of drawing capital

investment in recent years. (Zambia is unfortunately a prime ex-

ample.)But countrieswith the ‘‘weakest’’ andmost corrupt states,

and even raging civil wars, have often attracted very significant

inflows. Reno’s book on ‘‘warlord politics,’’ for instance, picked

four countries for study based on their ‘‘widespread violence and

extremelyweak state institutions’’: Liberia, SierraLeone,Congo/

Zaire,andNigeria(Reno1999).Wascapitalfleeingfromthese law-

less spaces?On the contrary:The four soakedupover half of pri-

vatecapital inflowstoSub-SaharanAfrica(excludingSouthAfrica)

in his sample year of 1994–95. Indeed, countrieswith raging civil

wars and spectacularly illiberal governments have on a numberof

occasions done surprisingly well, according to growth measures.

ConsiderAngola,whichduring thewar-torn1980sboastedoneof

the better gdp growth rates on the continent, or Sudan, whose

8.1 percent annualgdpgrowthmade itAfrica’s economicgrowth

‘‘star’’ of the 1990s, in spite of its horrific civil war and oppressive

government.6

Such observations suggest that the picture of Africa as a place

that has been simply abandoned by global capital has to be quali-

fied. It is true that, ascapital ‘‘hops’’over ‘‘unusableAfrica,’’ alight-

ingonlyinmineral-richenclavesthatarestarklydisconnectedfrom

their national societies, much of Africa is indeed marginalized

fromtheglobal economy,as several theoristsofglobalizationhave

noted.But the situation that comes intoviewfromrecent scholar-

ship is not exactly the featureless void thatCastells (2000) evokes

in his characterization of Africa as a ‘‘black hole’’ of the informa-

tion society.On the contrary, specific forms of ‘‘global’’ integra-

tiononthecontinentcoexistwithspecific—andequally ‘‘global’’—

formsof exclusion,marginalization, anddisconnection. Indeed, it

isworth askingwhetherAfrica’s combinationof privately secured

mineral-extraction enclaves and weakly governed humanitarian

hinterlands might constitute not a lamentably immature form of

globalization, but a quite ‘‘advanced’’ and sophisticatedmutation

of it. If so, the formsof ‘‘global economy’’ that havedeveloped in

somemineral-richAfricancountries in recentyearsmight showus

not just a theoretically interesting anomaly, but also a frightening

GlobalizingAfrica? 41

sortofpolitical-economicmodelforsomeotherworldregionsthat

combine mineral wealth with political intractability. (This possi-

bility is brieflyexplored in chapter 8.)

RETHINKING THE GLOBAL: AN EXAMPLE

IhavesuggestedthatasurveyofrecentscholarshiponAfricamight

notonly illuminate the situationon the continentbut alsohelpus

tothinkmorecriticallyaboutthemeaningof theglobal. Iwillnow

illustratethiswithabriefexamplefromthedomainofenvironmen-

tal politics.

Discussions of the environment often rely on a language of the

‘‘global.’’ Global warming, the ozone layer, acid rain, ocean eco-

systems,Chernobyl, desertification—all seem to showwith over-

whelming clarity that today’s key environmental issues are global

onesthatdemandtobeaddressedatwhatwecall the ‘‘global level,’’

notmerely thenational or the regional level. Such common-sense

turnsof phrase invoke the ‘‘global’’ as an encompassing,overarch-

ing spatial level, a notion that has come to bewidespread both in
popularand journalisticunderstandingsand inthescholarly litera-

ture on ‘‘globalization.’’

The implicationusuallydrawn fromsuch invocationsof the en-

vironmentasaglobal issue is that the ‘‘national level’’ is inadequate

for environmental regulation and protection, since environmen-

tal crises do not respect national borders. So environmentalism,

we are told, must ‘‘go global.’’ Now, it is undoubtedly true that

environmental crises reveal the limitations of the nation-state sys-

tem in a particularly vivid way. But if the global is not, as I have

argued, an enveloping level of coverage superior to the national
but,rather,aformofpoint-to-pointconnectivitythatbypassesand

short-circuits all scales basedoncontiguity, then the ‘‘global’’may

be just as inadequate to environmental problems as the national

(indeed, possibly evenmore so).This is so because ecosystems do

notwork ‘‘point-to-point’’ anymore than theyworknationally.

A great deal of what passes for environmental regulation and

protection inAfricaworks according to thepoint-to-pointmodel

(and is thuswell andtruly ‘‘global’’ inmysense).Nationalparks,of

42 GlobalizingAfrica?

course, are themselves guarded enclaves, existing in often fiercely

combative relations with surrounding residents. Often fenced

and militarily patrolled, these patches of internationally valued

‘‘nature’’ may be protected with ‘‘shoot-to-kill’’ policies against

‘‘poachers’’ who are often simply the local people who lost their

land and their ancestral hunting rights when they were forcibly

evicted tomakeway for the game park (seeAdams andMcShane

1996;Duffy2000;Neumann2001a).

More recent efforts in environmental protection and wildlife

conservation inAfrica have responded to the failures of the tradi-

tional ‘‘fortress conservation’’ approach by promoting a new ap-

proachbasedon ‘‘communityparticipation.’’The idea is to involve

members of ‘‘local communities’’ in the management of wildlife

‘‘resources,’’ in the hope that they will be able to control poach-

ing while also benefiting in someway from the existence of pre-

served wildlife (Hulme and Murphree 2001). Yet Roderick Neu-

mann(2001b)hasconvincinglyarguedthatthenewmodeldepends

justasmuchastheoldoneonthecoercivepartitioningofspaceand

the desire to ‘‘secure’’ selected rural areas as ‘‘resources’’ for inter-

nationallyvaluedeco-tourism.Inhiscase studyof theSelousCon-

servation Programme in Tanzania, he shows that the creation of

‘‘buffer zones’’ for the use of villagerswas designed to recruit vil-

lagers into a kindof anti-poaching self-surveillance. ‘‘Community

participation’’ did not replace coercion; it supplemented it. Both

state violence and the threat of it, Neumann argues, were essen-

tial to the working of the project. Indeed, his conclusion is that

‘‘community participation’’ and state violenceworked together as

‘‘integrated formsof social controldesignedtomeet theneedsand

goals of international conservationorganizations and the tourism

industry’’ (Neumann 2001b: 324).There is thus no contradiction

in the fact thatwildlifemanagement inTanzania has seenboth in-

creasing ‘‘community participation’’ and increasingmilitarization

in recent years—as illustrated in a recent reported incident in the

famed Serengeti Park in which game rangers allegedly arrested,

linedup,andshottodeathsomefiftyfamine-strickenvillagerswho

hadenteredtheparkarmedwithbowsandarrowsinsearchofsmall

game (Neumann2001b: 305).

Such spatial enclaving in the service of ‘‘nature’’ is not only the

GlobalizingAfrica? 43

work of states. Environmental ngos, too, often carve out their

ownspatial enclavesor turfs,perhaps targeting ‘‘hot spots’’of bio-

diversityor seeking topreserve specific environmental ‘‘treasures’’

orendangeredspecies.Suchngos are indeedoften ‘‘globally’’ net-

worked (i.e., linkedwith similarorganizations around theworld),

but it is a network of points, with most of what lies in between

simply bypassed or ignored. Meanwhile, the generalized destitu-

tion,theunderminingofstateauthority,andthespreadofcivilwar

on the continent pose fundamental threats to ecosystems that no

systemofprotected enclaves canmitigate for long.

Consider theworkofanenvironmentalngocalledAfricaRain-

forest andRiver Conservation (arrc). According to the group’s

Web site, its aim is to help preserve life that ‘‘has flourished in

Africa’sdarkestregions’’ formillionsofyearsbutthattoday ‘‘iscol-

lapsingatthehandsofman.’’7Itsmainworktodatehasbeeninthe

ChinkoRiver basinof theCentralAfricanRepublic (car),where

President Ange-Felix Patasse reportedly authorized the group to

create a wildlife preserve while developing a ‘‘counter-poaching

program’’ to prevent the destructionof gamebygroups of armed

poachers fromacross theSudanese border.

Arevealingarticlebya journalistwriting for the Observer maga-
zine, published by the British newspaper the Guardian, provides
the details on how the conservation project in the car is be-

ing carried out (Clynes 2002). Apparently, the arrc, led by its

founder, the Wyoming physician Bruce Hayse, has hired merce-

naries to attack the Sudanese poachers and to try to form a 400-

stronglocalanti-poachingmilitiatopatroltheChinkoRiverbasin.

Thearrc’s ‘‘directorofoperations’’ is reportedlya formerRhode-

sian mercenary and a veteran of the South African private mili-

tary firmExecutiveOutcomeswhouses the aliasDaveBryant. In

previous jobs in SouthAfrica,Mozambique, andMalawi, Bryant

movedeasilyacross the ‘‘oftenblurry’’ line separatingparamilitary

and anti-poachingwork (Clynes 2002: 5).He sees no conflict be-

tween military work and the task of conservation: ‘‘People don’t

like the fact that I’mex-military, butwhobetter todo this job?’’8

Other activists in the field of African wildlife conservation ap-

pear uneasy with the idea of a foreign ngo using conservation

fundstocreateanongovernmentalmilitaryforce. ‘‘Wewouldn’tdo

44 GlobalizingAfrica?

it,’’ saidRichardCarroll of theWorldWildlifeFund (wwf). ‘‘Can

you imagine the headlines? ‘wwf supporting SouthAfricanmer-

cenaries tokillCentralAfricans’?’’ (Clynes2002:6).But inarecent

interview,Haysedefendedtheoperationbyclaiming, ‘‘Whatwe’re

doing is really not that extreme by African standards in terms of

gameparks,’’ andnoting(correctly) thatshoot-to-killpolicieshave

beenused innationallyadministeredparks in countries likeKenya

andZimbabwe.While peoplewill certainly be killed, he noted re-

assuringly, ‘‘We’re not proposing to go out and do any kind of

widespreadmassacre.’’9

Askedforcommentduringthisinterview,anofficialnamedPeter

Knights from WildAid, another conservation ngo, agreed that

‘‘extreme measures’’ had been used in wildlife conservation for

some time on the continent. ‘‘And it’s not just aboutwildlife,’’ he

continued:

It’saboutresourcesingeneral,andit’sunfortunatelythescenariowe

find inAfrica,where there’s somanyof these small civil wars.You

often don’t hear about it, especially not here in the United States,

but there’s a lot ofwars, a lot of conflicts goingon, and sometimes

it’s aboutwildlife. Sometimes it’s aboutother commodities.

Indeed,those ‘‘othercommodities’’appeartobeapartofthearrc

story, aswell. According to the Observer article, the arrchas re-
sponded toa fundingcrunchbyseeking to raise itsownmoneyby

sellingdiamondsdug in ‘‘its’’ area.The journalistTomClynes ob-

servedBryantandothersnegotiatingtheacquisitionandsaleofthe

stones (thoughwithoutgreat success, at least initially), andHayse

openlydefendedthenewfundingdevice: ‘‘Diamonds lookedlikea

waytodeveloptheprojectwithsomekindofsecurefinancial foun-

dation, andtoprovideamoreequitablemeans for the localpeople

to sell thediamonds theypickup’’ (Clynes 2002: 7).With a ‘‘flexi-

bility’’ reminiscentofotheractors intheregion, thearrc is appar-

ently seeking toput its ‘‘conservation’’ enclave tomultiple uses.

The arrc is undoubtedly an extreme case in its explicit com-

mitment to privatized violence in support of conservation. It is

not unique, however.DeborahAvant (2004) has recently given a

fascinating account of the process throughwhich local officials of

thewwfandtheInternationalRhinoFund(irf)endedupdecid-

GlobalizingAfrica? 45

ing to hire mercenaries to protect the Garamba National Park in

thedrc.Thewwf’s national leadershipeventually repudiated the

effort,buttheirf(togetherwiththewwf’s localofficers)hascon-

tinuedtopursuehiredprotectionviaprivate securityfirms,aswell

as viaUgandan troopsoperatingnear thepark (Avant 2004: 376).

Mainstreamconservationorganizations like thewwfhavekept

theirdistance fromsuchpractices, at least inpublic—probablybe-

cause (asAvant rightlyobserves) theyderivemuchof their power

from a perception ofmoral authority that could easily be eroded

bysuchthingsas involvementwithmercenaries.Butmanyofficials

of these organizations are, by some accounts,more supportive of

suchmeasures inprivate. Indeed,accordingtothe Observer report,
the president and founder of the well-known Rainforest Action

Network,RandyHayes,waspresenton thearrc’sChinkoRiver

expedition, and someofficials are apparently glad that someone is

willing to do this sort of ‘‘dirty work.’’ According to one main-

streamconservationist(asquotedinClynes2002:6), ‘‘It’sprobably

better that thewwf isn’t involved.This is the sideof conservation

thattheorganizationswiththepanda-bearlogosdon’twanttodeal

with. It’s dirty, filthywork.And if youwant to succeed,youdon’t

put a choirboy in charge.’’

Perhaps themore importantpoint, however, is that thepractice

of thearrc is only a particularly uncompromisingmanifestation

of a vision of nature and its relation to the ‘‘global’’ that is much

morewidespread. After all, it is not only environmental extrem-

istswho take as their object of interventionwhat they imagine to

be pristine pockets of asocial nature. (The ‘‘hot spots’’ approach

to biodiversity has been endorsed bymanymainstream conserva-

tion organizations, includingConservation International and the

wwf.) And it is not only wild-eyed ‘‘eco-mercenaries’’ who be-

lieve that a ‘‘we’’ group of well-funded First World activists can

and should claim themoral authorityof a planetary conscience in

support of their own very particular interventions. Indeed,more

‘‘mainstream’’ environmentalngos also appear very much a part

of the larger ‘‘global’’ landscape that I have sketched here, oper-

ating as they do in a world of fragmented spaces, deteriorating

stateauthority,enclavedenvironmental ‘‘resources,’’andprivatized

security.

46 GlobalizingAfrica?

This is assuredly not to say that transnational ngos seeking to

conservewildlife and ecosystems deserve onlyour scorn and con-

demnation for theirefforts.Theirwork isoftenextremelyvaluable

and sometimes very sensitive to the sorts of concerns that I have

highlighted.Mypoint isnot todismiss theprojectofwildlife con-

servation but to point out theway that even such important and

undoubtedlywell-intentioned transnational projects,oftendriven

by altruistic motives, have increasingly, through a logic of prag-

matic adaptation to circumstance, taken on some of the forms of

spatialorganizationthatwemorereadilyassociatewiththeexploi-

tation of enclaves for mineral extraction.The same could be said

about humanitarian and relief agencies on the continent, which

havealsobecomeincreasinglyreliantonextra-statemechanismsto

establish patchworks of political order where states have become

nongovernmental.As aworker for Save theChildrenobservedof

theprivatemilitary companies inSierraLeone, ‘‘Theybangheads

veryefficiently, thefightingstops—andthat’swhenbabiesget fed’’

(asquoted inReno2001a: 212). Saving rhinos, like feedingbabies,

is surely a noble cause. But a close look at the means by which

such causes arepursuedwould seemtohavemuch to tell us about

how Africa is linked upwith a variety of contemporary ‘‘global’’

projects.

We have grown accustomed to a language of global ‘‘flows’’ in

thinkingabout ‘‘globalization,’’ butflowis apeculiarlypoormeta-

phor for the point-to-point connectivity and networking of en-

claves that confront us when we examine Africa’s experience of

globalization (cf. Tsing 2001). Such language literally naturalizes
globalizationbymakingitanalogoustothenaturalprocessofflow-

ingwater.Rivers reallydoflow.Like somanyecologically signifi-

cant processes, a river’s flowworks via spatial contiguity—a river

goesfrompointAtopointBonlybytraversing,watering,andcon-

necting the territory that lies between the two points. But as the

contemporaryAfricanmaterial showssovividly, the ‘‘global’’does

not ‘‘flow,’’ thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces;

it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the

networkwhile excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie

between the points. Ecological processes that depend on spatial

contiguity are, to be sure, not exclusively ‘‘local’’—often they are

GlobalizingAfrica? 47

regionaland, indeed,sometimesevenplanetary.Butneitherthere-

gionalnortheplanetaryscale iseasilyaddressedvia today’s ‘‘globe-

hopping’’ political and economic forms.

If this is so, then so-called global forms of economy, politics,

and regulation have no inherent advantage in dealing with envi-

ronmental issues. Indeed, insofar as contemporary ‘‘global’’ inter-

ventions on behalf of ‘‘the environment’’ rely on the existence of

protectedenclavessubject toradicallydistinctandspatiallydiscon-

tinuousmodesofpolicingandgovernment, they revealwithgreat

clarity theway that apparently universal andplanetary projects in

factrelyonsharpspatialdivisionsandviolentlypolicedzonesofex-

clusion.Such interventionsare indeed ‘‘global’’ in that theyrelyon

the transnational organizationof funding, institutions, andmoral

concern, but their very mode of operation reveals the selectively

disordered and starkly divided landscape that, I have argued, is a

foundational featureofAfrica’scontemporarymodeof integration

into ‘‘global society.’’

CONCLUSION

Areviewof recent scholarship on the political economyofAfrica

suggests that a continent that is widely understood to be simply

backwardorexcludedvis-à-vis thenewlyemergent formsofglobal

societymay in fact reveal key features of how the ‘‘global’’ works

today, and how itmightwork in the future. As I observed at the

start:Whatwe see depends onwherewe are looking from.What

doweseeabout the ‘‘global’’ today fromthevantagepointof these

recent studies?

The global, as seen fromAfrica, is not a seamless, shiny, round,

andall-encompassing totality (as theword seems to imply).Nor is

it a higher level of planetary unity, interconnection, and commu-

nication.Rather, the ‘‘global’’wesee in recent studiesofAfricahas

sharp, jagged edges; rich anddangerous trafficamid zonesof gen-

eralizedabjection; razor-wiredenclavesnext toabandonedhinter-

lands.Itfeaturesentirecountrieswithestimatedlifeexpectanciesin

themid-thirtiesanddropping;warfareseeminglywithoutend;and

thesteepesteconomicinequalitiesseeninhumanhistorytodate.It

48 GlobalizingAfrica?

isaglobalwherecapitalflowsandmarketsareatoncelightningfast

andpatchyand incomplete;where thegloballynetworkedenclave

sits rightbeside theungovernablehumanitariandisaster zone. It is

a global not of planetary communion, but of disconnection, seg-

mentation, and segregation—not a seamless world without bor-

ders, but a patchwork of discontinuous and hierarchically ranked

spaces,whoseedgesarecarefullydelimited,guarded,andenforced.

SuchanAfrica-centeredviewdoesnotshowusthe ‘‘truenature’’

of globalization—as if previous totalizing accounts of a global-

izedworld couldnowbe simplydismissedor replacedwith anew

one. Rather, the view developed here represents an attempt—an

‘‘essay’’—to show the possibilityof taking another perspective on

the ‘‘global’’ and to insist that there is no viewof ‘‘globalization’’

that simply ‘‘covers it all,’’ that all views (even themost apparently

all-inclusive and authoritative ones) are in fact views ‘‘fromsome-

where’’ (cf.Tsing2000).The fact that anAfrica-focusedpicture of

globalization looks sounlikewhatmost global theories leadus to

expect does notmean that other accounts, ‘‘from’’ other ‘‘places,’’

can simplybedismissed.Butneither is it simplyamatter adding a

newpiece toanotherwise intactpicture (as in theold cliché about

the five blindmen and the elephant)—as if we could simply ‘‘add

Africa and stir’’ and thus arrive at a truly all-inclusive picture. In-

stead, the view from Africa challenges us to develop new, more

situatedunderstandings of emergingglobal patterns, understand-

ings that attend more adequately not only to exciting new inter-

connections, but also to the material inequalities and spatial and

scalardisjunctures thatsuchinterconnectionsbothdependonand,

in someways, help to produce.Above all,what the inconvenient

questions comingoutofAfrica showus is howmuchmore think-

ing, and howmuchmore empirical social research, remains to be

done beforewe can really understand a globalization that divides

theplanet asmuch as it unites it.

GlobalizingAfrica? 49

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5
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The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change

,
Second Edition. Edited by J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Development of
Underdevelopment (1969)

Andre Gunder Frank

I

We cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the
majority of the world’s population who suffer from underdevelopment without first
learning how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present
underdevelopment. Yet most historians study only the developed metropolitan
countries and pay scant attention to the colonial and underdeveloped lands. For this
reason most of our theoretical categories and guides to development policy have
been distilled exclusively from the historical experience of the European and North
American advanced capitalist nations.

Since the historical experience of the colonial and underdeveloped countries has
demonstrably been quite different, available theory therefore fails to reflect the past
of the underdeveloped part of the world entirely, and reflects the past of the world as
a whole only in part. More important, our ignorance of the underdeveloped
countries’ history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present
resembles earlier stages of the history of the now developed countries. This ignorance
and this assumption lead us into serious misconceptions about contemporary
underdevelopment and development. Further, most studies of development and
underdevelopment fail to take account of the economic and other relations between
the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout the history of the world-wide
expansion and development of the mercantilist and capitalist system. Consequently,
most of our theory fails to explain the structure and development of the capitalist

7

Original publication details: Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly
Review, 18.4 (1969): 17–31. Reproduced with permission from Monthly Review Foundation.

106 Andre Gunder Frank

system as a whole and to account for its simultaneous generation of underdevelop-
ment in some of its parts and of economic development in others.

It is generally held that economic development occurs in a succession of capitalist
stages and that today’s underdeveloped countries are still in a stage, sometimes
depicted as an original stage of history, through which the now developed countries
passed long ago. Yet even a modest acquaintance with history shows that
underdevelopment is not original or traditional and that neither the past nor the
present of the underdeveloped countries resembles in any important respect the past
of the now developed countries. The now developed countries were never underde-
veloped, though they may have been undeveloped. It is also widely believed that the
contemporary underdevelopment of a country can be understood as the product or
reflection solely of its own economic, political, social, and cultural characteristics or
structure. Yet historical research demonstrates that contemporary underdevelop-
ment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and
other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now developed
metropolitan countries. Furthermore, these relations are an essential part of the
structure and development of the capitalist system on a world scale as a whole. A
related and also largely erroneous view is that the development of these underdevel-
oped countries and, within them of their most underdeveloped domestic areas,
must and will be generated or stimulated by diffusing capital, institutions, values,
etc., to them from the international and national capitalist metropoles. Historical
perspective based on the underdeveloped countries’ past experience suggests that
on the contrary in the underdeveloped countries economic development can now
occur only independently of most of these relations of diffusion.

Evident inequalities of income and differences in culture have led many observers
to see “dual” societies and economics in the underdeveloped countries. Each of the
two parts is supposed to have a history of its own, a structure, and a contemporary
dynamic largely independent of the other. Supposedly, only one part of the economy
and society has been importantly affected by intimate economic relations with the
“outside” capitalist world; and that part, it is held, became modern, capitalist, and
relatively developed precisely because of this contact. The other part is widely
regarded as variously isolated, subsistence-based, feudal, or precapitalist, and there-
fore more underdeveloped.

I believe on the contrary that the entire “dual society” thesis is false and that the
policy recommendations to which it leads will, if acted upon, serve only to intensify
and perpetuate the very conditions of underdevelopment they are supposedly
designed to remedy.

A mounting body of evidence suggests, and I am confident that future historical
research will confirm, that the expansion of the capitalist system over the past cen-
turies effectively and entirely penetrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of
the underdeveloped world. Therefore, the economic, political, social, and cultural
institutions and relations we now observe there are the products of the historical
development of the capitalist system no less than are the seemingly more modern or
capitalist features of the national metropoles of these underdeveloped countries.

The Development of Underdevelopment 107

Analogously to the relations between development and underdevelopment on the
international level, the contemporary underdeveloped institutions of the so-called
backward or feudal domestic areas of an underdeveloped country are no less the
product of the single historical process of capitalist development than are the
so-called capitalist institutions of the supposedly more progressive areas. In this
paper I should like to sketch the kinds of evidence which support this thesis and at
the same time indicate lines along which further study and research could fruitfully
proceed.

II

The Secretary General of the Latin American Center for Research in the Social
Sciences writes in that Center’s journal: “The privileged position of the city has its
origin in the colonial period. It was founded by the Conqueror to serve the same
ends that it still serves today; to incorporate the indigenous population into the
economy brought and developed by that Conqueror and his descendants. The
regional city was an instrument of conquest and is still today an instrument of
domination.”1 The Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National [Indigenous] Institute)
of Mexico confirms this observation when it notes that “the mestizo population, in
fact, always lives in a city, a center of an intercultural region, which acts as the
metropolis of a zone of indigenous population and which maintains with the under-
developed communities an intimate relation which links the center with the satellite
communities.”2 The Institute goes on to point out that “between the mestizos who
live in the nuclear city of the region and the Indians who live in the peasant hinter-
land there is in reality a closer economic and social interdependence than might at
first glance appear” and that the provincial metropoles “by being centers of
intercourse are also centers of exploitation.”3

Thus these metropolis–satellite relations are not limited to the imperial or inter-
national level but penetrate and structure the very economic, political, and social life
of the Latin American colonies and countries. Just as the colonial and national
capital and its export sector become the satellite of the Iberian (and later of other)
metropoles of the world economic system, this satellite immediately becomes a colo-
nial and then a national metropolis with respect to the productive sectors and
population of the interior. Furthermore, the provincial capitals, which thus are
themselves satellites of the national metropolis – and through the latter of the world
metropolis – are in turn provincial centers around which their own local satellites
orbit. Thus, a whole chain of constellations of metropoles and satellites relates all
parts of the whole system from its metropolitan center in Europe or the United
States to the farthest outpost in the Latin American countryside.

When we examine this metropolis–satellite structure, we find that each of the
satellites, including now-underdeveloped Spain and Portugal, serves as an instru-
ment to suck capital or economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part
of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites. Moreover, each

108 Andre Gunder Frank

national and local metropolis serves to impose and maintain the monopolistic struc-
ture and exploitative relationship of this system (as the Instituto Nacional Indigenista
of Mexico calls it) as long as it serves the interests of the metropoles which take
advantage of this global, national, and local structure to promote their own
development and the enrichment of their ruling classes.

These are the principal and still surviving structural characteristics which were
implanted in Latin America by the Conquest. Beyond examining the establishment
of this colonial structure in its historical context, the proposed approach calls for
study of the development – and underdevelopment – of these metropoles and satel-
lites of Latin America throughout the following and still continuing historical
process. In this way we can understand why there were and still are tendencies in the
Latin American and world capitalist structure which seem to lead to the development
of the metropolis and the underdevelopment of the satellite and why, particularly,
the satellized national, regional, and local metropoles in Latin America find that
their economic development is at best a limited or underdeveloped development.

III

That present underdevelopment of Latin America is the result of its centuries-long
participation in the process of world capitalist development, I believe I have shown
in my case studies of the economic and social histories of Chile and Brazil. My study
of Chilean history suggests that the Conquest not only incorporated this country
fully into the expansion and development of the world mercantile and later industrial
capitalist system but that it also introduced the monopolistic metropolis–satellite
structure and development of capitalism into the Chilean domestic economy and
society itself. This structure then penetrated and permeated all of Chile very quickly.
Since that time and in the course of world and Chilean history during the epochs of
colonialism, free trade, imperialism, and the present, Chile has become increasingly
marked by the economic, social, and political structure of satellite underdevelop-
ment. This development of underdevelopment continues today, both in Chile’s still
increasing satellization by the world metropolis and through the ever more acute
polarization of Chile’s domestic economy.

The history of Brazil is perhaps the clearest case of both national and regional
development of underdevelopment. The expansion of the world economy since the
beginning of the sixteenth century successively converted the Northeast, the Minas
Gerais interior, the North, and the Center-South (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and
Paraná) into export economies and incorporated them into the structure and
development of the world capitalist system. Each of these regions experienced what
may have appeared as economic development during the period of its respective
golden age. But it was a satellite development which was neither self-generating nor
self-perpetuating. As the market or the productivity of the first three regions
declined, foreign and domestic economic interest in them waned; and they were left
to develop the underdevelopment they live today. In the fourth region, the coffee

The Development of Underdevelopment 109

economy experienced a similar though not yet quite as serious fate (though the
development of a synthetic coffee substitute promises to deal it a mortal blow in the
not too distant future). All of this historical evidence contradicts the generally
accepted theses that Latin America suffers from a dual society or from the survival
of feudal institutions and that these are important obstacles to its economic
development.

I

V

During the First World War, however, and even more during the Great Depression
and the Second World War, São Paulo began to build up an industrial establishment
which is the largest in Latin America today. The question arises whether this
industrial development did or can break Brazil out of the cycle of satellite development
and underdevelopment which has characterized its other regions and national his-
tory within the capitalist system so far. I believe that the answer is no. Domestically
the evidence so far is fairly clear. The development of industry in São Paulo has not
brought greater riches to the other regions of Brazil. Instead, it converted them into
internal colonial satellites, de-capitalized them further, and consolidated or even
deepened their underdevelopment. There is little evidence to suggest that this
process is likely to be reversed in the foreseeable future except insofar as the provin-
cial poor migrate and become the poor of the metropolitan cities. Externally, the
evidence is that although the initial development of São Paulo’s industry was
relatively autonomous it is being increasingly satellized by the world capitalist
metropolis and its future development possibilities are increasingly restricted. This
development, my studies lead me to believe, also appears destined to limited or
underdeveloped development as long as it takes place in the present economic,
political, and social framework.

We must conclude, in short, that underdevelopment is not due to the survival of
archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage in regions that have
remained isolated from the stream of world history. On the contrary, underdevelop-
ment was and still is generated by the very same historical process which also
generated economic development: the development of capitalism itself. This view, I
am glad to say, is gaining adherents among students of Latin America and is proving
its worth in shedding new light on the problems of the area and in affording a better
perspective for the formulation of theory and policy.

V

The same historical and structural approach can also lead to better development
theory and policy by generating a series of hypotheses about development and
underdevelopment such as those I am testing in my current research. The hypotheses
are derived from the empirical observation and theoretical assumption that within

110 Andre Gunder Frank

this world-embracing metropolis–satellite structure the metropoles tend to develop
and the satellites to underdevelop. The first hypothesis has already been mentioned
above: that in contrast to the development of the world metropolis which is no one’s
satellite, the development of the national and other subordinate metropoles is
limited by their satellite status. It is perhaps more difficult to test this hypothesis
than the following ones because part of its confirmation depends on the test of the
other hypotheses. Nonetheless, this hypothesis appears to be generally confirmed by
the non-autonomous and unsatisfactory economic and especially industrial
development of Latin America’s national metropoles, as documented in the studies
already cited. The most important and at the same time most confirmatory exam-
ples are the metropolitan regions of Buenos Aires and São Paulo whose growth only
began in the nineteenth century, was therefore largely untrammelled by any colonial
heritage, but was and remains a satellite development largely dependent on the
outside metropolis, first of Britain and then of the United States.

A second hypothesis is that the satellites experience their greatest economic
development and especially their most classically capitalist industrial development
if and when their ties to their metropolis are weakest. This hypothesis is almost dia-
metrically opposed to the generally accepted thesis that development in the under-
developed countries follows from the greatest degree of contact with and diffusion
from the metropolitan developed countries. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed
by two kinds of relative isolation that Latin America has experienced in the course
of its history. One is the temporary isolation caused by the crises of war or depres-
sion in the world metropolis. Apart from minor ones, five periods of such major
crises stand out and seem to confirm the hypothesis. These are: the European (and
especially Spanish) Depression of the seventeenth century, the Napoleonic Wars,
the  First World War, the Depression of the 1930s, and the Second World War. It
is  clearly  established and generally recognized that the most important recent
industrial development – especially of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, but also of
other countries such as Chile – has taken place precisely during the periods of the
two World Wars and the intervening Depression. Thanks to the consequent loos-
ening of trade and investment ties during these periods, the satellites initiated
marked autonomous industrialization and growth. Historical research demonstrates
that the same thing happened in Latin America during Europe’s seventeenth-cen-
tury depression. Manufacturing grew in the Latin American countries, and several
of them such as Chile became exporters of manufactured goods. The Napoleonic
Wars gave rise to independence movements in Latin America, and these should per-
haps also be interpreted as confirming the development hypothesis in part.

The other kind of isolation which tends to confirm the second hypothesis is the
geographic and economic isolation of regions which at one time were relatively
weakly tied to and poorly integrated into the mercantilist and capitalist system. My
preliminary research suggests that in Latin America it was these regions which ini-
tiated and experienced the most promising self-generating economic development
of the classical industrial capitalist type. The most important regional cases probably
are Tucumán and Asunción, as well as other cities such as Mendoza and Rosario, in

The Development of Underdevelopment 111

the interior of Argentina and Paraguay during the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century São
Paulo, long before coffee was grown there, is another example. Perhaps Antioquia in
Colombia and Puebla and Querétaro in Mexico are other examples. In its own way,
Chile was also an example since, before the sea route around the Horn was opened,
this country was relatively isolated at the end of the long voyage from Europe via
Panama. All of these regions became manufacturing centers and even exporters,
usually of textiles, during the periods preceding their effective incorporation as sat-
ellites into the colonial, national, and world capitalist system… .

VI

A corollary of the second hypothesis is that when the metropolis recovers from its
crisis and re-establishes the trade and investment ties which fully re-incorporate the
satellite into the system, or when the metropolis expands to incorporate previously
isolated regions into the world-wide system, the previous development and industri-
alization of these regions is choked off or channelled into directions which are not
self-perpetuating and promising. This happened after each of the five crises cited
above. The renewed expansion of trade and the spread of economic liberalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries choked off and reversed the manufacturing
development which Latin America had experienced during the seventeenth century,
and in some places at the beginning of the nineteenth. After the First World War, the
new national industry of Brazil suffered serious consequences from American
economic invasion. The increase in the growth rate of Gross National Product and
particularly of industrialization throughout Latin America was again reversed and
industry became increasingly satellized after the Second World War and especially
after the post-Korean War recovery and expansion of the metropolis. Far from
having become more developed since then, industrial sectors of Brazil and most
conspicuously of Argentina have become structurally more and more underdevel-
oped and less and less able to generate continued industrialization and/or sustain
development of the economy. This process, from which India also suffers, is reflected
in a whole gamut of balance-of-payments, inflationary, and other economic and
political difficulties, and promises to yield to no solution short of far-reaching struc-
tural change.

Our hypothesis suggests that fundamentally the same process occurred even
more dramatically with the incorporation into the system of previously unsatellized
regions. The expansion of Buenos Aires as a satellite of Great Britain and the intro-
duction of free trade in the interest of the ruling groups of both metropoles destroyed
the manufacturing and much of the remainder of the economic base of the previ-
ously relatively prosperous interior almost entirely. Manufacturing was destroyed by
foreign competition, lands were taken and concentrated into latifundia by the
rapaciously growing export economy, intraregional distribution of income became
much more unequal, and the previously developing regions became simple satellites

112 Andre Gunder Frank

of Buenos Aires and through it of London. The provincial centers did not yield to
satellization without a struggle. This metropolis–satellite conflict was much of the
cause of the long political and armed struggle between the Unitarists in Buenos
Aires and the Federalists in the provinces, and it may be said to have been the sole
important cause of the War of the Triple Alliance in which Buenos Aires, Montevideo,
and Rio de Janeiro, encouraged and helped by London, destroyed not only the
autonomously developing economy of Paraguay but killed off nearly all of its
population which was unwilling to give in. Though this is no doubt the most spec-
tacular example which tends to confirm the hypothesis, I believe that historical
research on the satellization of previously relatively independent yeoman-farming
and incipient manufacturing regions such as the Caribbean islands will confirm it
further. These regions did not have a chance against the forces of expanding and
developing capitalism, and their own development had to be sacrificed to that of
others. The economy and industry of Argentina, Brazil, and other countries which
have experienced the effects of metropolitan recovery since the Second World War
are today suffering much the same fate, if fortunately still in lesser degree.

VII

A third major hypothesis derived from the metropolis–satellite structure is that the
regions which are the most underdeveloped and feudal-seeming today are the ones
which had the closest ties to the metropolis in the past. They are the regions which
were the greatest exporters of primary products to and the biggest sources of capital
for the world metropolis and which were abandoned by the metropolis when for one
reason or another business fell off. This hypothesis also contradicts the generally
held thesis that the source of a region’s underdevelopment is its isolation and its pre-
capitalist institutions.

This hypothesis seems to be amply confirmed by the former super-satellite
development and present ultra-underdevelopment of the once sugar-exporting
West Indies, Northeastern Brazil, the ex-mining districts of Minas Gerais in Brazil,
highland Peru, and Bolivia, and the central Mexican states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas,
and others whose names were made world famous centuries ago by their silver.
There surely are no major regions in Latin America which are today more cursed by
underdevelopment and poverty; yet all of these regions, like Bengal in India, once
provided the life blood of mercantile and industrial capitalist development – in the
metropolis. These regions’ participation in the development of the world capitalist
system gave them, already in their golden age, the typical structure of underdevelop-
ment of a capitalist export economy. When the market for their sugar or the wealth
of their mines disappeared and the metropolis abandoned them to their own devices,
the already existing economic, political, and social structure of these regions prohib-
ited autonomous generation of economic development and left them no alternative
but to turn in upon themselves and to degenerate into the ultra-underdevelopment
we find there today.

The Development of Underdevelopment 113

VIII

These considerations suggest two further and related hypotheses. One is that the
latifundium, irrespective of whether it appears as a plantation or a hacienda today,
was typically born as a commercial enterprise which created for itself the institu-
tions which permitted it to respond to increased demand in the world or national
market by expanding the amount of its land, capital, and labor and to increase the
supply of its products. The fifth hypothesis is that the latifundia which appear
isolated, subsistence-based, and semi-feudal today saw the demand for their prod-
ucts or their productive capacity decline and that they are to be found principally in
the above-named former agricultural and mining export regions whose economic
activity declined in general. These two hypotheses run counter to the notions of
most people, and even to the opinions of some historians and other students of the
subject, according to whom the historical roots and socio-economic causes of Latin
American latifundia and agrarian institutions are to be found in the transfer of
feudal institutions from Europe and/or in economic depression.

The evidence to test these hypotheses is not open to easy general inspection and
requires detailed analyses of many cases. Nonetheless, some important confirma-
tory evidence is available. The growth of the latifundium in nineteenth-century
Argentina and Cuba is a clear case in support of the fourth hypothesis and can in no
way be attributed to the transfer of feudal institutions during colonial times. The
same is evidently the case of the postrevolutionary and contemporary resurgence of
latifundia particularly in the North of Mexico, which produce for the American
market, and of similar ones on the coast of Peru and the new coffee regions of Brazil.
The conversion of previously yeoman-farming Caribbean islands, such as Barbados,
into sugar-exporting economies at various times between the seventeenth and twen-
tieth centuries and the resulting rise of the latifundia in these islands would seem to
confirm the fourth hypothesis as well. In Chile, the rise of the latifundium and the
creation of the institutions of servitude which later came to be called feudal occurred
in the eighteenth century and have been conclusively shown to be the result of and
response to the opening of a market for Chilean wheat in Lima.4 Even the growth
and consolidation of the latifundium in seventeenth-century Mexico – which most
expert students have attributed to a depression of the economy caused by the decline
of mining and a shortage of Indian labor and to a consequent turning in upon itself
and ruralization of the economy – occurred at a time when urban population and
demand were growing, food shortages became acute, food prices skyrocketed, and
the profitability of other economic activities such as mining and foreign trade
declined. All of these and other factors rendered hacienda agriculture more profit-
able. Thus, even this case would seem to confirm the hypothesis that the growth of
the latifundium and its feudal-seeming conditions of servitude in Latin America has
always been and still is the commercial response to increased demand and that it
does not represent the transfer or survival of alien institutions that have remained
beyond the reach of capitalist development. The emergence of latifundia, which
today really are more or less (though not entirely) isolated, might then be attributed

114 Andre Gunder Frank

to the causes advanced in the fifth hypothesis – i.e., the decline of previously profit-
able agricultural enterprises whose capital was, and whose currently produced
economic surplus still is, transferred elsewhere by owners and merchants who
frequently are the same persons or families. Testing this hypothesis requires still
more detailed analysis, some of which I have undertaken in a study on Brazilian
agriculture.

IX

All of these hypotheses and studies suggest that the global extension and unity of the
capitalist system, its monopoly structure and uneven development throughout its
history, and the resulting persistence of commercial rather than industrial capitalism
in the underdeveloped world (including its most industrially advanced countries)
deserve much more attention in the study of economic development and cultural
change than they have hitherto received. Though science and truth know no national
boundaries, it is probably new generations of scientists from the underdeveloped
countries themselves who most need to, and best can, devote the necessary attention
to these problems and clarify the process of underdevelopment and development. It
is their people who in the last analysis face the task of changing this no longer accept-
able process and eliminating this miserable reality.

They will not be able to accomplish these goals by importing sterile stereotypes
from the metropolis which do not correspond to their satellite economic reality and
do not respond to their liberating political needs. To change their reality they must
understand it. For this reason, I hope that better confirmation of these hypotheses
and further pursuit of the proposed historic, holistic, and structural approach may
help the peoples of the underdeveloped countries to understand the causes and
eliminate the reality of their development of underdevelopment and their underde-
velopment of development.

Notes

1 América Latina, Año 6, No. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1963), p. 8.
2 Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Los centros coordinadores indigenistas (Mexico City, 1962),

p. 34.
3 Ibid., pp. 33–4, 88.
4 Mario Góngora, Origen de los “inquilinos” de Chile central (Santiago: Editorial Universi-

taria, 1960); Jean Borde and Mario Góngora, Evolución de la propriedad rural en el Valle
del Puango (Santiago: Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad de Chile); Sergio
Sepúlveda, El trigo chileno en el mercado mundial (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria,
1959).

The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Globalization and Development: Recurring Themes

Why Are the Poor Countries Poor? Diverging Opinions
Social Turmoil and the Classical Thinkers
Becoming Modern
Dependency Theory and World-Systems Analysis
From Development to Globalization
Notes

• Part I Formative Approaches to Development and Social Change

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 1 Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Alienated Labour (1844)
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Alienated Labour
Chapter 2 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
Chapter 3 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
The Five Stages-of-Growth – A Summary
Notes
Chapter 4 Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (1962)
The Elements of Backwardness
The Banks
The State
The Gradations of Backwardness
Ideologies of Delayed Industrializations
Conclusions
Note
Chapter 5 A Study of Slum Culture: Backgrounds for La Vida (1968)
The Culture of Poverty
Notes
Chapter 6 Political Participation: Modernization and Political Decay (1968)
Modernization and Political Consciousness
Modernization and Violence
Notes

• Part II Dependency and Beyond

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 7 The Development of Underdevelopment (1969)
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Notes
Chapter 8 Dependency and Development in Latin America (1972)
Lenin’s Characterization of Imperialism
Imperialism and Dependent Economies
New Patterns of Capital Accumulation
New Forms of Economic Dependency
Some Political Consequences
Notes
Chapter 9 The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis (1979)
notes
Chapter 10 Taiwan’s Economic History: A Case of Etatisme and a Challenge to Dependency Theory (1979)
Introduction
The Colonial Period: 1895–1945
Land to the Tiller
Agriculture 1953–1968
Industrialization
The Taiwan Case and Dependency Theory
A Special Case
A Crisis of Labor
Notes
References
Chapter 11 Rethinking Development Theory: Insights from East Asia and Latin America (1989)
Introduction
Theoretical Perspectives on East Asian and Latin American Development: Perceptions and Misconceptions
The NICs in Historical and World-Systems Context
The Dynamic Interplay of Inward- and Outward-Oriented Industrialization
Dependent Development in Latin America and East Asia
The Emergent Global Manufacturing System: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis
Editors’ Note
References
Chapter 12 Interrogating Development: Feminism, Gender and Policy (1998)
Feminist Analysis versus Women and Development
Commonalities and Difference
Gender Interests and Emancipatory Projects
Domestic Groups: Cooperation, Conflict and Struggle
Feminisms and Green Fundamentalism
Gendered Economies: Relations of Production and Reproduction
Feminism as Deconstruction
Note
References
Chapter 13 Why Is Buying a “Madras” Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis (2004)
A Critique of Realist Commodity Chains and the Feminist Alternative
Distant Lands, Moral Ends
Producing Cotton: Changing Wage and Labor Relations in South India
Producing Femininities and Masculinities
Conclusion
Notes

• Part III What Is Globalization?

Introduction
Notes
Chapter 14 The New International Division of Labour in the World Economy (1980)
The Phenomenon
Main Tendencies in the Contemporary World Economy
Notes
Chapter 15 In Defense of Global Capitalism (2003)
Introduction
Poverty Reduction
Hunger
Democratization
Oppression of Women
Global Inequality
Reservations
Notes
Chapter 16 It’s a Flat World, After All (2005)
Chapter 17 The Financialization of the American Economy (2005)
Introduction
Two Views of Economic Change
Evidence for Financialization
Financialization and the Reorganization of Corporate Activity
Financialization and the Globalization of Production
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 18 The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of Globalization (2000)
Introduction
The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)
The Disclosure of Capitalist Globalization: Competitiveness
The Corporate Capture of Sustainable Development
Notes
Chapter 19 The Washington Consensus as Transnational Policy Paradigm: Its Origins, Trajectory and Likely Successor (2012)
The Washington Consensus as a Transnational Policy Paradigm
The Rise of the Washington Consensus
The Influence of the Washington Consensus
Notes
References
Chapter 20 The Crises of Capitalism (2010)

• Part IV Development after Globalization

Introduction
Note
Chapter 21 Global Crisis, African Oppression (2001)
The African Crisis Continues
Notes
Chapter 22 Agrofuels in the Food Regime (2010)
Introduction
Food Regimes and Development
The Twenty-First Century Agrarian Question
Corporate Food Regime Developments
Food Regime Ecology
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 23 Global Cities and Survival Circuits (2002)
Global Cities and Survival Circuits
Toward an Alternative Narrative about Globalization
Women in the Global City
New Employment Regimes in Cities
The Other Workers in the Advanced Corporate Economy
Producing a Global Supply of the New Caretakers: The Feminization of Survival
Government Debt: Shifting Resources from Women to Foreign Banks
Alternative Survival Circuits
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 24 What Makes a Miracle:: Some Myths about the Rise of China and India (2008)
Chapter 25 Foreign Aid (2006)
Introduction
Donors and recipients
Aid, Growth and Development
Donor Relationships with Recipient Countries
Summary and conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 26 The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (2011)
The Political Trilemma of the World Economy
Designing Capitalism 3.0
Notes

• Part V Global Themes Searching for New Paradigms

Introduction
Chapter 27 A New World Order (2004)
Regulators: The New Diplomats
Notes
References
Chapter 28 Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998)
What Is a Transnational Advocacy Network?
Why and How Have Transnational Advocacy Networks Emerged?
The Boomerang Pattern
The Growth of International Contact
How Do Transnational Advocacy Networks Work?
Under What Conditions Do Advocacy Networks Have Influence?
Issue Characteristics
Actor Characteristics
Toward a Global Civil Society?
Notes
Chapter 29 Multipolarity and the New World [Dis]Order: US Hegemonic Decline and the Fragmentation of the Global Climate Regime (2011)
Introduction
Copenhagen and Climate Justice
Multipolarity and the New World (Dis)Order
US Hegemonic Decline: Applying the Lens of Arrighi and Silver
Discussion and Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 30 Changing Global Norms through Reactive Diffusion: The Case of Intellectual Property Protection of AIDS Drugs (2012)
Making and Remaking of Global Norms: Current Views
Reactive Diffusion and Accumulated Experiences
From TRIPS to Doha and Beyond
Discussion
Notes
References
Chapter 31 Development as Freedom (1999)
Introduction: Development as Freedom
The Perspective of Freedom
The Ends and the Means of Development
Poverty as Capability Deprivation
Markets, State and Social Opportunity
Notes
Chapter 32 From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labor Studies (2010)
False Optimism
Grounding Globalization
Reconstructing Polanyi
Notes
Chapter 33 The Developmental State: Divergent Responses to Modern Economic Theory and the Twenty-First-Century Economy (2014)
The Recent Evolution of Development Theory
The Twentieth-Century Developmental State
A Historical Shift in the Character of Development
The Programmatic Implications of New Theory and New Circumstances
Does the Twenty-First Century Spell the Transformation or the Demise of the Developmental State?
Notes
References

• Index
• End User License Agreement

DEVELOPMENT and
SOCIAL CHANGE

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

SIXTH EDITION

PHILIP McMICHAEL
Cornell University

fSAGE
Los Angeles I London I New Delhi

Singapore I Washington DC

A Timeline of Development
WORLD
FRAMEWORK

POLITICAL
ECONOMY

SOCIAL GOALS

DEVELOPMENT
[Model]

MOBILIZING
TOOL

MECHANISMS

VARIANTS

MARKERS

Deveiopmentalism (1940s-1970s)

State-Regulated Markets (Keynesianism)
Public Spendin

g

Social Contract and Redistribution
National Citizenship

Industrial Replication
National Economic Sector Complementarity
[Brazil, Mexico, India]

Nationalism (Post-Colonialism)

Import-Substitution Industrialization (!SI)

Public Investment (Infrastructure, Energy)
Education
Land Reform

First World (Freedom of Enterprise)
Second World (Central Planning)
Third World (Modernization via Development Alliance)

~retton
‘woods
,(1944)

Cold War Begins
(1946)

Marshall Plan
(1946)

Korean War
(1950-53)

Vietnam War
(1964-75)

Alliance for Progress
(1961)

Uajted Nations
(1943)

Non-Aligned Group of World
Movement Forum 77 (G-77) Economic
(1955) (1964) Forum (1970)

T •
‘

FIRST DEVELOPMENT SECOND DEVELOPMENT
DECADE DECADE

1940. 1950 1960

1970

INSTITUTIONAL I ~odd PL-480 (1954) UNCTAD
(1964) DEVELOPMENTS Bank,

( IMF,

(GAIT
(1944)

US_$ as Reserve Currency

COMECON (1947)

Eurodollar/offshore $ market

,.

Globalism (1980s-2000s)

Self-Regulating Markets (Monetarism)

Public Downsizing

Private Initiative and Global Consumerism
Multi-Layered Citizenship and Recognition

Participation in World Market
Global Comparative Advantage

[Chile, South Korea; NAFTA]

Markets and Credit
Financialization

Export-Orientation
Privatization

Entrepreneurialism

Public and Majority-Class Austerity

National Structural Adjustment (Opening Economies)

Regional Free Trade Agreements

Global Governance

Oil Crises

(1973, 1979)

Cold War “New World

Ends (1989) Order”

Debt Regime WTORegime

New International Economic Chiapas Revolt
Order Initiative (1994)
(1974)

Group of 7 (G-7) Earth Kyoto Group of MDGs
(1975) Summit Protocol 20 (G-20) (2000)

(1992) (1997) (1999)

Imperial Wars
(2001-)

Climate Regime

Islamic State

(2013-?)

World Social Forum
(2001)

Stern IAASTD SDGs
Report Report (2015)
(2006) (2008)

“LOST DECADE” “GLOBALIZATION DECADE”

1970

Offshore Banking

1980 1990

GATT Uruguay

Round(1986-1994)

IPCC (1988)

UNFCCC (1988)

2000

NAFTA (1994)

WTO (1995)

Structural Adjustment Loans “Governance” /HIPC Loans

Glasnost/Perestroika

Public Private
Partnerships

I

Development

Theory and Reality

Development, today, is increasingly about how we survive the future, rather than how we improve on the past. While ideas of human prog-
ress and material improvement still guide theory and policy making, how we
manage “energy descent” and adapt to serious ecological deficits, climatic
disruption, and social justice effects will define our existence. How will this
change our understanding and practice of development?

A central issue is how effectively policy makers (in states and develop-
ment agencies) recognize the need for wholesale public coordination of plan-
ning to minimize and adapt to inevitable climatic changes. Plenty of new
ideas, practices, and policies are surfacing, but more as a cacophony rather
than a strategic endeavor to reverse our ecological footprint (see Glossary

/

Index for bolded definitions). For example, while the Chinese government is
strategic in promoting green technology, China-the major offshore assem-
bly zone for global commodities-leads in global greenhouse gas emissions
(one-third).

1

Climate summits tend to confirm ambivalence of governments
held hostage to domestic growth policies-whether these governments are
from the global North or the global South. Across this historic divide, there
is now a shared global crisis of unemployment and debt, compounding the
challenges of development futures with rising inequalities.

Not only are there increasingly evident biophysical limits to development
as we know it, but development is now compromised by public austerity
policies across the nation-state system, most recently evident in Greece.

1

2 Development and

Social Change

Such policies, introduced to the global South from the 1980s, now shape
northern societi~s and their interrelations. All over, the development ideal of
a social contra.ct between governments and citizens is crumbling as hard-won
social rights ancl public entitlements erode, generating despair, disillusion-
ment, or disorder as citizens protest cutbacks. Arguably, “development” is
not only in crisi~ but is a’iso at a significant turning point in its short history
as a master concept of (Western-oriented) social science and cultural life.

This book is a guide to the rise and transformation of “development” as
a powerful instrument of global social change over the last two centuries.
From one (long-term) angle, it appears increasingly cometlike: a brilliant
lodestar for ordering the world, but perhaps destined to burn out as its
energy-intensive foundations meet their -limits. From another (immediate)
angle, the energy and inequality dilemma forces renewed critical thinking
about how humans might live sustainably and equitably on the planet. These
perspectives are the subjects of chapters to come. Here, we are concerned
with the source and maturation of development as a master concept-both
its promises and its paradoxes.

Development: History and Politics

Development had its origins in the colonial era, as European domination
came to be understood as superiority and leadership along a development
axis. Global in its origins, the meaning of development nevertheless com-
pared European accomplishments with societies increasingly disrupted by
imperial ventdres. While such accomplishments came with substantial envi-
ronmental and social-and often violent-upheaval, they have been repre-
sented in theo,ry as a set’ bf idealized outcomes to be emulated by other
countries. Accordingly, development’s ends justify its means, however
socially and eci’ologically disruptive the process may be.

Here, Michael Cowan and Robert Shenton’s distinction between devel-
opment as an’ unfolding universal social process and development as a
political intervention is useful. In the nineteenth century, development was
understood philosophically as improving humankind (in the form of
knowledge btlilding, technological change, and wealth accumulation). In
relation to this, European political elites interpreted development practi-
cally, as a way ‘to socially engineer emerging natiohal societies. Elites
formulated government policy to manage the social transformations
attending the rise of capitalisn1 and ·inaustrial technologies, so develop-
ment was identified witli both inclustriali’zation and the regulation of its
disruptive social impacts. These’ impacts began with the displacement of

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CHAPTER I: Development 3

rural populations by land enclosures for cash cropping, a process that
generated “undesirables,” such as menacing paupers, restless proletarians,
and unhealthy factory towns. 2 Development, then, meant balancing tech-
nological change and the rise of new social classes, fashioning policies to
manage wholesale social transformations. At the same time, such transfor-
mations became the catalyst of competing political visions-liberal, social-
ist, conservative-of the ideal society.

In Europe’s colonies, the inhabitants appean;d undeveloped-by self-
referential (evolutionary) European standards. This ,ideqlogical understand-
ing of development legitimized imperial intervention, whether to plunder or
civilize. Either way, the social engineering impulse framed European imperi-
alism. Not only did massive colonial resource extraction facilitate European
industrialization, but European colonial administrators also managed sub-
ject populations experiencing their own wrenching social transformations.
Thus, development assumed an additional, normative meaning, namely, the
“white man’s burden”-the title of a poem by nineteenth-century English
poet Rudyard Kipling-imparting honor to an apparently noble task. The
implied racism remains a part of the normative understanding (and global
consequence) of development.

Thus, development extended modern social engineering to colonies incor-
porated into the European orbit. Subject populations were exposed to a
variety of new disciplines, including forced labor schemes, schooling, and
segregation in native quarters. Forms of colonial subordination differed
across time and space, but the overriding object was either to adapt or mar-
ginalize colonial subjects to the European presence. In this sense, develop-
ment involved a relation of power. For example, British colonialism
introduced the new English factory-model “Lancaster school” to the
(ancient) city of Cairo in 1843 to educate Cairo’s emerging civil service.
Egyptian students learned the new disciplines of a developing society that
was busily displacing peasant culture with plantations of cotton for export
to English textile mills and managing an army of migrant labor, which was
building an infrastructure of roads, canals, railways, telegraphs, and ports. 3

Through the colonial relation, industrialism transformed both English and
Egyptian society, producing new forms of social discipline among working-
and middle-class citizen-subjects. And while industrialism produced new
class inequalities within each s~ciety, colonialism racialized international
inequality. In this way, development introduced new class and racial hierar-
chies within and across societies.

While development informed modern narratives in the age of industrial-
ism and empire, it only became formalized as a project in the mid-twentieth
century. This period ~as the high tide of decolonization, as the Western

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4 Development and Social Change

(British, Italia~, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Belgian) and
Japanese empires succumbed to the moral force of anticolonial resistance and
when a stand~r~izing concept-development as an emancipatory promise-
became the new global ontology (a way of seeing/ordering the world).

In 1945, the United Nations, with the intent of expanding membership as
colonies gained \ndependence as sovereign states, institutionalized the Sys-
tem of National Accounts. A universal quantifiable measure of development,
the gross national product (GNP), was born. At this point, the colonial rule
of subjects under the guise of civilizing inferior races morphed into the devel-
opment project, based on the ideal of self-governing states composed of citi-
zens united by the ideology of nationalism. And by the twenty-first century,
the global development project focused. on market governance of and by
self-maximizing consumers. Given this trajectory, development is conven-
tionally understood as economic growth and rising consumption.

Development Theory

Identifying development with rising consumption privileges the market as
the vehicle of social change. The underlying philosophy-deriving from a
popular (but limiting) interpretation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations 4 and formalized in neoclassical economic theory-is that markets
maximize indiyiaual preferences and allocate resources efficiently. Whether
this theory reflects reality or not, it is a deeply held belief now institutional-
ized in much development policy across the world. Why is this the case?

Naturalizing Development
1

There are two ways to answer this question. First, a belief in markets is a
central tenet bf.liberal Western philosophy. Hungarian philosopher Karl
Polanyi noted that modern liberalism rests on a belief in a natural human
propensity £or, self-gain, which translates in economic theory as the market
principle-reaJi~ed as consumer preference. 5 Self-gain, expressed through
the market, drives the aspiration for improvement, aggregated as consump-
tion. Second, as Polanyi noted, to naturalize market behavior as an innate
propensity discounts other human traits or values-such as cooperation,
redistributiont and reciprocity, which are different organizing principles by
which human,_ societies have endured for centuries. For Polanyi and other
classical social theorists, pursuit of individualism via an ecohomic calculus
is quite novel in the history and makeup of human societies artd quite spe-
cific to modernity, rather than being inherent in human social life.

CHAPTER 1: Development 5

While cooperative values are clearly evident today in human interac-
tions, the aspiration for improvement, normalized now as a private motiva-
tion, informs development. That is, well-being and self-improvement center
on access to goods and services through the marketplace. Dating from the
mid-twentieth century, in an era of powerful anticolonial, labor, and citizen-
ship movements, formulations of development paired private consumption
with public provisions-infrastructure, education, health, water supply,
commons, clean air, and so forth. The mid-twentieth century was the
heyday of the welfare, or development, state. But from the last quarter of
the twentieth century, provisioning has increasingly been subjected to
privatization, as the market, rather than the state, becomes the medium
through which society develops.

This outcome was prefigured in one of the most influential theories of
development emerging in the post-World War II world. In 1960, economist
Walt Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto,6 outlining a development theory that celebrates the Western model
of free enterprise-in contrast to a state-planned economy. The “stages” tra-
verse a linear sequence, beginning with “Traditional Society” (agrarian, lim-
ited productivity) and moving through “Preconditions for Take-Off” (state
formation, education, science, banking, profit-systematization), “Take-Off”
(normalization of growth, with investment rates promoting the expanded
reproduction of industry), and “Maturity” (the second industrial revolution
that moved from textiles and iron to machine-tools, chemicals, and electrical
equipment)-and finally to the “Age of High Mass-Consumption,” charac-
terized by the movement from basic to durable goods, urbanization, and a
rising level of white-collar versus blue-collar work.

This evolutionary sequence, distilled from the US experience, represents
the consumer society as the terminal stage of a complex historical process.
Rostow viewed the US model as the goal to which other (i.e., developing)
societies should aspire, which partly explains his book’s subtitle-expressing
the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union at the
time. The theorization of development as a series of evolutionary stages
naturalizes the process, whether it occurs on a national (development era) or
an international (globalization era) stage. Mass consumption was a final
goal to be realized through membership of the “free world” at the time, and
by implication, US assistance would be available to spur the Third World of
postcolonial, developing nations into progress along the stages.

However, note that Rostow’s “development blueprint” depended on a
political context. That is, markets required creating, securing, and protecting
(by a development state). They could not be natural. And development was
neither spontaneous nor inevitable; rather, it was shaped by social struggle,

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6 Development and Social Change

and it required, an institutional complex on a world scale (a development
project) to nurture it along, complete with trade, monetary, and investment
rules, aid regI~es, and a military umbrella-all of which were supplied
through postwar, multilateral institutions and bilateral arrangements led by
the United States. In this way, a theory of spontaneous markets diverges
from reality. B~t reality was nonetheless shaped by this theory-informing
public discourse and translated into policy implementation via an increasing
market calculus. This is a central paradox explored in this book.

Global Context

Reality is more complicated than it first appears. For example, Rostow’s
prescriptions artificially separated societies from one another. This may
have expressed the idealism of mid-twentieth-century nationalism. But to
assign stages of growth to societies without accounting for their unequal
access to offshore resources discounted a fundamental historic relationship
between world regions shaped by colonial and investment patterns. Not
only did European powers once depend on their colonies for resources. and
markets, but these patterns continued in the postcolonial era. Because of
continuing First•World dependence on raw materials from the Third World,
some societies were more equal than others in their capacity to traverse
Rostow’s stages, in part because resource extraction was one way, as we
shall see in Chapter 4. ·

It was this reality that stimulated dependency analysis and world-system
analysis. The cbncept of “dependency” (referring to unequal economic rela-
tions between metropolitan societies and non-European peripheries) emerged
in the mid-twentieth century from several quarters-an empirical observa-
tion by econoipist Hans Singer that “peripheral” countries were exporting
more and more natural resources to pay for increasingly expensive manufac-
tured imports; ;ah argument by Singer’s collaborator, Argentinean economist
Raul Prebisch, that Latin American states should therefore industrialize
behind protective tariffs on manufactured imports; and earlier Marxist theo-
ries of exploit:{tiye imperialist relations between the European and the non-
European world. 7 Dependency was, then, a relationship accounting for the
development df Europe at the expense of the underdevelopment of the non-
European world. Economist Andre Gunder Frank put it this way:

[H]istorical i;esearch demonstrates that contemporary underdevelopment is in
large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other
relations betwe,en the satellite underdeveloped and the now-developed metro-
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CHAPTER 1: Development 7

find that each of the satellites … serves as an instrument to suck capital or
economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part of this surplus
to the world metropolis of which all are satellites.8

World-system analysis, advanced by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein,
deepened the concept of dependency by elevating the scope of the modern
social system to a global scale. States became political units competing for-or
surrendering-resources within a world division of labor. Here, regional labor
forces occupy a skill/technological hierarchy associated with state strength or
weakness in the capitalist world economy.9 From this perspective, the “core”
concentrates capital-intensive or intellectual production and the “periphery” is
associated with lower-skilled, labor-intensive production, whether plantation
labor, assembly of manufactured goods, or routine service work (e.g., call
centers). As we shall see, this kind of geographical hierarchy is increasingly
complicated by what journalist Thomas Friedman calls “flat world” processes,
exemplified, for him, by India’s embrace of information technology.10

While dependency broadens the analysis of development processes to
world-scale relationships, challenging the assumption that societies are
aligned along a self-evident spectrum of growth stages, it implies a
“development-centrism”-where (idealized Western) development is the
term of reference. In this regard, Wallerstein has argued that given the power
hierarchy of the world system, (idealized Western) development represents a
“lodestar,” or master concept, of modern social theory.11 As such, the privi-
leging of Western-style development denied many other collective/social
strategies of sustainability or improvement practiced by non-Western cul-
tures. Nevertheless, while measuring all societies against a conception of
(industrial) development may have seemed the appropriate goal for modern-
ization and dependency theory at mid-century, from the vantage point of the
twenty-first century it is quite problematic. The growing recognition that the
planet cannot sustain the current Western-emulating urban-industrial trends
in China and

India

is one dramatic expression of this new reality.

Agrarian Questions

Urbanization is a defining outcome of development and the “stages of
growth” metaphor, where “tradition” yields to “modernity” as industrial-
ization deepens and nurtures it. Political scientist Samuel Huntington, writ-
ing about the process of modernization in Political Order and Changing
Societies (1968), claimed, “Agriculture declines in importance compared to
commercial, industrial, and other nonagricultural activities, and commercial
agriculture replaces subsistence agriculture.” 12 While this theoretical

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8 Development and Social Change

‘ sequence is clearly in evidence and has informed policies discounting small-
scale farming, ~here is a further question regarding whether and to what
extent this is i:ia:tural, or inevitable. And this in turn raises questions about
the model of separate national development. In fact, the demise of millions
of small produ<;ers has foreign, or international, origins-in the form of colonialism, foreign aid, and unequal market relations-expressing the global power relations identified by dependency and world-system analysts. How we perceive these changes is the ultimate question: We know, for instance, that agricultural productivity ratios across high- and low-input farming systems have risen from 10:1 before 1940 to 2,000:1 in the twenty- first century, 13 putting small producers (primarily in the global South) at a competitive disadvantage in the global market. Even as social changes occur within nations, does that mean the change is "internally" driven? Thus, if subsistence agriculture declines or disappears, is this because it does not belong on a society's "development ladder"? 14 Or is it because of an expo- sure of smallholders to forces beyond their control, such as unequal world market competition by agribusiness?

Small farming cultures are represented as development “baselines”-in
theory and in practice, given modern technology’s drive to replace labor and
control producti’on (with commercial inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and pes-
ticides along with farm machinery). Unrecognized is the superior capacity or
potential in surviving agrarian cultures for managing and sustaining their
ecosystems COIJ;lpared to industrial agriculture, which attempts to override
natural limits with chemicals and other technologies that deplete soil fertil-
ity, hydrological cycles, and biodiv:ersity.15 The current “global land grab”
depends on representing land in the global South as “underutilized” and
better employed by conversion to commercial agricultural estates producing
foods and biofpels largely for export. 16 Such activities raise a fundamental
question as to’whether and to what extent development-as modeled-is
inevitable or int~tional, and national or international.

Ecological Questions
f :

This example of conversion of farming into an industrial activity under-
scores a significant ecological blindspot in development theory. Where the
passage from ~mall farming to large-scale (commercial) agriculture is rep-
resented as improvement, or development, it is an insufficient measure if it
does not take into account the “externals.” These are the significant social
and environmental impacts, such as disruption of agrarian cultures and
ecosystems, the deepening of dependency on fossil fuel, and modern
agriculture’s responsibility for up to a third of greenhouse gas emissions
(GHG). Such consequentes challenge the wisdom of replacing a

CHAPTER 1: Development 9

long-standing knowledge-intensive culture/ecology (farming) with an
increasingly unsustainable industrialized economic sector (agriculture).

One key example of this ecological blindspqt is its reproduction in the
Human Development Index (HDI), constructed by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990. The HDI overcame the singular
emphasis on economic growth as development, but carried forward the
absence of the ecological dimension:

The concept of human development focuses on the ends rather than the means
of development and progress. The real objective of development should be to
create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative
lives. Though this may appear to be a simple truth, it is often overlooked as
more immediate concerns are given precedence.17

While the HDI is known for its more robust measurement of (human)
development, its data sources have lacked environmental content. This is
particularly so, given that humanity has now overshot the earth’s biocapac-
ity (see Figure 1.1). Focusing on the outcomes of development discounts

, Figure 1:1 Humanity’s Ecological Footprint

1.5

…
Q.)

..a
8
;:l
~ 1.0 .__,
….. ,.-.,

‘&

~

….. t’d

g

f.L1

i:,.. …..
….. 0

t’d 0.5 u
‘6h
0

0
u

f.L1

0.0
1961 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2006

D Built-up Land ll Forest Land II Fishing Ground

11111 Grazing Land II Cropland Ill Carbon Footprint

Source: Global Footprint Network, 2010 National Footprint Accounts.

10 Development and Social Change

how we live on
I

the earth-that is, measuring what practices are sustainable
or not. It was only in 2011 that the UNDP began to embrace an ecological
sensibility. Thus, the Human Development Report (2011) is “about the
adverse reperc’u~sions of environment degradation for people, how the poor
and disadvantaged are worst affected, and how greater equity needs to be
part of the solntion.” 18

Given the UNDP’s reputation for questioning conventional wisdom, this
new focus complements the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which
noted that the last half century of human action has had the most intensive
and extensive negative impact on world ecosystems ever, and yet this has
been accompanied by continuing global gains in human well-being.19 Known
as the “environmentalist’s paradox” (sin~e we might expect ecosystem deg-
radation to negatively affect human well-being), researchers have noted that
average measures of well-being may reduce the validity of this claim, but
perhaps more significantly, “technology has decoupled well-being from
nature” and time lags will only tell.20 In other words, mastery of nature may
be effective in the short-term in generating rising consumption patterns, but
also in masking the long-term health implications of ecosystem stress. What
such research suggests is that development needs a robust sustainability
dimension-as suggested at the end of this book in the section on sustainable
development approaches.

DEVELOPMENT PARADOXES .

‘The environmentalist’s paradox, wh

0

en inverted, is, in fact, a “clevelopment f
paradox.” Folmer World Bank economist Herman Daly formulated this as an I
“impossibility;’tbeorem”-namely, that the universalization of US-style high

8 mass-consumption economy would require several planet Earths. Eithet way, I
the ultimate paradox here is that the environment is not equipped to absorb its ,
unrelenting exploitation by the current growth model of endless accumulation. fi
In other words: development as we know it is undermining itself. fil

Three of tthe nine designatecl.plan;tary operational boundaries have
1

been crossed already-climate change, biodivers~ty, ‘and the nitrogen cycle- 11
while others.such as fresh water use and oceanic,acidification are at serious I
tipping points. Meanwhile, the costs of environmental degradation are uu
borne disproportionately by the poor-the very same people targeted by the
development industry. This is a key development paradox. Related to these

CHAPTER 1: Development 11

formulations is the notion (advanced by the World Bank in 1992) that eco-
riomic growth is a condition for sustainable development, which the UK
Stern Review o( 2006 termed a paradox since the cost of climate change
adapta,tion would bE: far greater if w~ wait fpr higher future levels of ,wealth,
to address the prpblem.

Some subsidiary ~aradoxes in~ude such questions as these: Are low-
carbon cultures,that live with rath~r than seek to master nature backward?
Are. non-Western cultures judged poor in what makes Western cultures rich?
ls frugality poverty? Why is malnutrition common to Western and non-
Western cultures (see figure 1.2)? Are non-Western cultures rich in what
Western cultures are now poor (nonmonetized items such as open space,
leisure, solidarity, ecological knowledge)? Should we measure living stan-
dards only in.monetary terms?

Sources: FostJlr (2011 ); Stern {2U06)t DalyJ1990).

Figlll’e h2 Percentage of ,Poputation That Is Malnouri§hed and, Overweight

Overweight Malnourished

USA

Source: Adapted from New Internationalist 353 (2003): 20.

Overweight Malnourished
India

12 Development and Social Change

I
Social Change

As we have setn, development theory provides a blueprint, and justification,
for universalizing a European-centered process. European industrialization
depended on di&placing non-European industry and capturing non-European
resources (lab’o~, minerals, raw materials, and foodstuffs). Such colonial
intervention was justified as a civilizing mission-asked what he thought of
British civilization, the leader of India’s independence movement, Mahatma
Gandhi, reputedly replied, “It would be a good idea.” Of course, colonial
subjects resisted-for example, the successful fate-eighteenth-century slave
uprising in the French colony of Saint Domingue (forming the Haitian free
state), but also the unsuccessful Amritsar rebellion, put down savagely by
British forces in India in 1919. Such uprisings marked a long-term politics
of decolonization, with colonial subjects gaining moral and material power
as countermovements to European empires, which in turn became increas-
ingly costly to maintain. Resistance to colonial relations-including substan-
tial peasant mobilizations from China to Mexico to Kenya-was matched
with labor uprisings and political organization during the late-colonial era.
The British faced widespread labor strikes in their West Indian and African
colonies in the 1930s, and this pattern continued over the next two decades
in Africa as British and French colonial subjects protested conditions in
cities, ports, mines, and on the railways. 21

In other words, large-scale social changes accompanying industrial

The divisive racial legacy of colonialism certainly did not disappear, but
a very divern!’world was bound together now by a universal principle: an
international governmental structure enshrining the meaning and measure-
ment of development as a national standard. Thjs was institutionalized in
the UN System of National Accounts, by which monetized economic activity
was recorded as gross national product (GNP). Outside of the Communist
bloc (also known as the Second World), as national economic growth and

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CHAPTER I: Development 13

income levels became the measure of development, so First- and Third-
World societies came to be governed by the market (and its metrics), with
varying degrees of public regulation.

The “market society” was the product of modern capitalism and com-
modification of the material world, expressed in monetary exchanges. As
Karl Marx pointed out, even human labor power came to be commodified,
as villagers lost their means of livelihood and were forced to work for mon-
etary wages.22 Karl Polanyi extended this observation to land and currency,
noting that with the rise of nineteenth-century market society each of these
substances came to be traded for a price. He argued that neither labor, land,
nor money were produced for sale, and so were really “fictitious commodi-
ties.” When these substances are treated as commodities, workers, farmers,
and businesses are exposed to exploitative or uncertain conditions. That is,
their labor, farming, or entrepreneurship experience competitive relations
beyond their control by a market with seemingly independent authority.
Accordingly, social countermovements would inevitably arise and advocate
for protection from unregulated markets (a “double movement”). The
resulting effect would be to re-embed markets within social/public controls.
In Polanyi’s account, this explains the origins of the twentieth-century wel-
fare state, which became a model for the development state. It arose out of
a European-wide social mobilization to protect the rights of workers, farm-
ers, and businesses from the ill effects of unrestrained markets. 23

The Projects as Historical Framework

Within the terms of this broad social-change theory, then, the postcolo-
nial world order emerged from the combined force of decolonization politics
and public initiatives to regulate capitalist markets (as distinct from the
Communist model of a state-planned economy). Development as an ideal
and as a policy carried forward the social welfare dimension, reinforced by
the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948), by which govern-
ments were enjoined to protect civil rights through a social contract between
state and citizen. This idealistic contract defined the era of the development
project (1940s-1980), rooted in public regulation of markets as servants of
states. The following era of the globalization project (1980s through the
present) saw markets regain ascendancy-with states as servants-and the
incorporation of the “good market, bad state” mantra into public discourse.
The tension between these poles continues in what may become a sustain-
ability project as the world transitions to a new project governed by environ-
mental stress and climate uncertainty.

14 Development and Social Change

I

Here, we frame the story of development around the three projects:
colonial, devel,opment, and globalization. This framework stresses that
the meaning, and practice of development changes with changing
political-economic (and environmental) conditions. The transition from
the development to the globalization project stemmed from a political
reversal “from above” by increasingly powerful business and financial
interests and their allies to reduce or eliminate public regulation of cor-
porations and their ability to operate across national borders. Deregula-
tion of markets has been the ultimate goal, legitimized by neoliberal
economic theory. And subsequent controversies over the impact of glo-
balization at the turn of the twenty-first century have been generated
by social mobilization “from below,” driven by economic destabiliza-
tion and intensification of social inequalities as markets have been
disembedded from social controls. 24

These protests, dramatized in 2011 by the Arab Spring and the Occupy
Movement among others, draw attention to the development paradox,
where poverty accompanies economic growth. This is evidenced in an
Oxfam report that 2016 marked the threshold of the top 1 percent of the
world’s population owning more than 50 percent of global wealth, 25 as well
as continuing aifood crisis that renders almost a billion people chronically
hungry.

26

The current ·market malaise and combination of crises-food, energy,
climate, socialt-suggests the world may transition toward another project,
which I would term the sustainability project. The dynamic that links these
projects, and accounts for their succession, can be thought of as a series of
Polanyian “dbuble movements”: politicization of market rule (for or
against) via social mobilization. The colonial p~oject, accbmpanying the rise
of capitalist rµarkets, yielded to the development project, as social and
decolonization .countermoverp.ents challenged the ascendancy of the market
in their respe

Currently, the crisis of the globalization project (addressed in Chapter 8)
is stimulating h wide range of sustainability initiatives at all scales, geared to
containing o/ reducing environmental degradation and climate warming.
How these miy coalesce into some kind of worlq ordering is not yet clear.
Whether we will see or make a more authoritarian world order built on
energy and clifu.ate security claims or some decentralized, ecologically based
social organization are some of the possibilities that are informing’ debate

CHAPTER I: Development 15

(see Chapter 9). In the meantime, we can situate our condition via some
“development coordinates.”

The Development Experience

Development is not an activity that other societies do to catch up to the
“developed societies.” That nomenclature is unfortunate, since it suggests a
condition enjoyed by citizens of the global North that is the goal and envy
of the rest of the world. Indeed, some argue that the West is busy “undevel-
oping,” as jobs relocate to growth areas such as China and India, as north-
ern public infrastructure decays, as social services such as education and
health care dwindle, and as ecosystems degrade. From this perspective,
development does not look like a linear process, nor is there a model out-
come since it is an uneven global dynamic.

From a global perspective, development redistributes jobs to lower-wage
regions. While transnational firms thereby enhance profitability, northern
consumers (at least those with incomes) enjoy access to low-cost

products

that are produced offshore. In this sense, development has been identified-
for its beneficiaries-as consumption. This, of course, corresponds with
Rostow’s final growth stage, but not as a national characteristic-rather as
a global relationship. Much of what we consume today has global origins.
Even when a product has a domestic “Made in … ” label, its journey to
market probably combines components and labor from production and
assembly sites located around the world. Sneakers, or parts thereof, might
be produced in China or Indonesia, blue jeans assembled in the Philippines,
a cell phone or portable media player put together in Singapore, and a watch
made in Hong Kong. The British savor organic vegetables from western
China, the Chinese eat pork fed with South American soy, and North
Americans consume fast foods that may include chicken diced in Mexico or
hamburger beef from cattle raised in Costa Rica. And, depending on taste,
our coffee is from Southeast Asia, the Americas, or Africa. We readers may
not be global citizens yet, but we are certainly global consumers.

But global consumers are still a minority. While over three-quarters of the
world’s population can access television images of the global consumer, only
half of that audience has access to sufficient cash or credit to consume.
Television commercials depict people everywhere consuming global com-
modities, but this is just an image. We know that much of the world’s popu-
lation does not have Internet access (despite increasingly ubiquitous mobile
phones), and we know that a relative minority of the world’s population
consumes a vast majority of global goods and services.27 Distribution of, and

16 Development and Social Change

access to, the w~rld’s material wealth is extraordinarily uneven. Almost half
of the ex-colonial world dwells now in slums. Over three billion people can-
not, or do not/consume in the Western style. Uruguayan writer Eduardo
Galeano mak~s0.’this observation:

Advertising ehj’oins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast
majority of humanity from doing so …. This world, which puts on a banquet
for all, then slams the door in the noses of so many, is simultaneously equal-
izing and unequal: equalizing in the ideas and habits it imposes and unequal in
the opportunities it offers.28

And yet it is important also to note tha,t while readers may be accustomed
to a commercial culture and view it as the development “standard,” other
cultures and peoples are noncommercial, not comfortable with commercial
definition, or are simply marginal (by choice or circumstance) to commercial
life. Contrary to media images, global consumerism is neither accessible
to-nor possible for-a majority of humans, nqr is it necessarily a universal
aspiration, whether by cultural choice for some peoples, or simply for others
needing to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis.

Nevertheless,: the global marketplace binds consumers, producers, and
even those marginalized by resource consumption. Consumers everywhere
are surrounded,, and often identified by, world products. One of the most
ubiquitous, amj yet invisible, world products is coltan, a metallic ore used in
consumer electronics, such as computers and cell phones, in addition to
nuclear reactors: It comes predomip.antly from the Congo, where militarized
conflict over this valuable resource has caused nearly four million deaths,
and mining has negative environmental consequences-for forests and wildlife.
Such ethical issues, similar to those associated with “blood diamonds,” have

f
driven some electronics corporations to mine coltan elsewhere in Africa.29

The global ¢donomy is a matrix of networks of commodity exchanges. In
any one networ~, there is a sequence of production stages, located in a num-
ber of countries at sites that provide inputs of labor and materials contribut-
ing to the fabrication of a final product (see Figure 1.3). These networks are

‘ ·,
called commodity chains. The chain metaphor illuminates the interconnec-
tions among pr-0ducing communities dispersed across the world. And it
allows us to understand that, when we consume a product, we often partici-
pate in a glogal process that links us to a variety of places, people, and
resources. While we may experience consumption-individually, it is a funda-
mentally soci:d-and environmental-act.

Commodity chains enable firms to switch production sites for flexible
management of their operations (and costs). Any shopper at The Gap, for

CHAPTER 1: Development 17

Figure 1.f A Commodity Chain for Athletic

Shoes

Shoe Box

United States

Tanned Leather

South Korea

Cowhide

United States

Distribution

North America,
Europe, etc.

Boxed Shoes

Indonesia

Polyurethane
Air SAC

United States
Shoes
Indonesia

Ethylene-Vinyl
Acetate Foam

South Korea

Petroleum

Saudi Arabia

Tissue Paper

Indonesia

Rainforest Trees

Indonesia

Synthetic Rubber

Taiwan

Benzene

Taiwan

Coal

Taiwan

Source: Adapted from Bill Ryan and Alan During, “The Story of a Shoe,” World Watch, March/
April 1998.

18 Development and Social Change

I

example, knows that this clothing retailer competes by changing its styles on
a short-term cysle. Such flexibility requires access through subcontractors to
labor forces, iptreasingly feminized, which can be intensified or let go as
orders and fashion changes. Workers for these subcontractors often have
little security-qr rights-as they are one of the small links in this global
commodity chain stretching across an often-unregulated global workplace.

The world was shocked in 2010 when 18 Chinese migrant workers
between 17 and 25 years old attempted suicide at Foxconn factories in
three Chinese provinces. Foxconn recorded profits that year in excess of
some of its corporate customers, such as Microsoft, Dell, and Nokia.
Foxconn-responsible for producing the iPhone4, the iPod, and the
iPad2–captures 50 percent of the world.electronics market share in manu-
facturing and service. 30

CASE STUDY

The disconnect between development theory and the environment is dramatized
by the problem of waste, c~pcealed in plain s~ght The fact that consumption
simultaneously produces waste is neither something consumers want to
acknowledge, hor does it feature in measures of economic growth. An·d yet
waste in gener~I. and electronic waste (e-waste) in particular, are huge and
problematic by-products of our lifestyle. The household electronics sector is
now the fast~;t growing segment of municipal waste streams, as computing
and commun1cation technologies rapidly evolve. The UN estimates the annual
global generation of waste from electrical· and ele~tronic equipment (WEEE)

• runs at a raff?:of between 20 million and 50 million tons. In 2009, the UN
. Envfronment’?rogramme (UNEP) reported that e-waste could increase by 500
· percent over th\ next decade in rising middle-income countries. The toxicity of

this waste is extraordinary: From 1994 to 2003, for example, disposar ‘of
personal computers released 718,000 tons of lead, 287 tons· of mercury, and
1,363 tons or ~dmium into landfills worldwide.

Cellular, or mobile, phones (l.2 billion sold globally in 2007) leach more than
17 times thi! l;.1$ federal threshold for hazardous waste. And yet the noxious

1

ingredients (including silver, copper, platinum, andzgold) are valued on second-
hand marke~, just as discarded e-waste may be recycled for reuse in poorer
markets-sometimes by businesses such as Collective Good, which donates a por-
tion of the profits to the Red Cross or the Humane Society. Refurbishing phones
occurs from Ghana to India, where labor co~ts are lower ang environmental

CHAPTER I: Development 19

regulations are less. About 70 percent of the world’s discarded e-waste finds its
way through informal networks to China, where it is scavenged for usable parts”-
often by children with ~o’ protection-and ~bandoned to pollute soil and ground-
water with toxic metals. Africa is one of the largest markets for discarded phones,
while China sells between 200 million and 300 million phones annually to deal-
ers in India, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Thailand, from where they may pass on to

,, buyers in Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Just as water seeks its own
level, unregulated markets enable toxic waste to leach into the global South.
While there are regulations regarding hazardous waste, the 170-nation agree-
ment cal fed the Basel Convention is ambiguous on the question of restricting the
movement of e-waste from North to South.

Why is’the current fixation on the virtuaf, or “dematerializedt information
economy unable to recognize the dependence on offshore manufa,cturing and
disposal of waste-both of which pose social and’environmental h’azards?

Sources: Schwarzer et al. (2005); Widmer et al., (2005); Mooallem (2008); Leslie (2008);
Salehabadi (2011 }. ‘

Not everything we consume has such global origins, but the trend toward
these worldwide supply networks is powerful. Our food, clothing, and shel-
ter, in addition to other consumer comforts, have increasingly long supply
chains. Take food, for example. Britain was the first nation to deliberately
“outsource” a significant part of its food supply to its empire in the 1840s.
In spite of the fact that the British climate is ideal for fruit production, 80
percent of pears and almost 70 percent of apples consumed by Britons now
come from Chile, Australia, the United States, South Africa, and throughout
the European Union. 31 The Dutch concept of “ghost acres” refers to addi-
tional land offshore used to supply a national diet. Britons are estimated to
use about 4.1 million hectares of ghost acres to grow mainly animal feed.32

Ghost acres include “food miles,” prompting the remark, “This form of
global sourcing … is not only energy-inefficient, but it is also doubtful
whether it improves global ‘equity,’ and helps local farmers to meet the goals
of sustainable development.” 33 In other words, much commercial agriculture
today is dedicated to supplying the global consumer rather than improving
production for domestic consumers. It is extroverted, rather than introverted
as in the Rostow schema.

Half of all [Guatemala’s] children under five are malnourished-one of the high-
est rates of malnutrition in the world. Yet the country has food in abundance.

20 Development and Social Change

It is the fifth largest exporter of sugar, coffee, and bananas. Its rural areas are
witnessing a P\l-lm oil rush as international traders seek to cash in on demand
for biofuels c.r~ted by US and EU mandates and subsidies. But despite being a
leading agro-e):porter, half of Guatemala’s 14 million people live in extreme
poverty, on less, than $2 a day.34

Globalization deepens the paradox of development by virtue of its sheer
scale. Integrating the lives of consumers and producers across the world does
not necessarily mean sharing the benefits of development globally. The dis-
tance between consumers and producers and th.eir environments means it is
virtually impossible for consumers to recognize the impact of their consump-
tion on people and environments elsew9-ere. At the other end, producers
experience the social distance in the difficulty in voicing concerns about
working conditions or the health of their habitats. Bridging this distance has
become the focus of initiatives such as fair trade, or brand boycotts orga-
nized by activist movements or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to
enhance transparency with information to support more responsible con-
sumption (paradoxically perpetuating dependency on tropical exports ver-
sus local food system development).

CASE STUDY

t
In a report, fating Up the Amazon, Greenpeace noted, “Europe buys half t~e
soya exporteq from the Amazon state of Matto Grosso, where 90% of rainforest
soya is grown. Meat reared on rainforest soya finds its way oo to supermarket
shelves and fast food counters across Europe.” As the Greenpeace website
claimed, “Nu~gets of Amazon forest were being served up on a platter at
McDonald’s r~~taurants throughout Europe.” Following this dramatic report,
McDonald’s ~l~’pped a moratorium on purchasing soya grown in newly
deforested regions of the rainforest and entered into an alliance with
Greenpeace, ‘al5d other food retailers, to develop a zero deforestation plan,
involving th#gpvernment in monitoring the integrity of the forest and of its
inhabitants, s.ome of whom had been enslaved and subjected to violence. The
global soy trld~rs-Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Dreyfus, and Maggi-‘made a two-year
commitment’to the alliance.

What is ail this about? Like many NGOs, Greenpeace made the unseen rela-
tions embodi,ed in chicken nuggets explicit. Documenting the ways in which
the Brazilian soy boom-with all its social and environmental consequences-is
a product of the fast-food diet, Greenpeace brought to light what is routinely

CHAPTER 1: Development 21

made invisible by the impersonai mar~tpl!3ce. ByJra~ing the soy chain-witp
the aid of satellite imageJ, aerial s4rveillance, cla~ified government docu-
ments, anci ~n-ground 6bservation-Greenpe!3ce rec~nstructed the geography
of the soy trade, bringing the ethical dimensions of their diet to consum~rs’
notice. -While traders can escape the notice of the consuming public, retaif;r5,

‘ have become “brand sensitive” in an era in yvJ:)ich information te~h~ology has”‘
created a new public space, and consumer~ have the ability to choose,not to
consu!T)e products that come ),Nith.baggage.

What is the value q{ fastJood compared with the value of ,preserving one
of the richest and;most biologically diverse rainforests on Jhe planet-espe-
cially.given that the scientific journal Nature recently warned that 40 percent
of the.Amazon rai~forest will .disappear’QY 2050 if current trends continue?
A”nd ,what is it about tpe market that conceals the consequences of ou_r
consumer choices?

Sou~e: Gree~peace, £~ting Up the Amazon, 2005

‘.

Ava
0

ilal:lle at www.greenpeace.org.

SUMMARY-

Development, conventionally associated with economic growth, is a recent
phenomenon. With the rise of capitalism, European rulers pursued economic
growth to finance their needs for military protection and political legitimacy.
But “development,” as such, was not yet a universal strategy. It became so
only in the mid-twentieth century, as newly independent governments
embraced development as an antidote to colonialism, with varying success.

The mid-twentieth-century development project (1940s-1970s) was an
internationally orchestrated program of nationally sited economic growth
across the Cold War divide, involving financial, technological, and military
assistance from the United States and the Soviet Union. In United Nations
terms, development was a timely ideal, as formerly colonized subjects gained
political independence, and all governments were enjoined to implement a
human rights-based social contract with their citizens, even as this ideal was
unevenly practiced. This book traces the implementation of this project,
noting its partial successes and ultimate failure, in its own terms, to equalize
conditions across the world, and the foreshadowing of its successor, the
globalization project, in laying the foundations of a global market that
progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the
initial post-World War II era.

22 Development and Social Change

I

The globalization project (1970s-2000s) superimposed open markets
across national boundaries, liberalizing trade and investment rules and

‘ privatizing pu~li’!= goods and services. Corporate rights gained priority over
the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking. The
neoliberal doctripe (“market freedoms”) underlying the globalization proj-
ect has been met ‘with growing contention, symbolized by the antineoliberal
social revolt in Latin America over the last decade, recent Middle East and
southern European rebellions against authoritarianism and austerity, and the
growing weight and assertiveness of the more state-regulated economies of
China (and India) in the world political economy. Polanyi’s double move-
ment is alive and well.

Whether the global market will remain .dominant is still to be determined.
In the meantime, 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 con-
trast to “improving on the past,” as in modernization).

Finally, development, as we know it, is not the same across time, nor is it
the same across space. It is uneven within and among societies. It has been,
and will continue to be, contentious. This book seeks to make sense of this
by emphasizing >,development paradoxes and providing students with a
“birds-eye” (gl~bal) perspective on development controversies not easily

7
seen from the gr~mnd.

FURTHER READING
‘ .

Berger, Mark, In.cl Heloise Weber. Rethinking the ,Third World. Houndsmill,
Basingstoke:,P:algrave Macmillan, 2014.

Crow, Ben, and Suresh K. Lodha. The Atlas of Globa,l Inequalities. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2011.

Esteva, Gustavo; Salvatore Babones, and Philipp Babcicky. The Future of Develop-
ment: A Ra!liqil Manifesto. Bristol, United Kingdom: Policy Press, 2013.

Galeano, Eduardo.- Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. New York:
Picador, 2000!

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Allen
Lane, 2014(

Payne, Anthony, and Nicola Phillips. Development. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Polity, 201(1

Perrons, Diane. Globalization and Social Change: People and Places in a J)ivided
World. London: Routledge, 2004.

/

CHAPTER 1: Development 23

Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London:
Verso, 2014.

Sage, Colin. Environment and Development. London: Routledge, 2011.
Willis, Katie. Theories and Practices of Development. London: Routledge, 2011.

SELECT WEBSITES

Eldis Gateway to Development Information: www.eldis.org
Global Exchange: www.globalexchange.org
New Internationalist: www.newint.org
Raj Patel: www.RajPatel.org
UNDP Human Development Reports: http://hdr.undp.org/en/
World Bank Development Report: http://wdronline.worldbank.org/

PART I
The

Development Project

(Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

..
‘

2
Instituting the

Development Project

As we have seen in Chapter 1, “development” emerged as a comparative construct, in context of European colonization of the non-European
world. Not only did the extraction of colonial resources facilitate European
industrialization; but this process also required colonial administrators to
manage subject,ipopulations adjusting to the extractive economy and mono-

‘ cultures, administering colonial rule for their masters, and experiencing
physical as well as psychic displacement. Here, development assumed an
additional meahing: the proverbial “white man’s burden,” underscoring its
racial dimension.

Non-Europep.h cultures were irrevocably changed through colonialism,
and the postcolonial context was founded on inequality. When newly inde-
pendent states ~rherged, political leaders had to negotiate an unequal inter-
national framework not of their making, ‘but through which their
governments acquired political legitimacy. How that framework emerged is
the subject of th~ chapter. But first we must address the historical context
of colonialism.

1

Colonialism

Our appeal to
1
history begins with a powerful simplification. It concerns

the social psychology of European colonialism, built largely around stereo-
types that have shaped perceptions and conflict for at least five centuries.

26

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 27

(Colonialism is defined and explained in the “What Is Colonialism?” box,
and the European colonial empires are depicted in Figure 2.1.) One such
perception was the idea among Europeans that non-European native peo-
ple or colonial subjects were “backward” and trapped in stifling cultural
traditions. The experience of colonial rule encouraged this image, as the
juxtaposition of European and non-European cultures invited comparison,
but through the lens of Europe’s missionary and military-industrial
engagement. This comparison was interpreted-or misinterpreted-as
European cultural superiority. It was easy to take the next step, viewing
the difference as “progress”-something colonizers had-to impart to
their subjects.

WHAT IS COLONIALISM?

.Colonialism is the subjugatio»by~hysical and psychological force of one cul- J
ture by another-a colonizing power-through military and economtc cqriquest bs
of territory and stereotyping the subordinated cultures. It predates the era of ~
European expansion (fr~in the fifteenth century to the twentieth .century) and l;·

t extends to Japanese colonialism fa the twentieth century and, most recently, w
Chrnese occupation of Tibet and Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. i
Colonialism has two forms: colonies of settler\Jent, which’often eliminate indig- j
enous people (such as the Spanish destruction, ofthe Aztec and Inca civiliza- t
tions in the Americas); and, colonies of rule, where colo.nial administrators T6
reorganize existing cultures by imposing new inequalities to facilitate their ~
exploitation. Examples of the latter were the British creating loc~I landlords, J~
zamindars, to rule parts of India; confiscating p(lrsonal and common la.nd for f
cash cropping; depriving women of their customary resources; and elevating i
ethnoracial differences, such as Rrivileging certain castes or tribe~ in the exer- I
cise of coloni~I rule. Outcomes are, first, th.e cultural genocide or margina!iza- ~
tion of indigenous ‘people; second, the introduction of new tensions around f;
class, gender, race, and caste that shape postcolonial societies; third, the f

W0

extraction of labor, cultural treasures, ant resources to enrich the colonial l:
power, its private interests, and public museums; fourth, the elaboration of f
ideologies justifying colonial rule, including racism and notions of backward- t
ness; and fifth, responses by colonial subjects, ranging from death to internal- ~.
ization. of jnf~riority to a variety of resistances-from everyday forms to sporadic ~.
uprisings to mass political mqbilization. )

N
00

: Figure 2.1 European Colonial Empires at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

~

• Austro-Hungarian \~~
\{‘.-:

.Belgian ~

.British

Elf Dutch
j: ·:·’.!French m Italian
t{{1 German ~ Japanese

~Ottoman ~ Russian
~Portuegese [ID] Spanish

.., ~ ‘ – .

‘
,,

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 29

Such a powerful misinterpretation-and devaluing-of other cultures
appears frequently in historical accounts. It is reflected in assumptions made
by settlers about indigenous people they encountered in the Americas and
Australasia. Europeans perceived Native Americans and aboriginal
Australians as people who did not “work” the land they inhabited. In other
words, the native populations had no right of “property”-a European con-
cept in which property is private and alienable. Their displacement from
their ancestral lands is a bloody reminder of the combined military power
and moral fervor with which the European powers pursued colonization. It
also foreshadowed the modern practice of rupturing the unity of the human
and natural world, a unity characterizing some non-European cultures.

In precolonial Africa, communities relied on ancestral ecological knowl-
edge and earth-centered cosmologies to sustain themselves and their environ-
ment. These methods were at once conservative and adaptive because, over
time, African communities changed their composition, scale, and location in
a long process of settlement and migration through the lands south of the
equator. European colonists in Africa, however, saw these superstitious cul-
tures as static and as only occupying-rather than improving-the land. This
perception ignored the complex social systems adapted first to African ecol-
ogy and then to European occupation. 1 Under these circumstances, Europeans
viewed themselves as bringing civilization to the nonwhite races. French his-
torian Albert Sarraut, ignoring non-European inventions such as gunpowder,
the compass, the abacus, moveable type printing, and the saddle, claimed,

It should not be forgotten that we are centuries ahead of them, long centuries
during which-slowly and painfully, through a lengthy effort of research,
invention, meditation and intellectual progress aided by the very influence of
our temperate climate-a magnificent heritage of science, experience, and
moral superiority has taken shape, which makes us eminently entitled to protect
and lead the races lagging behind us.2

The ensuing colonial exchange was captured in the postcolonial African
saying “When the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land.
When the white man left, we had the Bible and he had the land.” Under
colonialism, when non-Europeans lost control of their land, their spiritual
life was compromised insofar as it was connected to their landscapes. It ~as
difficult to sustain material and cultural integrity under these degrading
extractive processes and conditions. At the same time, European coloniza-
tion of natural resources converted land, water, cultivars, and food into
economic categories, discounting their complex regenerative capacities and
ecological interdependencies.

30 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

Development, European-style, thus came to be identified as the destiny of
all humankind.: The systematic handicapping of non-Europeans in this
apparently nattiral and fulfilling endeavor remained largely unacknowl-
edged, just as non-European scientific, ecological, and moral achievements,
and legacies in Eurdpeart culture, were generally ignored.

WHAT ARE SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF
PRECOLONIAL CULTURES?

~
All precolonial cultures had their own ways of satisfying thejr material and U
spiritual needs. Cultures varied by the differentiation among their members or .,
households ac;cording to their particular ecological .endowments and s~>eial ~
contact with other cultures. The variety ranged from small communities of ~

‘~ subsistence producers, who lived off the land or the forest, to extensive king- ,.,
,l’,

doms or states. Subsistence producers, organized by kin wlations, usually sub- ti
divided so<;ial tasks between men, who hunted and cleareq land for cultiv~tion, ··11 and wom;n, who cultivated and processed crops, harvested wild fruits and g nuts, and perfl>rmed household tasks. These cultures were highlX skilled in i
resource management and production to satisfy their·material needs. They ,~.
generally did not produce a surplus beyond what was required for their imme- t,

~!
diate needs, end they organized cooperatively-a “‘practice that often made 1t
them vulnerabl~ to intruders because they were not prepared for self-defense. I
Unli~e North ~inerican Indians, whose social organization prpvided leadership ff
for resistancd, some aboriginal cultures, such as those of Australia and the f
Amazon, lacked lepdership hierarchies and were more easily wiped out by set- tt
tiers. By c;on’3?t, the Mogul empire in seventeenth~century India h,ad a.corn· 1·: ..
plex hierarchical organization, bas,ed on local chiefdoms in whicn the chief .
presided ove{the village community and ensured tbat surpluses (monetary
taxes and produce) were delivered to a prosperous central court and “high
culture.” Village and urban arti~ans produced a rqnge of metal goods, pottery

,,

and crafts, inJhiding SQRhisticated muslins and silk~. C9~te distinctions, linked,
to previous invasiol)s, cqrresponded to divisions of labor, su.ch as trading, weav*
ing, cultivating; ruling, and ,,performing. unskilled labor\. ColonJzers typica!Jy
adapted such social and political hierarchies to rthe!r own ends-alienating
indigenous cCJltures from their natural ecologij;!s an,d their political ~stems
from their customary social functions, incubating tensions that havj;! beep
inherited by postcolonial states.

Sources: Bujra (1992); Rowley {1974).

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 31

The Colonial Division of Labor

From the sixteenth century, European colonists and traders traveled along
African coasts to the New World and across the Indian Ocean and the China
seas, seeking fur, precious metals, _slave labor, spices, tobacco, cacao,
potatoes, sugar, and cotton. The principal European colonial powers-
Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and Britain-and their merchant compa-
nies exchanged manufactured goods such as cloth, guns, and implements for
these products and for Africans taken into slavery and transported to the
Americas. In the process, they reorganized the world.

The basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction of
raw materials and production of primary products that were unavailable in
Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial
inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force. On a world scale, this
specialization between European economies and their colonies came to be
termed the colonial division of labor (see Figure 2.2).

While the colonial division of labor stimulated European industrializa-
tion, it forced non-Europeans into primary commodity production. Special-
ization at each end of the exchange set in motion a transformation of social
and environmental relationships, fueled by a dynamic relocation of resources
and energy from colony to metropolis: an unequal ecological exchange.3 Not
only were the colonies converted into exporters of raw materials and food-
stuffs, but they also became “exporters of sustainability. “4

r Figure 2.2 Distinguishing Between an In1:ernationat and a Natio11al Division of
Labor

European states

Manufactured
goods

Primary products

Colonial, or international,
division oflabor

Nation state

Industry

Manufactured
goods Primary

products

Agriculture

“Internal” division oflabor,
between national econo~c sectors

32 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

The colonial division of labor, as cause and consequence of economic
growth, exposed non-European cultures and ecologies to profound disorga-
nization, as c~lonies were converted into supply zones of labor and
resources. Local crafts and mixed farming systems were undermined, alien-
ating land and (orests for commercial exploitation and rupturing the eco-
logical balan~. Not only did non-European cultures surrender their
handicraft industries in this exchange, but also their agriculture was often
reduced to a specialized export monoculture, where local farmers produced
a single crop, such as peanuts or coffee, for export, or plantations (sugar,
cotton, tea, rubber, bananas) were imposed on land appropriated from those
who became plantation laborers. Systems of export agriculture interrupted
centuries-old patterns of diet and cultivation, creating the all-too-familiar
commercial food economy, in which “what was grown became disconnected
from what was eaten, and for the first time in history, money determined
what people ate and even if they ate. “5

Handicraft decline was often deliberate and widespread. Perhaps the best-
known destruction of native crafts occurred through Britain’s conquest of
India. Until the nineteenth century, Indian cotton muslins and calicos were
luxury imports into Europe (as were Chinese silks and satins). By that time,
however, the Eah India Company (which ruled India for the British Crown
until 1858) undermined this Indian craft and, in its own words, “succeeded in
converting India’ from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw
produce.” 6 Th~company had convinced the Briti;h government to use tariffs
of 70 percent t~ ~O percent against Indian finished goods and to permit virtu-
ally free entry 1f raw cotton into England. In turn, British traders flooded India
with cheap cloth manufactured in Manchester. Industrial technology (textile
machinery and the steam engine) combined with political power to impose the
colonial divisiqr1 of labor, as British-built railway systems moved Indian raw
cotton to coas~~l ports for shipment to Liverpool ‘and returned across India
selling machine-r,rtade products-and un~ermini~g a time-honored craft.

! ‘

f *
The ecologicpl dimension of the coloniaf division of labor reminds us that
industria!ismJs premised on transform/ng nature from a regenerative system to
mere “raw m~terial.” Prior to industrial society and co1onialism, the majority of

#’

humans depended on their local ecosystem to supply their various needs via

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 33

a multiplicity of locally produced materials, harvesting just what was necessary.
Overharvesting resources wastes energy, reducing an ecosystem’s capacity and
therehy threatening the sustainability of the human community. The colonial
division of-labor depended on overharvesting. Here, trade across ecosysterrf
boundaries focused extractive activfties on those few resources ‘profitable to
thetraders. Stephen Bl.Inker and Paul Cicc:antelf;in their researcli on Amazonian
ecology; observe the following:

Extractive economies’ tqus often deplete or seriously /educe .pJapts or
aqimalsi and they disrupt al)d degrade hydrol9gical systems and geo-
logical formations [w.hich] serve critical ful)ctions for, the reproduction of
other spec.ies and for {he conservation of the wa.Wc9urses and land
forms on which they depend. losses from,e~c~ssivy harvesting of a single
:spec,jes or material form.can !hus ramify through apd r~duce the pro9uc:
tivity and integrity of ar entire ecosystem.

The early Portuguese colonists: enslaving inaigenous labor, extracted
luxury goods from tl’fe Arhazorr, such as cacao, ·rosewood, spices, caymans,

‘anc:Hurtle eggs:…all·of•which Qad high value-to-volume ratios in European
m·arkets. Wealthy Europeans prized turtle oil for perfume and lightfng their
lamps: but wasteful narvesting of turtle eggs· Jar the oil severely ctepteted
protein supplies and Amazonian aquatic environments on which populations
depended Jar their material reproduction: Englrsh Md French colonies of the
eighteenth century imposed monocultures:of;sugar,’tobacco, coffee, and tea.
Mimi Sheller observes, “In consuming the Caribbean … Europe was itself
transformed.”

By the nineteenth· century, European and North American extraction’
focused.on industrial inputs such as rubber, fllrtlter disrupting·Amazonian habi-
tats and ecology alid exposing”local industry to competition from commodities

‘simported ch·eaply in the ampfe· cargo space”:t>n the return leg of the rubbe(
‘transport ships. As-demantl for rubber intensified later in the tentury, rubber
plantations were established ill Southeast Asia and·Affica, by that British and’
·the >Ar’heficans,res’pectively-“in tum transforming those ecologies by introduc-
ing mbrloc!.lltures and·also impoverishing the Amazonian economy as feral
‘rubber extraction declined.

What are the c6nsequences of the “r:l’evelopmentalist focus on ‘hum~h’
exchange through trade, i~normg the exchange with nature?

,S9urc~; Bunk~r anfl <;;ic~an!ell (2005: 34-47); Sheller (2003: 81 ).

34 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

Social Reorganizati.on Under Col.oniausm

The coloniat 4ivision of labor devastated producing communities and their
craft- and agriculture-based systems. When the British first came to India in
the mid-eighteenth century, Robert Clive described the textile city of Dacca as
“extensive, populous, and rich as the city of London.” By 1840, Sir Charles
Trevelyan testified before a British parliamentary committee that the popula-
tion of Dacca “has fallen from 150,000 to 30,000, and the jungle and malaria
are fast encroaching upon the town …. Dacca, the Manchester of India, has
fallen off from a very flourishing town to a very.poor and small town.” 7

While native industries declined under colonial systems, local farming
cultures lost their best lands to commercial agriculture supplying European
consumers and industries. Plantations and other kinds of cash cropping pro-
liferated across the colonial world, producing specialized tropical exports
ranging from bananas to peanuts, depending on local agroecologies (see
Table 2.1). Non-European societies were fundamentally transformed through
the loss of resources and craft traditions, as colo.nial subjects were forced to
labor in mines, fields, and plantations to produce exports sustaining distant
European factories. This was a global process, whereby slaves, peasants, and
laborers in the colonies provisioned European industrial classes with cheap
colonial products, such as sugar, tea, tropical oils, and cotton for clothing.
European development was realized through a racialized global relationship,
“underdevelopiµg” colonial cultures. The legacy of this relationship contin-
ues today-for.1e?’ample, Mali (ranked 176th out of 187 on the UN Human
Development Index) derives half of its export revenues from cotton, with
40 percent of it~ population depending on this crop for their livelihoods, but
the country is in unequal competition with highly subsidized cotton produc-
ers in the Unite’1:· States, the European Union, and China. 8

Colonial systems of rule focused on mobilizing colonial labor. For exam-
ple, a landed ollgarchy (the hacendados) ruled South America before the
nineteenth centuzy in the name of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies,
using an institution called encomienda to create a form of native serfdom.
Settler coloniaijspl also spread to the Americas, Australasia, and southern
Africa, wliere settlers used military, legal, and economic force to wrest land
from the natives, for commercial purposes, using slave, convict, and inden-
tured labor.9 A!!. the industrial era matured, coloqial rule (in Asia and Africa)
grew more bureaucratic. By the end of the nineteenth century, colonial

‘ ,
administrations were self-financing, depending on military force and the
loyalty of locat princes and chiefs, tribes, and castes (note that the British
presence never exceeded 0.5 percent of the Indiart population). 10 Native rul-
ers were bribed with titles, land, or tax-farming privileges to recruit male

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 35

;r”‘ r
i Table 2 1 Selected Colonial Export Crops
le

‘
, .•

Colony Colonial Power Export Crop i.

Australia Britain Wool, wheat

Brazil Portugal Sugar, coffee

Congo Belgium Rubber, ivory I
Egypt Britain Cotton ” :Ii
Ghana Britain Cocoa ~

g

Haiti France Sugar t

India Britain Cotton, opium, tea i
>

Indochina France Rice, rubber

Indonesia Holland Rubber, tobacco

Cote d’Ivoire France Cocoa

Kenya Britain Coffee, tea, sisal

Malaya Britain Rubber, palm oil
g

Senegal France Peanuts

South Africa Britain Gold, diamonds .

.. • . y • ,er 33”>’13 S,’S, ,.,;;;- “‘:f,,f’ …,.·,t;r’.ffef’ r..;,.. . .• . ., .

peasants to the military and to force them into cash cropping to pay the taxes
supporting the colonial state.

Male entry into cash cropping disrupted patriarchal gender divisions,
creating new gender inequalities. Women’s customary land-user rights were
often displaced by new systems of private property, circumscribing food
production, traditionally women’s responsibility. Thus, British colonialism
in Kenya fragmented the Kikuyu culture as peasant land was confiscated and
men migrated to work on European estates, reducing women’s control over
resources and lowering their status, wealth, and authority.

In India, production of commercial crops such as cotton, jute, tea, peanuts,
and sugar cane grew by 85 percent between the 1890s and the 1940s. In
contrast, in that same period, local food crop production declined by 7 per-
cent while the population grew by 40 percent, a shift that spread hunger,
famine, and social unrest. 11 Using tax and irrigation policies to force farmers
into export agriculture, Britain came to depend on India for almost 20 percent

36 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

of its wheat consumption by 1900. Part of the reason that “Londoners were
in fact eating Iqdia’s bread” was the destruction of Indian food security by
modern technolpgies, converting grain into a commodity. New telegraph sys-
tems transmitted prices set by London grain merchants, prying grain reserves
from villages along railway networks for export to Britain. Thus, new global

\

market technologies undermined the customary system of grain reserves orga-
nized at the village level as protection against drought and famine. For
example, during the famine of 1899 to 1900, 143,000 peasants in Berar
starved to death-as the province exported tens of thousands of cotton bales
in addition to 747,000 bushels of grain.12

Starvation in the colonies was not simply due to conversion of resources
into export commodities. British rule in· India, for example, converted the
“commons” into private property or state monopolies. Forest and pasture
commons were ecological zones of nonmarket resources to which villagers
were customarily entitled:

[Village economy across monsoonal Asia] augmc::nted crops and handicrafts
with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass
for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves, and forest debris for fertilizer,
clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these
common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the
very margin of survival.13

.I

By the end 1of the 1870s, Britain had enclosed all Indian forests, previ-
ously communally managed. Ending communal access to grassland resources
ruptured “the 1ancient ecological interdependence of pastoralists and farm-
ers,” and age-old practices of extensive crop ro~ation and long fallow, to
replenish soils~:declined with the expansion of cotton and other export
monocrops. 14 Export monocultures displaced indigenous irrigation systems
with canals, ~Hich blocked natural drainage, and thus exacerbated water
salinity and pooled water in swamps; the perfect host environment for the
dreaded malarial anopheline mosquito. A British engineer reported to the
1901 Irrigatiop ~Commission, “Canals may not protect against famines, but
they may give’ a~.enormous return on your money.” 15

The colonial ·division of labor developed European capitalist civilization
(with food arid raw materials) at the same time that it undermined non-
European culfures and ecologies. As European i1!dustrial society matured,
the exploding.urban populations demanded ever-increasing imports of sugar,
coffee, tea, ccfcoa, tobacco, and vegetable oils from the colonies, anti the
expanding factory system demanded ever-increasing inputs of raw materials
such as cotton, timber, rubber, and jute, employing forced and slave labor.

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 37

As the African slave trade subsided, the Europeans created new schemes
of forced, or indentured, labor. Indian and Chinese peasants and handicrafts-
men, impoverished by colonial intervention or market competition from
cheap textiles, scattered to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius,
and Natal; to rubber plantations in Malaya and Sumatra; and to British East
Africa to build the railways that intensified the two-way extraction of
African resources and the introduction of cheap manufactured goods. In the
third quarter of the nineteenth century alone, more than one million inden-
tured Indians went overseas. Today, Indians still outnumber native Fijians;
they also make up 50 percent of the Guyanese population and 40 percent of
the residents of Trinidad. In the same period, 90,000 Chinese indentured
laborers went to work in the Peruvian guano fields, and 200,000 went to
California to work in the fruit industry, on the gold fields, and on the rail-
ways.16 Displacement of colonial subjects from their societies and their dis-
persion to resolve labor shortages elsewhere in the colonial world have had
a lasting global effect-notably in the African, Indian, and Chinese diaspo-
ras. This cultural mosaic underlines modern expressions of race, ethnicity,
and nationality-generating ethnopolitical tensions that shape national poli-
tics across the world today and question the modern ideal of the secular state.

The contradictions of the secular-modernist ideal stem from racialized
colonial rule, where industrial and/or military techniques organized labor
forces, schooling, and urban and rural surveillance, as well as supervised
hygiene and public health.17 European exercise of power in the colonies
revealed the hard edge of power in the modern state, premised on class
structuring via racial humiliation. 18 Such methods produced resistances
among subject populations, whether laborers, peasants, soldiers, or civil
servants. These tensions fed the politics of decolonization, dedicated to
molding inchoate resistance to colonial abuses into coherent, nationalist
movements striving for independence.

THE COLONIAL PROJECT UNLOCKS A
DEVELOPMENT PUZZLE

The colonial project was far-reaching and multidimensional in j~ ~ffects. We
Jocus here on the coloni9Jodivjsion of labor-0ecause it isolates a key issue in the
development puzzle. Unless wasee the interdependence created through this
division,of world labor, it is ~asy,to take our upeqqal,world atJace,value’ a11d

(Cont;nued}

‘.

38 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

(~ontinued) \ . ..

view it as a flatural continuum, with an advanced Eoropean region showf ng
tbe way for a b’ackward, non:European region. But viewing world inequality as.
relational (int;e?dependent) ra:ther than as sJquential (catch-up) calls. the con:
venti”onal moJerh unaerstanding of devejoprnent ~nto question. Th~ co~ven-
tiohal understanding is ttlat inclividual

0

Societi’es ‘expeti~nce or ‘pursue
development in sequence, on a ”development “iadder.'” If, howevetindustrial
growth in Europe depended on agricultural monoculture !n the non-European
world

1
then developm·ent was more than· simply a national process, even if

represented as such. What we can concluae frorfl the coloni~I project is that
development historically depended on the iinequai rel

0

ati6nships of c61onialismt
which i nduded an ~nequal division of labor and unequal ecological excliariges-
both of ·which produced” a legacy of “underdeveToprflent” in the colonial aiid
postcolonl~I worlds. · • ·

Decolonization

As Europeans were attempting to “civilize” their colonies, colonial subjects
across the Americas, Asia, and Africa engaged the European paradox-a .
discourse of ri~hts and sovereignty juxtaposed against non-European subju-
gation. In the French sugar colony of Saint Domingue, the late-eighteenth-

‘ century “Black Jacobin” revolt powerfully exposed this double standard.
Turning the sovereignty rhetoric of the French Revolution successfully against
French colonialism, the rebellious slaves of the sugar plantations became the
first to gain theh·.independence in the newly established nation of Haiti, send-
ing tremors th;o~ghout the slaveholding lands of the New World. 19

Resistance to tolonialism evolved across the
1
next two centuries, from the

early-nineteenth-century independence of the Latin American republics
(from SNih aifd-jortugal) to the dismantling of South African apartheid in
the early 1990s: Although decolonization has continued into the present day
(with the independence of East Timar in 2002 and the Palestinians still
struggling for a sovereign homeland), the worldwide decolonization move-
ment peaked {s European colonialism collapsed in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, when Wotld War II sapped the power of the French, Dutch, British, and

J;

Belgian states ‘to withstand anticolonial struggles. Freedom was linked to
overcoming the deprivations of colonialism. Its vehicle was the nation-state,
which offered formal political independence. Substantively, however, the

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 39

sovereignty of independent states was compromised by the cultural and
economic legacies of colonialism.

Colonial Liberation

Freedom included overcoming the social-psychological scars of colonial-
ism. The racist legacy of colonialism penetrated the psyche of the colonist
and the colonized and remains with us today. In 1957 at the height of African
independence struggles, Tunisian philosopher Albert Memmi wrote The
Colonizer and the Colonized, dedicating the American edition to the (colo-
nized) American Negro. In this work (published in 1967), he claimed this:

Racism … is the highest expression of the colonial system and one of the most
significant features of the colonialist. Not only does it establish a fundamental
discrimination between colonizer and colonized, a sine qua non of colonial
life, but it also lays the foundation for the immutability of this life.20

To overcome this apparent immutability, West Indian psychiatrist Frantz
Fanon, writing from Algeria, responded with The Wretched of the Earth, a
manifesto of liberation. It was a searing indictment of European colonialism
and a call to people of the former colonies (the Third World) to transcend
the mentality of enslavement and forge a new path for humanity. He wrote,

It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history
which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has
put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most
horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological
tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity …. On the
immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and
above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen
thousand millions of men …. Humanity is waiting for something other from
us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. 21

Decolonization was rooted in a liberatory upsurge, expressed in mass
political movements of resistance. In Algeria (as in Palestine today), the
independence movement incubated within and struck at the French occupa-
tion from the native quarter. The use of terror, on both sides, symbolized ,the
bitter divide between colonizer and colonized (brilliantly portrayed in Gillo
Pontecorvo’s film, Battle of Algiers).

Other forms of resistance included militarized national liberation strug-
gles (e.g., Portuguese African colonies, French Indochina) and widespread
colonial labor unrest. British colonialism faced widespread labor strikes in

40 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

its West Indian and African colonies in the 1930s, and this pattern continued
over the next two decades in Africa as British and French colonial subjects
protested condit{ons in cities, ports, mines, and on the railways. In this con-
text, development was interpreted as a pragmatic effort to preserve the colo-
nies by improvip.g material conditions-and there was no doubt that
colonial subject’s understood this and turned the promise of development
back on the colonizers, viewing development as an entitlement. British
Colonial Secretary MacDonald observed the following in 1940:

If we are not now going to do something fairly good for the Colonial Empire,
and something which helps them to get proper social services, we shall deserve
to lose the colonies and it will only be a marter of time before we get what we
deserve.22

In these terms, eloquent international appeals to justice in the language of
rights and freedom by the representatives of colonized peoples held a mirror
up to the colonial powers, in their demands for freedom.

A new world order was in the making. From 1945 to 1981, 105 new
states joined the United Nations (UN) as the colonial empires crumbled,
swelling UN raaj

I
Worlds joined t<;>gether in a coordinated effort to stimulate economic growth;
bring social improvements through education, public health, family plan-
ning, and transport and communication systems to urban and rural popula-
tions; and promote political citizenship in the new nations. Just as colonized
subjects appropriated the democratic discourse of the colonizers in fueling
their independence movements, so leaders of the new nation-states appropri-
ated the ideali~ of the development era and proclaimed equality as a
domestic and international goal, informed by the UN Universal Declaration
of Human Rig~t~ (1948).

The UN dec;lar;ition represented a new world paradigm of fundamental
human rights df lreedom, equality, life, liberty, and security to all, without
distinction by vise, color, sex, language, religion, political opinion, national
or social origi,n, property, birth, or other status. The declaration also
included citizep:ship rights-that is, citizens’ rights to the social contract:
Everyone was “‘entitled to realization, through national effort, and interna-
tional co-oper4″tion and in accordance with the organization and res9urces
of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for
his dignity and the free development of his personality.” 24

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 41

Mahatma Gandhi’s model of nonviolent resistance to British colonialism
affirmed the simplicity and virtue in the ideal-typical premodern solidarities of
Indian village life. Rather than embrace the emerging world of nation-states,
Gandhi argued, didactically, that Indians became a subject population, not
because of colonial force, but through the seduction of modernity. Gandhi’s
approach flowed from his philosophy of transcendental (as opposed to
scientific or historical) truth, guided by a social morality. Gandhi disdained the
violent methods of the modern state and the institutional rationality of the
industrial age, regarding machinery as the source of India’s impoverishment,
not only in destroying handicrafts but in compromising humanity:

We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it
wants, and still remains unsatisfied …. Our ancestors, therefore, set a
limit to our indulgences. They saw”that happiness is largely a mental
condition …. We have managed with the sam’e kind of plough as existed
thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that
we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same
as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition …. It
was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefa-
lhers knew that if we set our hearts after such things, we would become
slaves and lose our moral fibres.

Gandhi’s methpd of resistance included wearing homespun cloth instead of
machine-made goods, foreswearing useofthe English language, and mistrust-
ing the European philosophy of ‘self,interest Gandhi ‘Viewed self~nterest as
uhdermining community-based ethics and advocated the decentralization of
social power, appealing to grassroots notions of self-reliance, proclaiming the
following:

Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be)1
republic or panchayat,having full powers. ft folfows, therefore, that every
village h?s to be self-sustained a11d capable of managing’ its affairs even
to the exient of detending itsel{ against the whole ‘world.
While Gandhi’s politics, anchored in a ‘potentially reactionary·Hindu reli:-,1

,gious imagery, galvanized rural India, Jndian nationalism actually rode to
power via the’fnpian Natioqal Congress and Qne of its progressive democratic

(Co!Jtinued)’

42 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

(Continued)

socialist leader:;, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru represented the formative national
state, viewing the Gandhian philosophy as inappropriate to the modern world
but recognizii:ig its mobilizing power. Infusing the national movement with
calls for land· reform and agrarran modernization to complement industrial
development,1Nehru declared this:

It can hardly be challenged that, in the context of the modern world, no
country can be politically and economically independent, even within
the framework of international interdependence, unless it is highly
industrialized and has developed its power resources to the utmost.

Together, Gandhi and Nehru are revered as fathers of independence and
the Indian national state, respectively. Note that the struggle against empire
was woven out of two strands: an idealist .strand looking back and looking
forward to a transcendental Hinduism anchored ln village-level self-reliance, as
well as a realist strand looking sideways and asserting that Indian civilization
could be rescued, contained, and celebrated in the form of a modern state.

Did Gandhi’s and Nehru’s opposing visions of develqpment at the time of
1ndian independence foreshadow today’s rising tension between sustaipability
and maximum economic growth?

Source: Chatteriej’ (2001: 86, 87, 91, 97, 144, 151 ).

i .

Decoloniz3;tton and Development
;;. t.

DecolonizatiOQ..· gave development new meaning,’ linking it to the ideal of
sovereignty, tlre: possibility of converting subjects into citizens, and the
pursuit of economic development for social justice. Already independent
Latin American states adopted similar goals, having been inspired by

~

French and BS·. revolutionary ideologies of liberal-nationalism, which
informed nineteenth-century European nation building via national educa-
tion systems, iational languages and currencies, and modern armies and
voting citizeris. These ideolo~ies also informed the twentieth-century

cl
movements intAsia and Africa for decolonization, coinciding with the rise
of the United ‘States to global power and prosperity. Eager to reconstruct
the post-World War II world to expand markets and the flow of raw mate-
rials, the United States led an international project, inspired by a vision of

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 43

development as a national enterprise to be repeated across a world of
sovereign states.

US development modeled this vision, being more “inner-directed” than
the “outer-directed” British imperial model (as “workshop of the world”).
Despite relentless destruction of native American cultures as the continent
was claimed (internal colonialism), US origins in the revolt of the North
American colonies against British colonialism in the late eighteenth century
informed an “anticolonial” heritage. Once slavery was abolished, the New
South was incorporated into a national economic dynamic, articulating
agricultural and industrial sectors. Figure 2.2 depicts the difference between
the colonial and the national division between industry and agriculture.

The division of labor between industry and agriculture, defining the
global exchange between colonial powers and their colonies, was now
internalized within the United States. Chicago traders, for instance, pur-
chased Midwestern farm products for processing, in turn selling machinery
and goods to those farmers. This mutual prosperity of city and countryside
is a model-that is, it prescribes an ideal version, even as foreign trade and
investment continued. But it did industrialize agriculture as a series of spe-
cialized crops, requiring endless inputs of chemical fertilizers and hybrid
seeds, with corrosive effects on soils and water cycles. The export of this
developmental model of capital-intensive industrial farming has defined
agricultural modernization, with global ecological consequence. 25

Postwar Decolonization and the Rise
of the Third World

In the era of decolonization, the world subdivided into three geopolitical
segments. These subdivisions emerged after World War II (1939-1944) dur-
ing the Cold War, dividing the capitalist Western (First World) from the
Communist Soviet (Second World) blocs. The Third World included the
postcolonial bloc of nations. Of course, there was considerable inequality
across and within these subdivisions, as well as within their national units.
The subdivision of the world is further explained in the “How We Divide the
World’s Nations” box.

In this era, the United States was the most powerful state economically,
militarily, and ideologically. Its high standard of living (with a per capita
income three times the West European average), its anticolonial heritage,
and its commitment to liberal domestic and international relations lent it the
legitimacy of a world leade’r and the model of a developed society.

44 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

HOW WE DIVIDE THE WORLD’S NATIONS
~

Division of the,,nations of the world is quite complex and extensille, and it
depends on the purpose of the dividing. The basic division made (by French
demographer3Alfred Sauvy in 1952) was into three worlds: The First World
defined the capitalist world (the West plus Japan); the Second World’ defined
the socialist world (the Soviet bloc), and the Third World was the rest-mostly
former European colonies. The core of the Third World was the group of non-
aligned countries steering an independent path .between the First and Second
Worlds, especially China, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and
Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, a Fourth World was named to describe marginalized
regions. The United Nations and the development establishment use a differ-
ent nomenclature: developed countries, developing countries, and least devel-
oped countries; this terminology echoes “modernization” theory, which locates
countries.on a continuum, or “development ladder,” ascended as a country
develops an industrial economy, rational-legal administrative structures, and a
pluralist-representative political system.

Ranged against the United States were the Soviet Union and an assort-,
ment of Eastern ];!,uropean Communist states. This Second World was con-
sidered the altfrnative to First World capitalism. The Third World, the
remaining half of humanity-most of whom were still food-growing rural
dwellers-was ;represented in economic language as impoverished or, in
Fanon’s politico-cultural language, as the “wretched of the earth.”

Whereas th 7 .First World had 65 percent of world income with only
20 percent of thl:World’s population, the Third Worlµ accounted for 67 percent
of world populat,ion but only 18 percent of its income. While some believe
the gap in living standards between the First an~ Third Worlds registers dif-
ferential rates of growth, others believe that much of it was a result of
colonialism.26 Still others are skeptical of distinguishing cultures via a uniform

l .

standard based ‘:-,on income levels, since non-Westernized-cultures value

non-cash-genet~ing practices.
Economic · sparity between the First and Third Worlds generated the

vision of deve. opment that would energize political and business elites in
each world. Stizing the moment as leader of the First World, President
Harry S. Trurri”an included in a key speech on January 20, 1949, the follow-,..
ing proclamation:

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scien-
tific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 45

growth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism-exploitation for for-
eign profit-has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of
development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing …. Only by
helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human
family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people. Democ-
racy alone can supply the vitalizing force.27

The following year, a Nigerian nationalist echoed these sentiments:

Self-government will not necessarily lead to a paradise overnight …. But it will
have ended the rule of one race over another, with all the humiliation and
exploitation which that implies. It can also pave the way for the internal social
revolution that is required within each country.28

Despite the power differential between the United States and the African
countries, the shared sentiments affirmed the connection between decoloni-
zation and development, where sovereign states could pursue national eco-
nomic growth with First World assistance. The program of development
pursued by new nations, “dependence” in independence, marked the post-
colonial experience.

President Truman’s paternalistic proclamation confirmed this under-
standing in suggesting a new paradigm for the postwar era: the division of
humanity into developed and undeveloped regions. This division of the
world projected a singular destiny for all nations. Mexican intellectual
Gustavo Esteva commented,

Underdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On that day, two billion
people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on, they ceased
being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an
inverted mirror of others’ reality: a mirror that defines their identity … simply
in the terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority.29

In other words, the proclamation by President Truman divided the world
between those who were modern and those who were not. Development/
modernity became the discursive benchmark. This was a way of looking at
the world, a new paradigm, suggesting that the ex-colonial world was not
only backward but could also develop, with help.

This new paradigm inscribed First World power and privilege in the new
institutional structure of the postwar international economy. In context of
the Cold War between First and Second Worlds (for the hearts and resources
of the ex-colonial world), development was simultaneously the restoration
of a capitalist world market to sustain First World wealth, through access to
strategic natural resources, and the opportunity for Third World countries

46 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

to emulate First World civilization and living standards. Because develop-
ment was both a blueprint for the world of nation-states and a strategy for
world order, I cail this enterprise the development project. The epithet proj-
ect emphasizes the political content of development, as a global organizing
principle. It also ,underlines the self-referential meaning of development, as
defined by thos~ with the means to make the rules.

The power of the new development paradigm arose in part from its abil-
ity to present itself as universal, natural, and therefore uncontentious-
obliterating its colonial roots. In a postcolonial era, Third World states could
not repeat the European experience of developing by exploiting the labor
and resources of other societies. Development was modeled as a national
process, initiated in European states. Its aura of inevitability devalued non-
European cultures and discounted what the West learned from the non-
European world. Gilbert Rist observed of postcolonial states, “Their right to
self-determination had been acquired in exchange for the right to self-
definition,”30suggesting that in choosing the Western-centered future for the
world, they legitimized (or naturalized) it. Of course, each state imparted its
own particular style to this common agenda, drawing on regional cultures
such as African socialism, Latin American bureaucratic authoritarianism, or
Confucianism in East Asia.

Ingredients tof the Development Project

The development project was a political and intellectual response to the
condition ~f tlie world at the historic moment of decolonization. Here,
development assumed a specific meaning. It impos~d an essentially economic
(reductionist) up_derstanding of social change, universalizing an instrumental
form of develo’p~ent across multi~le cultures as· a single market culture,
driven by the n~fion-state and economic growth.

The Nation-Ԥtt;ite
‘ ..

The nation-‘st~te was to be the framework of the development project.
Natio~-states (vere territorially defined political systems based on the
government-citizen relationship that emerged in nineteenth-century Europe.
Colonialism e1ported this political model (with it~ military shell), framing
the politics of tp.e decolonization movement, even where national boundar-
ies made little tense. The UN Economic Commission for Africa, for exam-
ple, argued in 1989 that African. underdevelopment derived from its
arbitrary postcolonial geography, including 14 landlocked states, 23 states

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Developmeht Project 47

with a population below five million, and 13 states with a land mass of
fewer than 50,000 hectares each.31 The following insert illustrates the
effects of these arbitrarily drawn boundaries.

HOW WAS AFRICA DIVIDED UNDER COLONIALISM?

t The colonial powers’ inflicted profound damage on that continent, driving ffon:
ti!lrs straight through’the ancestral territories of nations. For examp1e, we drew

!
i a line througft Somali9, separating off part of the So’mali people and placing
} them y.,ithin Keny~: We ;did the same by spfitting ‘the’ great Masai nation
f b,etween Kenya and Tanzania. Elsewhere, of courset we created the usual arti-

ficial states. Nigeria consists of four princi p’al nations: the H 13usa: lgbo, Yoruba,
and Fulani peoples. It has already suffered a terrjble’war which killed hundreds
of thousands ‘of people and which settled nothing. Sudan, Chad, Djibouti,
Senegal, Mall, Burundi, and of course Rwanda, are among the many other
states that are riven by conflict.

Source: Quoted from Goldsmith {1994: 57}.

During the 1950s, certain leading African anticolonialists doubted the
appropriateness of the nation-state form to postcolonial Africa. They knew
that sophisticated systems of rule had evolved in Africa before colonialism.
They advocated a pan-African federalism, whose territories would transcend
the arbitrary borders drawn across Africa by colonialism. However, deci-
sions about postcolonial political arrangements were made in London and
Paris where the colonial powers, looking to sustain spheres of influence,
insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of
decolonization. Indeed, a British Committee on Colonial Policy advised this
to the prime minister in 1957:

During the period when we can still exercise control in any territory, it is most
important to take every step open to us to ensure, as far as we can, that British
standards and methods of business and administration permeate the whole life
of the territory. 32

An African elite, expecting gains from decolonization-whether personal
or national-prepared to assume power in the newly independent states.
The power its members assumed was already mortgaged to the nation-state

48 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

system: a vehicle of containment of political desires and of extraction of
resources via Eu:ropean military and economic aid, investment, and trade-
the paradox of ic,vereignty.

Pan-Africanis’m was unsuccessful; nevertheless, it did bear witness to an
alternative politii:;al and territorial logic. Some of Guinea’s rural areas were
in fact attached: as hinterlands to urban centers in other states, such as Dakar
in Senegal and Abidjan in the Cote d’Ivoire. Considerable cross-border
smuggling today is continuing testimony to these relationships. Fierce civil
wars broke out in Nigeria in the 1960s and in Ethiopia in the 1970s, states
such as Somalia and Rwanda collapsed in th:e early 1990s, and, in the
twenty-first century, military conflict in the Congo threatened a repartition
of Africa, and Sudan subdivided, creating a new state in 2011-South
Sudan. Such eruptions all include ethnic dimensions, rooted in social dispari-
ties and cross-border realities. In retrospect, they suggest that the pan-
African movement had considerable foresight. Ideas about the limits to the
nation-state organization resonate today in new macro regional groupings. 33

Economic Growth

The seco.nd ingredient of the development project was economic growth.
A mandatory UN System of National Accounts institutionalized a universal
quantifiable mea_sure of national development. }’he UN Charter of 1945
proclaimed “a fising standard of living” as the global objective. This “mate-
rial well-being;, ,indicator is measured in the commercial output of goods
and services ~th~n a country: capita gross national product (GNP), or the
national average of per capita income. While per capita income was not the
sole measure of rising living standards (health, literacy, etc.), the key crite-
rion was measuiable progress toward the “good society,” popularized by US
presidential ad~iser Walt Rostow’s idea of the adv~nced stage of “high mass
consumption. ,~-34’·

In the minds bf Western economists, development required a jump start
in the Third World. Cultural practices of wealth sharing and cooperative
labor-dissipating individual wealth, but sustaining the community-were
perceived as a. traditional obstacle to making the transition. The solution
was to introdJice a market system based on private property and wealth
accumulation. A range of modern practices and•institutions designed to sus-

” tain economid growth, such as banking and accounting systems, education,
stock markets~ and legal systems, and public infrastructure (transport,
power sources) was required.

The use of the economic growth. yardstick o’f development, however, is
fraught with problems. Average indices such as per capita income obscure

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 49

inequalities among social groups and classes. Aggregate indices such as ris-
ing consumption levels in and of themselves are not accurate records of
improvement in quality of life. Running air conditioners are measured as
increased consumption, but they also release harmful hydrocarbons into the
warming atmosphere. Economic criteria for development have normative
assumptions that often marginalize other criteria for evaluating living stan-
dards relating to the quality of human interactions, physical and spiritual
health, and so on.

The emphasis on converting human interactions into measurable (and
taxable) cash relations discounts the social wealth of nonmonetary activities
(nature’s processes, cooperative labor, people growing their own food, per-
forming unpaid household labor, and· community service). Wolfgang Sachs
observed this of early 1940s comparative statistical measurement of “eco-
nomic growth”:

As soon as the scale of incomes had been established, order was imposed on a
confused globe: horizontally, such different worlds as those o( the Zapotec
people of Mexico, the Tuareg of north Africa, and Rajasthanies of India could
be classed together, while a vertical comparison to “rich” nations demanded
relegating them to a position of almost immeasurable inferiority. In this way,
“poverty” was used to define whole peoples, not according to what they are
and want to be, but according to what they lack and are expected to become.
Economic disdain had thus taken the place of colonial contempt. 35

Framing the Development Project

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the development project was a
powerful perception by planners, governmental elites, and citizens alike
that development was destiny. Both Cold War blocs understood develop-
ment in these terms, even if their respective paths of development were
different. Each bloc took its cue from key nineteenth-century thinkers.
The West identified free-enterprise capitalism as the endpoint of develop-
ment, based in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy of the common
good arising out of the pursuit of individual self-interest. Communist
orthodoxy identified the abolition of private property and central plan-
ning as the goal of social development, deriving from Karl Marx’s collec-
tivist dictum: “From each according to their ability, and to each according
to their needs.”

Although the two political blocs subscribed to opposing representations
of human destiny, they shared the same modernist paradigm. National
industrialization would be the vehicle of development in each.

50 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

National Industrialization: Ideal and Reali’ty

“National industrialization” had two key assumptions. First, it assumed
that developmeµt involved the displacement of agrarian civilization by an
urban-industrial society. For national development policy, this meant a
deliberate shriµking of the agricultural population as the manufacturing and
service sectors grew. It also meant the transfer of resources such as food, raw
materials, and redundant labor from the agrarian sector as peasants disap-
peared and agricultural productivity grew. Industrial growth would ideally
feed back into and technicize agriculture. These,! two national economic sec-
tors would therefore condition each other’s development, as in the US case
discussed earlier in this chapter and illusµated in Figure 2.2.

Second, the idea of national industrialization assumed a linear direction
for development-for example, catching up with the West. Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin articulated this doctrine in the 1930s, proclaiming, “We are
fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good
this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us. ” 36 Stalin’s resolve
came from the pressures of military (and therefore economic) survival in a
hostile world. The Soviet Union industrialized in one generation, “squeez-
ing” the peasantry to finance urban-industrial development with cheap food.
. Across the Cold War divide, industrialization symbolized success. Leaders
in each bloc pursued industrial development to legitimize their power; the
reasoning was that as people consumed more goods and services they would
subscribe to die prevailing philosophy delivering the goods and would sup-
port their gov~r’nments. In this se”!se, development is not just a goal; it is a
method of rule. ·

The competitive-and legitimizing-dynamic of industrializatiort framed
the development project across the Cold War divide. Third World states

]>,,

climbed on the oandwagon. The ultimate goal was to achieve Western levels
of affluence. It some states chose to mix and match elements from either side
of the Cold Wat divide, well and good. The game was still the same: catch-
up. Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, proclaimed, “We in Ghana
will go in ten ?’tars what it took others one hundred years to do. ” 37

,,

Economic ~ationalism

Decolonizatic/.n involved a universal nationalist upsurge across the Third
World, assuming different forms in different countries, depending on the
configuration z of social forces in each national political system. Third World
governments strove to build national development states-whether central-
ized like South Korea, corporatist like Brazil, or decentralized and populist

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 51

like Tanzania. The development state organizes national economic growth
by mobilizing money and people. It uses individual and corporate taxes,
along with other government revenues, such as export taxes and sales taxes,
to finance public building of transport systems and to finance state enter-
prises, such as steel works and energy exploration. And it forms coalitions
to support its policies. State elites regularly use their power to accumulate
wealth and influence in the state-whether through selling rights to public
resources to cronies or capturing foreign-aid distribution channels. As
Sugata Bose remarked of the Indian state, “Instead of the state being used as
an instrument of development, development became an instrument of the
state’s legitimacy. “38 Either way, the development state was a central pillar of
the postwar development era.

Import-Substitution Industrialization

Just as political nationalism pursued sovereignty for Third World popula-
tions, so economic nationalism sought to reverse the colonial division of
labor-as governments encouraged and protected domestic industrialization
with tariffs and public subsidies, reducing dependence on primary exports
(“resource bondage”).

Economic nationalism was associated with Raul Prebisch, an adviser to
the Argentine military government in the 1930s. During that decade’s world
depression, world trade declined and Latin American-landed interests lost
political power, as shrinking primary export markets depleted their reve-
nues. Prebisch proposed an industrial protection policy. Import controls
reduced dependency on expensive imports of Western manufactured goods
and shifted resources into domestic manufacturing. 39 This policy was
adopted in the 1950s by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America
(ECLA), under Prebisch’s lead as executive secretary.

Import-substitution industrialization (ISI) framed initial economic devel-
opment strategies in the Third World as governments subsidized “infant
industries.” The goal was a cumulative process of domestic industrialization.
For example, a domestic automotive industry would generate parts manu-
facturing, road building, service stations, and so on, in addition to industries
such as steel, rubber, aluminum, cement, and paint. In this way, a local
industrial base would emerge. ISI became the new economic orthodoxy in
the postwar era. 40

Development states such as Brazil redistributed private investment from
export sectors to domestic production, establishing a development bank to
make loans to investors and state corporations in such central industries as
petroleum and electric-power generation. When the domestic market was

52 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

sufficiently large, multinational corporations invested directly in the
Brazilian economy-as they did elsewhere in Latin America during this
period. Latin -4merica characteristically had relatively urbanized popula-
tions with expanding consumer markets. 41

By contrast, the South Korean state centralized control of national develop-
ment and the ·~istribution of industrial finance. South Korea relied less on
foreign investment than Brazil and more on export markets for the country’s
growing range of manufactured goods. Comprehensive land reforms equal-
ized wealth among the rural population, and South Korean development
depended on strategic public investment decisiorrs that more evenly distributed
wealth among urban classes and between urban and rural constituencies.

FOREIGN INVESTMENT AND THE PARADOX
OF PROTECTIONISM

Wh~n states erected tariffs in the development era, multinational corporations 1′
hopped over’ and invested in local,. as well, as natural resour~e, industries. For . ~
Brazil in 1956, foreign (chiefly US) capital controlled 50 pe1cent of the iron
and rolled-metal industry, So percent of .th~ meat industry, 56,. percent ofahe
textile industry, 72 percent of·Etfectric power ,production,, 80 per~nt ,of ciga-
rette manufacturing, 80 percent of pharmaceutic$.production; 98 percent of
the automoJile industry, ;md 190 percent pf oil i:!nd gasoline dJiooution. in
Peru, a subsiQiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey owned the.oil that represented
80 percent bf national, prodorJ;[9n~ qnd Belt Telephone controlled tEtlephone·
services. 1n Venezuela, Standi:!rd Oir proauceo SQ. percent of tbe .oil.’ Shell
another 25 Qercent, and Gulf, one-seventh. In.what Peter Evans has pJlled the
“triple allian~~,” states such as Bra?il ai:tively bro.kered relationships, between
foreign and local firms in an attempt to spur industrial ueveloprhent.,

Sources: de Castro (1969: 241-242); Evans (1979).

,l ••

To secure ‘an expanding industrial base, Th}rd World governments con-
structed political coalitions among different social groups to support rapid
industrialization-such as the Latin American development alliance.42 Its
social constituency included commercial farmers, public employees, urban
industrialists, merchants, and workers dependent on industrialization, orga-
nized into associations and unions. Policy makers used price subsidies and

CHAPTER 2: Instituting the Development Project 53

public services such as health and education programs, cheap transport, and
food subsidies to complement the earnings of urban dwellers, attract them
to the cause of national industrialization, and realize the social contract.

The development alliance was also a vehicle of political patronage,
whereby governments could manipulate electoral support. Mexico’s Institu-
tional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which controlled the state for much of the
twentieth century, created corporatist institutions such as the Confederation
of Popular Organizations, the Confederation of Mexican Workers, and the
National Confederation of Peasants to channel patronage “downward” and
to massage loyalty “upward.” Political elites embraced the development
project, mobilizing their national populations around the promise of rising
living standards and expecting economic growth to legitimize them in the
eyes of their emerging citizenry.

In accounting for and evaluating the development project, this book gives
greatest attention to the Western bloc since Western affluence was the uni-
versal standard of development and modernity, and this has been extended
under the guise of the globalization project to the ex-Second World follow-
ing the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.

SUMMARY”

The idea of development emerged during, and within the terms of, the era
of the colonial project. This global hierarchy informed the understanding of
development as a European achievement. Meanwhile, colonialism disorga-
nized non-European societies by reconstructing their labor systems around
specialized, ecologically degrading export production and by disorganizing
the social psychology of colonial subjects. Exposure of non-European intel-
lectuals, workers, and soldiers to the European liberal discourse on rights
fueled anticolonial movements for political independence.

The political independence of the colonial world gave birth to the devel-
opment project, a blueprint for national development as well as a “protec-
tion racket,” insofar as international aid, trade, and investment flows were
calibrated to Western military aid to secure Cold War perimeters and make
the “free world” safe for business. Third World states became at once inde-
pendent, but were collectively defined as “underdeveloped.”

The pursuit of rising living standards, via industrialization, inevitably
promoted Westernization in political, economic, and cultural terms as the

54 PART I: The Development Project (Late 1940s to Early 1970s)

non-European world emulated the European enterprise. Thus, the develop-
ment project un~ercut Frantz Fanon’s call for a non-European way, qualify-
ing the sovereignty and diversity that often animated the movements for
decolonization. · It also rejected the pan-African insight into alternative
political organization. These ideas are reemerging, and they have a growing
audience.

The remainder of this book explores how these ideals have worked out in
practice and how they have been reformulated. The next chapter examines
the development project in action.

FURTHER J\~DINJi

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: William Heineman, 1958.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the

Third World. London: Verso, 2001.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the

Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Evans, Peter. Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and

Local Capital in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Fanon, Frantz. Th’t! Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967.
Leys, Colin. Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Mitchell, Timotl&. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Quinn, Daniel. ,~shmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York:

Bantam, 19193.·

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