The Development Reader

The Development Reader brings together fifty-four key readings on development history, theory and policy: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. It shows how debates around development have been structured by different readings of the roles played by markets, empire, nature and difference in the organization of world affairs. For example, present-day concerns about economic liberalization echo long-standing debates around free-trade, extended divisions of labour and national economic policy. Likewise, old debates about empire are re-appearing in critical perspectives on US policy in the Middle East. While there is little room today for old-fashioned environmental or cultural determinism, the attention now being given to climate change and a clash of civilisations shows that questions of nature and difference remain at the centre of development politics. Section and individual extract introductions guide students through the material and bind the readings into a coherent whole. Organized chronologically as well as thematically, it offers an intellectual history of the debates and political struggles that swirl around development.

By bringing together intellectual history and contemporary development issues in this way, The Development Reader breaks fresh ground. It will have broad appeal across the humanities and social sciences, and is essential reading for students of contemporary development issues, practitioners and campaigners.

Sharad Chari is Lecturer in Human Geography at the London School of Economics. He works on the historical ethnography of labour, work, activism, gender, state-sanctioned racism, and development in India and South Africa. He is the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men, and globalization in provincial India (Stanford University Press, 2004), and is working on a monograph on space, race and activism in twentieth-century South Africa.

Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics. He has written widely on economic and political change in India and the history of development thought. His most recent book (with Williams, Srivastava and Veron) is Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (CUP, 2005).