Modernization from the Other Shore

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America’s experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America’s understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy. American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for―and the costs of―Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain. This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor, is a specialist in international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. He is the author of three books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), and The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018) – and the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World. His work has been supported by major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute, and other sources. Engerman has been especially active in the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), winning both the Stuart L. Bernath Book and Lecture prizes, an Honorable Mention for the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, and serving as elected president in 2016. His current research recounts the history of development through the lives and works of six prominent economists.