Understanding Development History

31 Comments / History Pedagogy / By admin

On a flight from Beijing to Chicago last week, the man sitting by my right asked me what kind of history that I do? I told him I do development history. His next question was, “what is that? I have never heard of it!”His response is one I have heard fairly often. This is because the field of development history is relatively new. So, in this blog post I want to share what I do in my research or when I teach development history.

Development is an area that has received a lot of attention from social scientists. A whole new discipline, “Development Studies” has originated as a result of this. As a historian, I approach development from a different perspective than social scientists. Most of the work social scientists have done focuses on economic development as a spontaneous process that they can study and measure statically. My approach is to look at development as an intentional practice that states try to make happen, and these interventions have a history that we can study, analyze and learn from.

Why is the state intervening? This is an important question to keep in mind when assessing interventions. For every scheme or project, we have to ask this question. This is because development is not simply an immanent process. It is intentional. To answer this question, we have to understand context. We have to explore the direction of things and why the state wants to order that direction. It’s history!

For sources, we do not rely solely on the final documents that are produced. These documents tell us very little about the history. While they may be analyzed, the primary focus is on the process. An important to ask here is, how did they get to the final decisions reflected in these documents? I call this, ‘the sausage-making of development!’ What we do here is to try to get hold of the minutes of meetings, private and official letters, personal diaries, etc. What you find out in these documents are the different ideologies of those involved, the intentions (yes, the outcomes do not always reflect the intentions), the agreements and disagreements between them. The ‘human side’ of development! Care has to be taken to reflect the non-elite voices also. This is always the challenge because their voices are scarcely reflected in archives or newspapers. So, there is some need to supplement with oral interviews. It is this challenge that made me develop the crowdsourcing project, developmentschemes.com to provide a platform for everyone affected by development to tell their stories.

We also study the process during and after the intervention. Not by measuring statically as social scientists do but the day to day impact of the intervention. The question we try to answer is, how did this project shape the lives of the people and how have their lives shaped the project?

In teaching, I get the students involved with these documents. I get them to probe the documents and to find answers to the questions. By getting working with these documents all semester long, they can understand how complex development is and have a better grasp of the pitfalls that often end up hurting the people that the intervention was supposed to help in the first place. .