Book cover of Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil

Book description

This innovative study compares the history of economic ideas and ideologies in Rumania and Brazil-and more broadly, those in East Central Europe and Latin America-in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Why read it?

1 author picked Crafting the Third World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In this classic and pioneering study, Joseph Love traces how ideas about underdevelopment travelled from interwar Rumania to postwar Brazil, two peripheral regions united in their disenchantment with the promises of economic liberalism.

Household names like Mihail Manoilescu, Raúl Prebisch, and Celso Furtado come across as heirs to a long intellectual tradition connecting Russian Narodnik populism to Latin American dependency theory a century later.

These disparate historical actors were brought together by a shared concern with the obstacles to development posed by a world of structural economic and geopolitical inequalities, thus shining a spotlight on the conflicting interests between the…

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