79 Books Like The History of Development

I love this book because it amply illustrates the ways global geopolitics damage far less powerful countries, such as Eritrea. Wrong shows how stronger countries’ national desires deeply limited the opportunities of those in a small country. The Italians were Eritrea’s first occupiers. They were defeated by the British and the tens of thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers who fought alongside them.

The book’s title comes from a legend of an old woman thanking the British for their release from Fascist rule. He told her he “didn’t do it for” her. And indeed, the British did not. After their victory, they stripped and destroyed a great deal of the well-built Italian infrastructure. The Italians were followed by Ethiopia, who claimed historical rights backed by key global players, leading to a long civil war.

Wrong’s tale is a haunting one for many reasons. One is that the wrongdoers seem to… show more.

I love this book and have taught it a number of times because the protagonist challenges us not to like her, and we do anyway. The novel's first line is that her brother died, and she is not sad. From that point on, you are enveloped in the complex and conflicting dynamics of an extended Shona family that has been changed by missionary education in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

It becomes clear that Western education, mostly by design, introduces students to concepts (if not languages) foreign to their families of origin. The result can be estrangement and division. The novel is semi-autobiographical and a moving illustration of colonialism's social and cultural impact.

I loved this book because it clearly demonstrates not only how Western Kenyans (in this case, the Luo) think about their economy but also its resilience despite more than 100 years of Western imposition. Shipton shows that Luo acts within relationships and thinks of economics in terms of giving and receiving. Thus, it is better to always be indebted to a number of people (including the dead and land) in the sense that you “owe” them something. This is what Shipton calls entrustment. It is an obligation but also strategic.

Such a way of life creates a more stable and resilient future for small-scale farmers and herders. Rather than seeking a more holistic economy in the West, we need only learn from our global neighbors about their centuries-long systems that have served them well.

I love Ferguson’s book because it seeks to be useful rather than academic. He uses the category of “Africa” to understand large-scale dynamics that have perpetually underestimated or misunderstood the agency of Africans.

For example, globalization is not passing over Africa; it is deeply implicated there but in isolated ways that perpetuate inequalities rather than erase them, as globalization proponents promote. Or that global capital can thrive in a failed state without peace, property law, or many other attributes of the modern state.

Again, like in all my book picks, Ferguson is eager to show how Africa’s role in global society is not in the shadows but in full sun, illuminating aspects of our world order that many would rather not look at straight on.

This is a great textbook as well. But it has two important advantages.

First, it came out 10 years later than Why Nations Fail, therefore covering so much more recent research in this very vibrant field of interdisciplinary work on what drives and what slows down economic development.

Second, while the authors have worked on these issues themselves, they are much less focused on one of the explanations of development and provide a more balanced view of the field.

Very informative read even for those who (like me) have already read a lot on the subject. A treasure of previously unknown stories of development and underdevelopment to discuss with friends and students. 

Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.

Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.

Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.

The Will to Improve is most celebrated for its explanation of ‘rendering technical’: the ways complex, political factors contributing to poverty are reduced to those amenable to technical intervention.

But I have found Tania Li’s concept of ‘trustee’ the most useful in my work on local development actors: understanding how they come to take on the role of trustee, their desire to ‘improve’ others, and the prickly subjects that resist their efforts.

Li traces the ‘will to improve’ through 200 years of Indonesian history, but it is most powerfully elucidated through her rich ethnographic description from the province of Sulawesi.

Her analysis weaves together Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci, showing how theory can illuminate description. It is a masterclass in storytelling and the power of theory. 

Degrowth is a new field of thought and political strategy and is throwing up lots of questions. That’s why I like books such as this, in which many critical thinkers jostle together in one volume.

Crucially in my view, this volume brings voices from the Global South, where degrowth has to be discussed differently to the ways it’s approached in rich countries of the North.

Economic development is critical for municipalities and which helps drive the city planning process.

This book takes actual case studies and discusses each one at length for an entire chapter for a municipality’s planning process since it is heavily dependent upon the economics of an area. This area is critical for practitioners and graduate students understanding economic development and how it impacts a community.

There are a number of case studies throughout the book that cover a wide array of topics (e.g. Non-Profit organization’s involvement), which are important to comprehend how those forces impact the economy for municipalities and counties.

The theoretical work of Aghion and his colleagues is complemented by Breznitz's empirical examination of how a disparate set of innovative economies actually function and of the alternative bases for the competitive achievements. 

I discovered Dan Breznitz's fieldwork on innovation first from his book on China, The Run of the Red Queen, and then his comparative analysis of the different paths along which Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland moved from peasant levels of development to the technological frontier. He provides an essential complement to the more theoretical analysis of Aghion and his colleagues.