TY - JOUR
AU - Young, Alden
AB - Joanne Meyerowitz begins her compelling account by asking how in the United States the lodestar of the development enterprise went from modernization, defined as the structural transformation of society, to preventing poverty. While at times the concept of development has appeared elusive enough that it might be capable of encompassing both modernization and antipoverty, Meyerowitz’s study does an excellent job of showing that the shift during the 1970s “from large-scale industrial and infrastructure projects aimed at national economic growth and towards small-scale antipoverty projects” entailed a total reimagination of the meaning of development (2). In order to tell the story of why the 1970s and 1980s are pivotal moments in the history of development, Meyerowitz builds on essential works of earlier generations of historians of development. The historiography on development might helpfully be thought of as consisting of three waves.1 The first wave, starting in the early years of this century, told the story of the rise and fall of modernization theory during the height of the Cold War. The second wave increasingly turned towards the application of development ideas in specific cases and projects. One of the core insights of the second wave of the historiography of development was the persistence and enduring nature of development practices across the colonial and postcolonial divide. The third wave of which A Global War on Poverty makes an excellent contribution is defined by overturning a number of the assumptions of the first two waves. The most important of which is the epistemic divide between the Global North and the Global South. For a long time, the history of development, often inadvertently replicated the division of labor within development studies itself, where ideas/theory came from the Global North, and they were applied in the Global South. This dichotomy has lately been challenged by authors like Priya Lal, Amy Offner, Christy Thornton, and Margarita Fajardo.2 Meyerowitz’s contribution to the emerging third wave of scholarship in the history of development is established as she turns to the 1970s and 1980s, where she tells the story of the transformation in development by pointing to a number of what she refers to as “‘influencers who came from outside the United States and had unusual clout within it” (7). The novelty is that rather than an exporter of ideas the United States finds itself importing ideas from seemingly unlikely places such as Pakistan in the guise of Mahbub ul Haq, India in the shape of Ela Bhatt or most famously Bangladesh through the microcredit craze attributed to Muhammad Yunus. In the process, Meyerowitz points out the irony that left-leaning economists, politicians, and feminists by insisting that development should prioritize ending absolute poverty ended up submerging the project of global redistribution found in the older projects of modernization. Why did this happen? Meyerowitz acknowledges that the inspiration for this project came a dozen years ago, while she was visiting her sister in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Back in the United States, trying to understand the abundance of programs designed to care for women, Meyerowitz searched the USAID website where she came across this sentence, “USAID’s commitment to the full inclusion of women dates back to 1973, when the United States Congress passed the ‘Percy Amendment’ (232). Starting from this historical fact, Meyerowitz sets out to explain how development became gendered. Why is it that so often today development is illustrated through what Meyerowitz calls “gender stories”? This book sets out to explain how this happened, and in the process how the late 1970s push by developing countries for projects like the New International Economic Order were replaced by frequently feminized concepts of poverty reduction or women’s economic empowerment. The book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book describes the global war on poverty in the 1970s. Chapter one tells the story of the rise and fall of modernization theory in U.S. policymaking circles and how that fall led to dramatic cutbacks in foreign aid. Chapter two describes how the rise of antipoverty efforts during the 1970s took two distinct paths. Leaders of the Global South and their supporters pushed for the New International Economic Order, which demanded structural changes in the global economy. Meanwhile, economists in international organizations like the World Bank began to agitate for a global mass movement to supply “basic needs” to the poorest people in the poorest lands. Part two discusses how women became the deserving poor. Chapter three describes how U.S. foreign aid came to see indigent women as the primary object of development displacing the older ideal of the male breadwinner. Chapter four focuses on the increasing role of the private sector as the object of development assistance. Development now meant building small enterprises and the worthy recipient became the entrepreneur. Finally, part three looks at the rise of microcredit as a movement. Chapter five details how during the 1970s and 1980s, credit became a tool of development. While microfinance has become ubiquitous, by the early twenty-first century it had become clear that the benefits of microcredit were at best mixed. Women borrowed from one lender to simply pay off another and a massive literature would arise concluding that the financialization of poverty only made it more entrenched.3 As Meyerowitz concludes, the boldest among the development reformers dreamed of structural changes to the global economy, but they ended up with microfinance. She does a great job of telling us why the rise of entrepreneurship became attractive and how it was able to attach itself to very real outrages in the form of abject poverty and horrific gender inequality. But, we are left to wonder if the activists and intellectuals who “influenced” these policies were making the best of a bad hand in the face of an ascendant Reaganomics or if the push into the market and away from the state was seen by them to genuinely increase liberty and choice. Did the development reformers of the 1970s and 1980s truly believe that market-based solutions promised empowerment that was not available from the state? Alden Young is an associate professor of African American Studies and a member of the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, United States. He teaches courses in the program of International Development Studies. Young's first book is entitled, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State-Formation (Cambridge, 2017). He is currently working on projects researching the contemporary history of the Horn of Africa and Red Sea littoral countries. Footnotes 1 For an excellent account of the first two waves, see the work of Joseph Morgan Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 6, no. 3 (2015): 429–63 and “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 7, no. 1 (2016): 125–174. 2 Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge, 2015); Amy C. Offner. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ, 2019); Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (Oakland, CA, 2021); Margarita Fajardo, The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Cambridge, MA, 2022). 3 Lena Lavinas, “Latin America: Anti-Poverty Schemes Instead of Social Protection,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 7, no.1 (2015): 112–171. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - Bridging the Global Wealth Gap
JO - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhac070
DA - 2022-10-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/bridging-the-global-wealth-gap-evq80frYbg
SP - 161
EP - 163
VL - 47
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -