as a solution to this new issue of “underdevelopment” was the modernization theory. This highlights the positive role played by Western countries in modernizing and facilitating development in the non-West. It is often contrasted with dependency theory. The theory of modernization consists of three parts: A hierarchical identification of nations or societies, and explanation of how those designated as "modernized" or relatively modernized differ from others Specification of how societies become modernized, comparing factors that are more or less conducive to transformation Generalizations about how the parts of a modernized society fit together, involving stages of modernization and ideal types of successfully modernized countries In the mid-20th century, the world leaders that had emerged from the Second World War saw the former colonies as areas that needed increasing amounts of intervention because their populations were the subjects of much suffering. It became a moral imperative for developed nations, primarily the U.S., to offer assistance so that these countries could industrialize the way the countries of the first world had. The modernization theory, growing out of U.S. scholarship, equated modernization with industrialization, development, and progress. One of the most notable contributors to the theory was Walt Whitman Rostow who developed an economic model which outlined five stages of growth for nations to follow in his essay, “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto”. Rostow’s Five Stages: The Traditional Society The Preconditions for take-off The Take-off The Drive to Maturity The Age of High Mass Consumption These stages present a linear trajectory of development in a which the traditional society, exhibiting feudal and “backward” characteristics, can transform into a modern society with advanced industries and urban societies. By placing national growth on a linear path to modernization and hails industrialization as the key to development, Rostow's model simplifies complex inequality between nations by claiming that (since various nations began the process of development at different time periods) different societies are simply at different stages of growth. Rostow’s model makes the assumption that the inequality between states will eventually disappear once each progresses on the timeline of modernity—sped up, he argued, through contact with modernized cultures and their modern economic and political models. Dependency theory Dependency theory reflects the body of mid-20th century theories by various intellectuals, both from the Third World and the First World, that suggest that the wealthy nations of the world need a subjugated peripheral group of poorer