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Where development meets history

That the study of contemporary development lacks historical awareness is a common lament. It is a difficult charge to rebut. One reaction is to plead guilty, but to claim extenuating circumstances. Intensely preoccupied with the crises afflicting today’s ‘developing’ societies, including their relations with the ‘developed’ world, policy specialists might reasonably insist that delving too deeply into the distant past is a luxury they can ill afford. Another response, more characteristic of the academic researcher, is to ask for clarification: what exactly does the plea for greater attention to history actually mean when applied to the politics of development? This is the question that I will address in introducing the collection of papers that comprise this special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. The diversity of the contributions to this collection hints at the range of meanings underlying the persistent call for the study of development to be ‘historicised’. The papers vary in terms of the questions the authors investigate, the methodologies deployed, the regions analysed, and the periods covered. Amidst this diversity, which reflects to some degree the range of disciplinary backgrounds represented among the contributors, it is possible to discern three ways in which the relationship between history and development has been formulated. For the sake of convenience, they can be labelled as (1) ‘the history of development ideas’, (2) ‘the use of historical parallels to support development theory’, and (3) ‘the impact of historical pathways on future development choices’. Most of the papers in this collection are spread across more than just one of these three broad areas of conceptual inquiry, in the process throwing up new perspectives on the interface between history and development, particularly as Commonwealth & Comparative Politics Vol. 44, No. 1, 2–15, March 2006