In the last half of the twentieth century, the world community underwent a remarkable expansion. Sparked by the declining capacity of western powers to maintain the colonial project, the rise of colonial nationalist movements in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and the more general changes in the structure and ideology of the international system epitomized by the creation of the United Nations in 1945, state after state on the periphery began to acquire its political independence. As this process of decolonization progressed, a new phase emerged grounded in the desire of these countries to back up their newly found political independence with economic viability. It is this – the development phase of the postwar world – which sets the scene for what follows.

Transforming these former satellites into modern states was a monumental task. Life for the majority of its people was insecure, ‘nasty, brutish and short’ with disease and starvation ever-present realities. In the West, it had taken a cumulative process over centuries to alleviate such conditions. With the onset of decolonization, however, which brought the plight of the non-western world to the doorsteps of the West, this past reliance on a ‘natural’ process of growth and development was no longer felt acceptable nor conducive in the long run to global stability. In its place, a more positivistic notion emerged that ‘development’ should be systematically pursued, induced and accelerated, a notion reinforced by the belief that ‘modernity’, soon to be represented in the Third World by planners, Third World technocrats, and foreign aid workers, now possessed the means to pull the ‘undeveloped’ world out of the depths of poverty.