Contested Developments: Regime and Social Theory in the Age of Decolonization
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Mantena, Karuna
Abstract
This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the place of theories of development in projects of postcolonial emancipation. Synthesizing archival research with readings of a set of colonial and anticolonial political thinkers drawn from across the twentieth century British empire, I produce an account of the developmental states that emerged in the wake of the decolonizations of the twentieth century as a distinctive political regime. In contrast to accounts of development that regard it as either inherently dominating or naturally emancipatory, I argue that the historical gap between developmentalism’s emancipatory ambitions and its dominating effects is better understood as a symptom of the fragility of efforts to secure self-determination in a structurally hostile international order. Despite the historical centrality of visions of development to twentieth-century projects of postcolonial emancipation, developmentalism carries a more ambivalent characterization in contemporary political theory. On certain liberal egalitarian accounts, the necessity of development is so obvious as to scarcely merit discussion: in the face of rising material expectations and population growth, development—understood as an expansion in the scope and productivity of national economies—offers a crucial strategy for satisfying an expanded scope of collective needs. A more skeptical perspective articulated by post-development scholars and critics of empire, however, argues that the categories of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “developing” countries consolidated in this mid-twentieth century conjuncture represent merely the latest reformulation of a far longer history of distinctions between “civilized” and “barbaric”, “progressive” and “backwards,” “modern” and “traditional,” that locate first colonial societies, and more recently the postcolonial nation-states of the Third World, as both temporally “behind” and spatially peripheral to the West. By contrast, in analyzing developmental states as a kind of regime, I pursue an analysis that considers not only developmentalism’s ideational content, but also the principles, institutions, and modes of relation between state and citizen that it calls forth. The first half of the dissertation produces a genealogy of the developmental state as a particularly (although not exclusively) postcolonial state form. Chapter 2 reconstructs the effect of the colonial labor revolts of global Great Depression on the social theory of figures like the social anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski and colonial economist J.H. Boeke. In figuring colonial societies not as uniformly traditional or pre-modern societies but “dual economies,” I argue that colonial social theorists like Boeke and Malinowski placed the management of modernizing transition at the heart of a reformed, because welfarist, vision of colonial trusteeship. Chapter 3 shows how this form of trusteeship was integrated into the logic of postcolonial statecraft by tracking the political economist and pan-Africanist W. Arthur Lewis’ translation of the social theory of economic dualism into the conceptual foundations of development economics. In formulating development as a process of growth-driven social transformation that unfolded out of the resources of a closed economy, Lewis’ vision of development re-interpolated the postcolonial state as a trustee who would need to defer demands for redistribution or democratic participation in the name securing of collective freedom. The second half of the dissertation reconstructs two strategies to which anticolonial political thinkers turned to evade the dispossessive implications of this model of national economy: internationalism and mass democracy. Chapter 4 recovers the efforts of Indian delegates to the United Nations like R.K. Nehru and V.K.R.V. Rao to secure the “right to development” through postwar international institutions like the International Trade Organization and UN General Assembly by appropriating and expanding the meaning of postwar reconstruction. Analyzing the dismantling of such projects clarifies not only the fragility of internationalist projects in face of the intensifying cold war, but also the connections between the consolidation of militarism and the ossification of more self-reliant developmental states. Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on the postcolonial ossification of extractive economies in natural resources in the Caribbean as the spur for C.L.R. James’ efforts to theorize the postcolonial mass democratic party. In the face of postcolonial state capitalism, James looked to the mass party as an institution both for the expression of the alienation of workers on the region’s oilfields and plantations and for the articulation of forms of collective intelligence through which alternatives to the dependent modernization of the postcolonial state could emerge. The epilogue closes by reflecting on the trajectories of development in the wake of decolonization’s classical phase and in the face of declining faith in the possibility and desirability of unbounded economic growth. I suggest that in spite of development’s disappointments, its affinity with questions of specifically democratic forms of futurity still offers important resources for envisioning just planetary futures.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Joy, "Contested Developments: Regime and Social Theory in the Age of Decolonization" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1143.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1143
