In his inaugural address as president of the United States on January 20, 1949, Harry Truman announced his concept of a “fair deal” for the entire world. An essential component of this concept was his appeal to the United States and the world to solve the problems of the “underdeveloped areas” of the globe.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas....

One of the many changes that occurred in the early post–World War II period was the “discovery” of mass poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Relatively inconspicuous and seemingly logical, this discovery was to provide the anchor for an important restructuring of global culture and political economy. The discourse of war was displaced onto the social domain and to a new geographical terrain: the Third World. Left behind was the struggle against fascism. In the rapid globalization of U.S. domination as a world power, the “war on poverty” in the Third World began to occupy a prominent place....

Lauchlin Currie, a former Harvard economist and official in the Roosevelt administration, evoked in the following way, at a testimonial dinner party in Bogotá in 1979, the first World Bank mission, which thirty years earlier had taken him to that same country:

I don’t know where in my conservative Canadian background I acquired a reformer’s zeal, but I must admit that I had it. I just happen to be one of those tiresome people who can’t encounter a problem without wanting to do something about it. So you can imagine how Colombia affected me. Such a marvelous number of practically...

No aspect of development appears to be as straightforward as hunger. When people are hungry, is not the provision of food the logical answer? Policy would be a matter of ensuring that enough food reaches those in need on a sustained basis. The symbolism of hunger, however, has proven powerful throughout the ages. From famine in prehistoric times to the food riots in Latin America during the 1980s and early 1990s, hunger has been a potent social and political force. From the Bible to Knut Hamsun, Dickens, Orwell, Steinbeck, and, in twentieth-century Latin America, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, and Graciliano...

The History of development is seen in conventional analyses in terms of the evolution of theories and ideas, or as the succession of more or less effective interventions. For political economists, the same history reflects different ideological responses to allegedly deeper contradictions, dictated by capital accumulation and circulation. This history, however, can also be seen from the perspective of the changes and transformations in the discursive regime, even if these changes, as should be clear by now, are circumscribed by discursive practices tied to political economies, knowledge traditions, and institutions of ruling.

In chapter 2, I argued that the development...

The Industrialized Countries, with 26 percent of the population, account for 78 percent of world production of goods and services, 81 percent of energy consumption, 70 percent of chemical fertilizers, and 87 percent of world armaments. One U.S. resident spends as much energy as 7 Mexicans, 55 Indians, 168 Tanzanians, and 900 Nepalis. In many Third World countries, military expenditures exceed expenditures for health. The cost of one modern fighter plane can finance forty thousand rural health centers. In Brazil, the consumption of the 20 percent richest is thirty-three times that of the 20 percent poorest, and the gap between...