Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with Western values and ideologies. Thus, Power (2003: 67) notes that
the 'emergence of an idea of “the West” was also important to the
Enlightenment … it was a very European affair which put Europe and
European intellectuals at the very pinnacle of human achievement'.
Thus, development was seen as being directly linked to Western reli-
gion, science, rationality and principles of justice.
In the nineteenth century, the ideas of the natural scientist Charles
Darwin on evolution began to emerge, stressing gradual change
towards something more appropriate for future survival (Esteva, 1992).
When combined with the rationality of Enlightenment thinking, the
result became a narrower but 'correct' way of development, one based
on Western social theory. During the Industrial Revolution, this
became heavily economic in its nature. But by the late nineteenth cen-
tury, a clear distinction seems to have emerged between the notion of
'progress', which was held to be typified by the unregulated chaos of
pure capitalist industrialization, and 'development', which was repre-
sentative of Christian order, modernization and responsibility (Cowen
and Shenton, 1995; Preston, 1996).
It is this latter notion of development that began to characterize the
colonial mission from the 1920s onwards, equating development in over-
seas lands with an ordered progress towards a set of standards laid
down by the West. Esteva views this as amounting to 'robbing people of
different cultures of the opportunity to define the terms of their social
life' (Esteva, 1992: 9). Little recognition was given to the fact that 'tra-
ditional' societies had always been responsive to new and more produc-
tive types of development. Indeed, had they not been so, they would not
have survived. Furthermore, the continued economic exploitation of the
colonies made it virtually impossible for such development towards
Western standards and values to be achieved. In this sense, underdevel-
opment was the creation of development, as would later be argued by
dependency theorists such as André Gunder Frank (see Chapter 2.2).
21
Conventional Development: 'Authoritative
Intervention' and Economic Growth
In his speech of 1949, President Truman stated directly that the under-
developed world's poverty is 'a handicap and threat both to them and
more prosperous areas … greater production is the key to prosperity and
