| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. Ed. by David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xvi, 283 pp. Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 1-55849-369-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55849-370-0.)
Modernization is a theory of economic, social, and political change crafted in U.S. academic centers and supported by government-funded research. The theory was central to Cold War foreign policy, which was committed to winning hearts and minds in newly independent and strategically important countries of the so-called Third World. For its advocates in the United States and elsewhere, modernization represented an unassailable scientific truth about socioeconomic development and the inevitable future for the postcolonial world (a synonym for Third World in this book).	1
The basic argument in Staging Growth, as the lucid introduction by Michael E. Latham suggests, is that the theoretical formulation of modernization was far from a purely scientific endeavor, and the wholesale application of modernization policy was rarely a straightforward matter. The contributors to this book thoroughly assess—using primary sources in languages other than English in many cases—the role of political ideology, institutional funding, intellectual networks, and Cold War geopolitics in the ascendance of modernization theory in U.S. foreign policy. Questions about the relationship between modernization and race, ethnicity, or gender are also raised in several chapters, but, unfortunately, these particular factors do not receive detailed attention.	. . .

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