Description
Book SynopsisAfter World War II, a powerful conviction took hold among American intellectuals and policymakers: that the United States could profoundly accelerate and ultimately direct the development of the decolonizing world, serving as a modernizing force around the globe. By accelerating economic growth, promoting agricultural expansion, and encouraging the rise of enlightened elites, they hoped to link development with security, preventing revolutions and rapidly creating liberal, capitalist states. In The Right Kind of Revolution, Michael E. Latham explores the role of modernization and development in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War through the present.
The modernization project rarely went as its architects anticipated. Nationalist leaders in postcolonial states such as India, Ghana, and Egypt pursued their own independent visions of development. Attempts to promote technological solutions to development problems also created unintended consequences by increasing
Trade Review
The Right Kind of Revolution opens a window on the variety of new scholarship on the issue in this excellent primer on the place of modernization in U.S. foreign relations. Writing with clarity and verve, Latham makes complicated topics accessible and diverse situations comparable. His précis of the origins of modernization theory and its rapid spread across the American social sciences is fluent and does much to explicate why the concepted seemed like an attractive solution to so many problems for policymakers and scholars alike. He makes clear that modernization was not just an activity conducted by the American state. It had considerable support from a collection of nongovernmental advocates that included universities, foundations, and missionary groups. Latham also gives room to the governments and leaders of those countries the United States sought to modernize, reminding readers of their agency. Latham has captured and synthesized the fresh and exciting scholarship on this rich issue while adding to it in a manner accessible to students and stimulating for scholars.
-- David Ekbladh * American Historical Review *
Michael E. Latham has provided a very interesting and useful synthesis of the rise and decline (and eventual reappearance) of modernization theory in the United States, exploring both its intellectual roots and its deep connections to the country's foreign policy.
-- Michele Alacevich * Technology and Culture *
Michael Latham's The Right Kind of Revolution will for the foreseeable future be the textbook synthesis on the impact of ideas of modernization on American foreign affairs during the twentieth century.... It toggles artfully between discussions of U.S. foreign policy in the Global South, how ideas of modernization were used both to understand and to guide those policies, and how these policies and ideas were received by political elites in target countries.
-- Nils Gilman * H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews *
Since the end of the Cold War there has been an enormous increase in scholarship by historians of U.S. foreign relations on American efforts to 'modernize' or develop the poorest areas of the world after World War II. Michael E. Latham has been at the forefront of this research.... This is an exceptionally well-written synthesis that will become a staple in college and graduate classrooms for years to come.... Latham has provided an excellent book on an important topic.
* Journal of American History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Setting the Foundations: Imperial Ideals, Global War, and Decolonization
2. Take-Off: Modernization and Cold War America
3. Nationalist Encounters: Nehru's India, Nasser's Egypt,
and Nkrumah's Ghana
4. Technocratic Faith: From Birth Control to the Green Revolution
5. Counterinsurgency and Repression: Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Iran
6. Modernization under Fire: Alternative Paradigms, Sustainable Development, and the Neoliberal Turn
7. The Ghosts of Modernization: From Cold War Victory to Afghanistan and IraqBibliography
Index
