International development in Africa: Historiographical themes and new perspectives

Abstract

This article explores scholarship on the history of international development in Africa and highlights promising new perspectives. The literature review reveals common themes in writing on the history of development—neocolonialism, knowledge production, and statecraft—but also shows that scholars have given too much power to development paradigms and policies. While the scholarship has demonstrated the rhetorical significance of development and the importance of developmentalist states, historians have paid less attention to institutional cleavages, material outcomes, and the complexity of development intervention on the ground. New work draws on oral histories to center local communities, while also examining national and transnational actors and contexts. Examining how development was executed on the ground, and how local communities experienced and reconfigured development, has the potential to help scholars completely rethink these histories. Recent scholarship demonstrates the long-term continuities of development; the disjunctures between economic theory and development practice; the particular forms of power and modalities of governance that have emerged in different settings; and the social, political, and material implications for local communities targeted by the international development apparatus.