Yearbook for the History of Global Development – serie

What is development, what has it been in the past, and what can historians learn from studying the history of development? How has the field of the history of development evolved over time, and where should it be going in the future?

Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy to do whatever it takes for development to occur, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments that enable standards of health to be maintained or improved. However, the ways in which health and development interact are complex and contested. This volume unites eleven case studies from nine countries in three continents and two international organizations since the late-nineteenth century. Collectively, they show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the sometimes contradictory nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.

The third issue of the Yearbook on the History of Global Development aims at collecting contributions about the role of international organizations in shaping the global system of development throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International organizations – both intergovernmental and NGOs – have played a crucial role, shaping the global system of development by setting agendas, mobilizing people, and framing ideas and practices regarding development on local, national, regional, and global scales.

Histories of environment and histories of technology have moved in exciting, interdisciplinary directions in recent years, with increasing recognition that both environments and technologies are made and remade, gaining meaning only in specific historical settings. With historical scholarship weighted towards examples from the North Atlantic world, this volume provides a collection of grounded case studies from across the modern world that interrogate the relationship between environment and technology in developmental practices and discourses. Development projects have often involved assumptions that humans can create and wield technology to harness, improve or protect the non-human environment. This volume will not simply discredit these assumptions by revealing their nefarious effects on our society and planet, but instead historicise them by locating them within specific power structures and epistemologies. The connections and conversations between dispersed cases raised here point us to more nuanced conclusions about the causes and effects, the objects and subjects of history, in this dynamic interaction between environment, technology, and development.

Developmental policies frequently have contradictory effects. These typically play out in different sectors of life and are analyzed in different academic disciplines, using different assumptions, methods and bodies of literature. The results translate into conflicting political demands. This volume argues that keeping two separate narratives distorts reality and prevents a full understanding of development and its challenges. Over the last 200 years, life has become better. People around the world have grown taller and lived longer, benefitting from growing wealth, better nutrition, better housing, better clothing, more tax revenues and better healthcare policies. Life has also become worse: two centuries of industrialization have caused pollution, wasteful consumerism and climate change threatening predominantly the livelihoods of those least responsible, exacerbating global inequality. But these narratives describe different but inseparable elements of the same history. 13 papers explore ways to integrate the "good" and "bad" narratives into coherent, intertwined histories, using theoretical analyses and case studies from five continents. It is the first publication to centrally focus on this question and its repercussions.

The historical understanding of the multifaceted trajectories of development - encompassing contested discourses, diverse institutional frameworks, and a heterogeneous repertoire of policies and practices - has evolved significantly in recent years. This scholarship has brought a fresh historical reassessment of ‘colonial development,’ critically examining its shifting chronologies and dynamics, geographies and actors, motivations and objectives, as well as its planned and unintended consequences.We now have a rich body of literature that explores development in relation to key historical phenomena of the twentieth century, including the institutionalization of international organizations, the intensification of urbanization and industrialization, the expansion of globalizing dynamics and global integration, decolonization, and the emergence of both the Cold War and the ‘Third World.’This volume documents the variety and depth of these historiographical achievements, offering original, high-quality studies. It serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in the historical complexities of development and its broader global implications.