The spatial lives of economic ideas : the international division of labor and the (un)making of postwar development

This dissertation offers a historical geography of development intellectuals’ encounters with the reorganization of the capitalist world economy from World War II to the present. While transnational economic interdependence has long structured capitalist development, the postwar period witnessed transformations in industrial organization, trade, finance, and geopolitical order that made the international division of labor appear newly constraining to national development strategies pursued in the name of modernization theory. This dissertation analyzes how economists and policymakers reconciled the belief that nations should individually pursue technologically-advanced, higher-income economic structures with this shifting perception of international economic space. As national economies came to be understood as embedded in hierarchical and competitive world-market relations, core assumptions of modernization theory were unsettled: growth no longer appeared linear or convergent; high wages in mature sectors became potential liabilities; and key determinants of development seemed to lie beyond nationally-bounded policy negotiation. The dissertation conceptualizes this terrain as “development-after-modernization”: the uneven and recursive adaptation of modernization’s horizon to a changing international division of labor. It develops a conjunctural methodology for analyzing the relationship between the production and circulation of economic ideas and the spatiotemporal dynamics of uneven capitalist restructuring. Drawing on comparative political economy, intellectual history, and economic geography, the approach foregrounds inter-scalar relations, locality, and world-systemic interdependence in the intellectual and institutional politics of development knowledge. The argument is advanced through three extended case studies in which development-after-modernization came to redefine the terms of economic progress, the goals of development policy, and the modes of intervention over the course of post-World War II U.S. hegemony. After outlining the theoretical and methodological terrain in Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 examines the transformation of interwar agricultural economics into international agricultural development by the Chicago school of agricultural economics; Chapter 4 analyzes the uneven spread of the U.S. industrial policy debate into development discourse; and Chapter 5 traces the articulation of neoclassical and structuralist traditions into China’s new structural economics. Across these cases, development-after-modernization emerges from efforts to navigate between protectionism and laissez-faire by advocating adaptation to the world market through state-supported industrial upgrading at the technological frontier.