S ara L orenzini . Global Development

The 1980s are often cast as a lost decade in the history of development, as years of crisis and inertia. But as Sara Lorenzini shows in her deeply researched and insightful new work, Global Development: A Cold War History, the development project was in crisis long before the decade began. Through a sweeping tour that takes the reader from Deng Xiaoping’s China to Tanzanian railroad construction projects, from the obscure statistical office of the United Nations to the farmlands of the Italian Mezzogiorno, Lorenzini tracks the rise and fall of “development” as a hermeneutic, as a real-world project, and as a utopian vision for the future. Arguing that the Cold War played a determining role in restricting (but not crippling) the possibilities of development, Lorenzini’s nuanced explanation stays attuned both to great-power politics and to the shifting meanings of development over time. She is careful not to read and...

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