Abstract
Originally presented at a conference at the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC), March 28-29, 2008.
Historians’ studies of efforts to modernize the so-called Third World have accelerated in the last decade and show little signs of diminishing. Most of the early scholarship on modernization theory was American-centered, focused more on ideas than on practices, and examined only the 1950s and 1960s. The latest scholarship on modernization, some of which was discussed at a recent GHI workshop, has built on these studies but has expanded dramatically in terms of chronology, approach, and perspective. As the American and European scholars gathered to discuss “Modernization as a Global Project” agreed, new work on modernization is far broader. It is more global (looking from the perspective of the Soviet bloc and from the Third World countries that were the objects of modernization); it looks at periods both before and after the heyday of modernization in the two decades after the end of the Second World War; and it includes intensive local studies as well as expansive interpretative approaches, very often in the same work. As a result, scholars are now able to gain a better understanding of events and concepts that shaped the
course of Third World and global history in the context of decolonization and the Cold War.