The History of “Underdevelopment”

Perhaps the most important feature of the modern world is its sustained, intensive economic growth. This produces most of the other distinctive features of modernity. Although there were earlier episodes of such economic efflorescence (to use Jack Goldstones term), it was only with the industrial revolution of late eighteenth-century Britain that it became a permanent and prominent feature of the world economy. Following the advent of this transformative process, questions soon arose elsewhere. The first was that of how to achieve the same kind of growth and dynamism. Soon this led to further questions: why other parts of the world did not show these qualities and why their attempts to do so ended in failure.