This session deconstructs the meaning and methodological approaches associated with “development.” As such, it reconceptualizes how we think about and approach debates surrounding development and its place in economic history. Panelists explore the term’s rich trajectory over the last 125 years, contextualizing what it meant to people of different backgrounds and ideologies in particular moments.

Lurtz delves into agricultural surveys collected by the Mexican Agricultural Society and the federal Department of Development for the 1900 Paris World’s Exposition. She examines the disconnections between federal technocrats’ uniform understanding of agricultural statistics and local officials and agriculturalists’ more diverse interpretations. Ball approaches the interwar years in Brazil. In an era of rising concern for public health as well as oversight of women’s reproductive capabilities, birth outcomes were recorded systematically in the São Paulo maternity hospital. Considered collectively and interpreted using the capabilities approach that has gained popularity among philosophers and economists since the mid-1990s, these records demonstrate differentiated experiences of medical progress and the racial and ethnic barriers that women faced to improving standards of living. Fajardo explores the intellectual trajectory and longevity of the ideas and initiatives associated with cepalinos, those intellectuals and policy makers working for the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America from its founding in 1949 through the end of the golden age of development in the late 20^th century. She explores the growing tensions in the 1960s and 1970s between cepalinos’ understanding of development and that of neoliberal and Marxist approaches, demonstrating the term’s considerable malleability in a turbulent era.

The variety of methodological and archival sources these papers utilize also highlight the multi-faceted nature of economic history and its ability to shed light on historical lives and experiences. Economic history has become increasingly siloed as a subdiscipline, but its intersections with the other subdisciplines of history is undeniable. Increased dialogues with social, cultural, and political history can prove fruitful. Lurtz and Ball breathe new life into official statistics and records, finding individual stories and understanding amongst columns, rows, and ledgers. They demonstrate how creative cross-readings and applied new economic history methodologies yield new insights into everyday lives. Fajardo examination of cepalinos demonstrates the extensive reach of their center-periphery model on dependency theory throughout the Global South and at the longevity that their initiatives had at the local level. Together, these papers push historians to understand the persistence of development as policy and practice through the multitude of actors who made its terms their own.