This session brings together research projects that move the historiography on development forward in fresh directions. The panel suggests a long durée history of development, including not only initiatives framed under an imperial context in the early twentieth century but also others accomplished under the guidance of nation-states in the Global South– thereby both challenging and reimagining Cold War dynamics. By foregrounding local knowledge production and developmental practice, our goal is to embed ideas and public policies about development in the context in which they were applied. This means taking into consideration a new range of actors like social movements, private companies, state officials, workers, and consumers.

Bringing together scholars working on the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America, this session analyzes both the discursive practices of development and its impact on the ground, demonstrating how they transformed landscapes, bodies, and consumers’ attitudes. Bostock’s paper examines how Ottoman plans to construct railways in the desert of Southern Palestine shaped the desert’s contours as well as the possibilities of its inhabitants, while the British disassembly of the railway contributed to the image of the desolate desert in constant need of development. Qayyum’s paper reinserts biopolitics into histories of development and examines how the reproductive practices of East Pakistani citizens emerged as a site for enacting and contesting authoritarian developmentalism. Pryluka’s paper analyzes the connections between developmental debates and the import substitution industrialization of South America by focusing on the automotive industry and its impact on the consumers’ markets of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between the 1950s and the 1970s.

This session argues for the importance of expanding the meaning of development beyond its postwar international understanding. It interrogates the new set of archives, chronologies, and methodologies that emerge from a multi-regional approach to social histories of development. This way, we are able to debunk the narrative of developed and developing states on a linear road to modernity and start to imagine alternative possibilities for planning the future.