Recent interest in promoting the economic development of the so-called “underdeveloped” areas has stimulated concern with the problem of the effects of social anil cultural institutions on economic growth. A major difficulty in the study of this problem is the scarcity of cases of marked economic development in non-Western cultural milieus, Japan being the major striking exception. Under these circumstances it may be of some interest to examine cases of less striking change on a smaller scale, not only for what can be learned about each case, but also for the assistance they may give in interpreting the more numerous cases of little or no economic growth.

More than a decade ago, Arthur Gayer, W. W. Rostow, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz completed their remarkable work of collaborative scholarship. Preoccupation of the authors with other usks during and after the war was, it is stated, the main cause for the delay in publication; but one may surmise that with a study of such full-bodied proportions as was originally put together, the ever-rising cost of publication was also a factor. Fortunately, the surviving authors (Mr. Gayer died in 1951) have not been too reverent of the arduous fullness of their well-planned product. They have accepted the expedient of microfilming to meet their purpose of making unpublished parts accessible to other scholars. How generous their prewar intentions were is indicated by the list, occupying nearly seventeen pages in Volume II, of full texts of several sections and of tables of monthly data on prices of stocks and commodities, as well as other basic matter, which will be available through the Columbia University Council on Research in the Social Sciences, which has fostered the study virtually from the conception of the project by Mr. Gayer twenty years ago.

Is it possible for an underdeveloped area to construct democratic parliamentary organs as the means of allocating central political authority in a society, simultaneously widi the pursuit of rapid economic development? This is what we shall examine in the following discussion. That the problem is of significance can perhaps readily be conceded. It has implications for the colonial policy of those Western nations that still have large territorial holdings in many diverse parts of the globe. It assumes more crucial significance as colonial empires disintegrate under the combined pressures of economic and political demands by nationalists and as competing ideologies find service in the cause of independence.