Over the last thirty years, scholars have been engaged in writing the history of development as applied to the regions and peoples of the Global South. Historians offer a valuable perspective, because their methods seek to understand international development, rather than use development theories to explain world history. A substantial corpus of work now exists, offering a more varied and nuanced picture of the history of development as a global and transnational enterprise.Footnote ¹ A wider range of historical experiences beyond the modalities of the United States and Western Europe, for example, have been added in recent years by researchers working on the history of Soviet and Chinese-led development, or on regions previously marginalized or overlooked in the literature. Historians have also moved in different topical and thematic directions, drawing attention for instance to the impact of development on the environment, gender, and culture. Beyond the geographic and thematic breadth of the new development historiography, scholars have begun to incorporate a more diverse cast of actors in their studies: including non-state agencies and individuals and groups on the receiving end of the aid spectrum.

A key feature of the “historical turn” in the study of development has been to extend the chronological boundaries by venturing beyond the “Cold War lens” of earlier scholarship, which understood development as a post-1945 construction. There has been a great deal of interest in probing the origins of development's framework in earlier contexts, particularly its European colonial iterations in Africa and elsewhere. What has been missing is a synthesis of this work that brings together the many strands into a compelling narrative, one that both advanced specialists as well as students new to the field will find informative and useful. This book, by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, is a much-needed addition to the literature. The Idea of Development in Africa, as the authors lay out in the introduction, “offers an overview that explores where this idea of development came from and how it has shaped Africa's past, present, and visions for the future” (2).

The book is organized around the concept of the “development episteme.” The term “episteme,” of course, recalls Michel Foucault, whose influential work is invoked through the mediation of Arturo Escobar's seminal text, Encountering Development, as well as V. Y. Mudimbe's study, The Idea of Africa, which problematizes the epistemological order that made colonial discourses about Africa possible.Footnote ² It is in this spirit that the authors define the development episteme as the unconscious rules and assumptions that have determined the ideas governing “development” in Africa since the eighteenth century. “The ‘development episteme,’” Decker and McMahon write, “thus refers to the knowledge system that claims there are real, measurable differences in ‘development’ between nations, societies, or social groups … [and it] promotes the impression that development is the only lens through which one can understand African cultures and societies” (3). The same knowledge system, the authors contend, continues to define North-South relations and the development industry in the present. Although the financial and institutional mechanisms have been reconfigured, the basic assumptions and objectives of development remain the same, which suggests to the authors the need for a “deeper historical understanding” of these assumptions in order to break from the seemingly self-perpetuating “cycle generated by the development episteme” (14).

The book is divided into three parts: “Origins of the Development Episteme,” “Implementation of the Development Episteme,” and “‘Problems’ in the Development Episteme.” The first two sections are structured chronologically, with Part One tracing the production of knowledge about Africa that underpins the development episteme. This knowledge system has its roots in Enlightenment philosophy and the notion of progress, which gave “the West” a sense of racial and cultural superiority over other peoples and regions of the world. The belief that European society was the most progressive and advanced civilization was integral to the “civilizing mission” advocated by missionaries in the nineteenth century, while knowledge generated by scientific endeavors such as cartography, natural history, and geographic exploration, facilitated European colonization and occupation of the interior of the African continent after 1870. Together, they formed the basis of the modern development episteme. As Decker and McMahon explain:

This section ends with reference to scholars and activists in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have challenged the epistemological assumptions of Western superiority, and points to organizational efforts like the founding of the New Development Bank by the BRICS countries in 2014, an institution which aims to “decolonize” development institutions through “South-to-South” partnerships.

Part Two of the book surveys the practices and policies by which the creation of knowledge about development was, and continues to be, translated into power. Here, the authors place great emphasis on the role of scientific research and specialisms, including ethnography and anthropology, in enabling the exploitation of Africa's resources and the modernization of its societies and subjects. It is here, in the ideological shift from the nineteenth-century “civilizing mission” to a more rationalizing, scientific approach of the colonial period, that the birth of the “development specialist” can be firmly located. The “scientific turn” in colonial Africa helped steer administrators toward the problem of “native welfare.” In the wake of the economic crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War, which in Africa led to waves of labor strikes and protests in the 1930s and 1940s, greater emphasis was placed on the provision of education, health care services, and improving the living standards of Africans through the enacting of the British Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of the 1940s, and the French Fonds d'investissements pour le développement économique et social (FIDES) in 1946.

The postwar years were a turning point in the “internationalization of development” in response to the twin forces of decolonization and the Cold War. It was at this moment that new intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank and the IMF were established, new theoretical paradigms such as modernization theory and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan's “big push” theory of industrialization were formulated, and new “donor” countries arrived on the scene, most notably the United States, the USSR, and China. Yet, despite the reconfiguration of North-South relations after 1945, Decker and McMahon argue that the basic definition of development informing the new policy rhetoric and program initiatives remained fundamentally unchanged. Even after the dismantling of the developmentalist state in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, it can be argued that the same assumptions and unconscious rules continue to inform the work of NGOs, which the authors suggest are the new “secular missionaries” of twenty-first-century neoliberalism.

Part Three of the book provides an interesting thematic perspective, through the addition of several informative case studies that illustrate how this knowledge-power system impacted the everyday lives of Africans caught up in its web. The section considers topics, including: housing, domesticity, and urban planning; education and schooling; medicine, public health, and disease; and, finally, industrialization and manufacturing. In Chapter Nine, for example, we are introduced to one of the earliest “development problems”: the European concern to regulate African domestic space, in which the “hut” became the “quintessential icon” of African primitiveness and backwardness. Beginning with missionary activities there have been ongoing attempts and interventions to rationalize African life through the introduction of rectangular homes, clean and orderly villages, and linear street grids. The turn toward social welfare in the 1930s and 1940s brought a renewed interest in African domestic arrangements with officials directing their gaze to problems of maternal and child health, nutrition, and community education. Encouraging, and at times coercing, Africans to live in “model villages” and homes became part and parcel of various planned settlement and agricultural schemes throughout colonial Africa, such as the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in French Soudan (Mali). The emergence of a permanent African working class in many colonial ports, mining centers, and other urban centers by the 1950s, pressured colonial states to allocate more funding and resources for labor stabilization measures through schemes for urban housing estates and large-scale resettlement projects but with only limited effect. Today, the “shantytowns” and peri-urban spaces surrounding African cities have replaced the hut and shamba as the symbol of Africa's continuing impoverishment and underdevelopment.

One of the most significant and central assertions of the book is the integrality of racial and civilizational discourses within the history of development. The authors convincingly argue that the essentializing logic of rendering Africa and its people as different and inferior “is built into the foundations of the development episteme itself” (4). Thus, the morphological hierarchies of the “family of man” that informed social evolutionary theory and the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century were carried over as a grammar of racial types and differences, shaping the scientific turn in colonial Africa in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond. After the Second World War, the overtly scientific racism and biological determinism of the colonial age was repudiated and replaced by the language of “culture” and cultural differences. Nevertheless, the authors contend, the racial and civilization categories that lie at the heart of the development episteme continued to inform the postwar “internationalization of development” and have remained implicit in international development policies up to the present. This point is highlighted most prominently in Chapter Three, which traces the rise of early anthropological theories of human evolution and biological racism, and their relationship to the eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Although explicit references to “race” and “tribes” were edited out of development texts and policies in the 1950s and 1960s, and the early ties to eugenics and eugenicists would in time be forgotten, many of the ideas and practices would live on, morphing into demography studies, population control policies, and family planning programs. This reminds us of Uma Kothari's critique of the silences about race in development studies, and the need to be more reflexive, not only about the relationship between colonialism and development, but of the ways in which racial differences and hierarchies of power based on race are embedded in the discipline.Footnote ³

Of course, the book is not without its drawbacks. It is, by the authors’ own admission, a sweeping overview of the origins and evolution of ideas and assumptions about development in Africa, and as such, there is a tendency to overgeneralize and oversimplify what is an exceedingly complex and multivariant subject. Nor does the book pretend to be comprehensive, as many worthy episodes and dimensions have inevitably been left out in the interest is conciseness and brevity. The authors are certainly aware of some of the complexities disrupting the development narrative, for example, that scientific research operated not only as a tool for colonial domination, but as Helen Tilley has shown, also led to questioning and challenging Eurocentric paradigms that contributed to the decolonizing and liberating of the continent.Footnote ⁴ But while such nuances are acknowledged, they are not really explored. Instead, we are told “it always reinforced development as the organizing principle of the colonial project”(105). The development episteme thus appears as an all-encompassing force, capable of adapting to different contexts and being applied to novel objects of intervention, even subsuming opposing agendas and objectives, all the while maintaining its underlying logic and sets of relations. From this totalizing formation, it seems almost impossible to escape.

Such criticisms aside, Decker and McMahon should be commended for bringing so many different aspects of the history of development in Africa together within the pages of a single, succinct monograph. By employing the foundational concept of the development episteme and pushing their analytical timeframe back to the nineteenth century, they reveal the interconnected histories of missionaries, explorers, anthropologists, colonial officials, African nationalist elites, academics, World Bank economists, non-state entities, African farmers, migrant workers, and many others. The result is a lucid, engaging, and accessible book, one that both the expert and the novice will find helpful, and which provides a timely and important addition not only to the history of development, but to the field of African studies as well.