Introduction

Abstract

The concepts, development and underdevelopment, have only been widely used in their present sense since the end of the Second World War. For most of modern history the economic and social divisions of the world were understood as expressions of natural differences in race and climate. Differences in income were treated in much the same way as differences, say, in rainfall, and as late as 1930 a senior British administrator could blandly comment that average per capita income of £30 in Ghana compared not unfavourably with £80 in Britain.¹ In the colonial mind the world was divided into civilised men and natives and the gulf that divided them was considered unbridgeable — at least in the foreseeable future. Attitudes have now changed, and the view of the world embodied in the concepts of development and underdevelopment no longer holds the division to be permanent and fixed. Underdevelopment implies development in a way that barbarism never implied civilisation. The differences between an underdeveloped country and a developed one are of degree rather than kind; and the very use of these terms suggests that they are differences that can and should be overcome. It is, to say the least, a more positive outlook.