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Abstract

Ferns introduces the age of international development, which lasted from the end of the Second World War in 1945 through to the mid-1970s. During this period, the idea of development rose to dominate international attitudes towards the poorer regions of the world. Scholars were engaged in an international conversation over the meaning of this idea, with a modernisation orthodoxy emerging by the early 1960s. Ferns then connects this intellectual history with Australia’s colonial administration of Papua New Guinea and foreign aid programs, such as the Colombo Plan. He contends that it is impossible to understand Australia’s place in the global age of international development without looking at both case studies together.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Department of External Affairs, “Technical Assistance for Economic Development—Australian Policy,” December 8, 1949, National Archives of Australia (hereafter cited as NAA): A1838, 532/5/2/2.

  2. 2.

    Department of External Affairs, “Technical Assistance for Economic Development—Australian Policy.”

  3. 3.

    “Report of the Task Force on a Unified Aid Administration,” May 1973, NAA: M3383, 73.

  4. 4.

    David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, 1914 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 68–74.

  5. 5.

    Eugene Staley, World Economic Development: Effects on Advanced Industrial Countries (Montreal: International Labour Office, 1944), 5.

  6. 6.

    Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Seers, eds., Pioneers in Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  7. 7.

    Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 58.

  8. 8.

    Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 206.

  9. 9.

    Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

  10. 10.

    Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth, 165.

  11. 11.

    Ekbladh, The Great American Mission; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  12. 12.

    Staley, World Economic Development; P.N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “The International Development of Economically Backward Areas,” International Affairs 20, no. 2 (1944).

  13. 13.

    Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd ed. (London: Zed, 2008), 73.

  14. 14.

    W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955).

  15. 15.

    John Crawford and A.A. Ross, Wartime Agriculture in Australia and New Zealand 193950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954); D.B. Copland, The Changing Structure of the Western Economy (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1963), 18; H.W. Arndt, A Small Rich Industrial Country: Studies in Australian Development, Aid and Trade (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1968).

  16. 16.

    United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (Lake Success: United Nations Department of Economic Affairs, 1950); H.W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 120; Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

  17. 17.

    Rex Mortimer, ed., Showcase State: The Illusion of Indonesia’s “Accelerated Modernisation” (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973).

  18. 18.

    Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 172.

  19. 19.

    Rist, History of Development, 71 (Emphasis in original); Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (2010): 8; Corinna R. Unger, International Development: A Postwar History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

  20. 20.

    Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, 77–78.

  21. 21.

    Chris Renwick, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State (London: Penguin, 2017).

  22. 22.

    Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), x. Other examples of this scholarship include Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ian R. Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  23. 23.

    Latham, Modernization as Ideology; David C. Engerman, “West Meets East: The Center for International Studies and Indian Economic Development,” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 202; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 3.

  24. 24.

    Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, 4.

  25. 25.

    Eugene Staley, The Future of Underdeveloped Countries: Political Implications of Economic Development, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1961), 7.

  26. 26.

    Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1 (2015).

  27. 27.

    Rist, History of Development, 140.

  28. 28.

    Gilman, “The New International Economic Order,” 1, (Emphasis in original).

  29. 29.

    Rist, History of Development, 153; Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso, 2012), 17.

  30. 30.

    Stuart Hall, “The Neoliberal Revolution,” Soundings, no. 48 (2011): 9–11.

  31. 31.

    Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 17.

  32. 32.

    Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  33. 33.

    Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: A Reforming Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145.

  34. 34.

    Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015), 73.

  35. 35.

    A.G.L. Shaw, The Economic Development of Australia, rev. ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1946); G.L. Wood, ed., Australia: Its Resources and Development (New York: Macmillan, 1947).

  36. 36.

    Wood, Australia, vii.

  37. 37.

    Ian Downs, The Australian Trusteeship Papua New Guinea, 194575 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1980), 54.

  38. 38.

    Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 310; Kate Darian-Smith, “World War 2 and Post-War Reconstruction,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.

  39. 39.

    Marjorie Harper, Douglas Copland: Scholar, Economist, Diplomat (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press, 2013). Alex Millmow has written a fascinating piece on Copland’s ‘battle’ with younger post-war Australian economists. While Copland may have dissented from orthodox views regarding Australian development, if anything this brought him closer to the international orthodoxy. Alex Millmow, “Douglas Copland’s Battle with the Younger Brethren of Economists,” Australian Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2013).

  40. 40.

    Copland, The Changing Structure of the Western Economy, 64–65.

  41. 41.

    Cyril S. Belshaw, “Native Administration in South-Eastern Papua,” Australian Outlook 5, no. 2 (1951): 115.

  42. 42.

    David George Bettison, “The People of Papua-New Guinea,” in The Independence of Papua-New Guinea: What Are the Pre-Requisites?Four Lectures Presented under the Auspices of the Public Lectures Committee of the Australian National University, ed. David George Bettison, E.K. Fisk, F.J. West and J.G. Crawford (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), 10.

  43. 43.

    Brown, Governing Prosperity, 88–89; Peter D. Groenewegen and Bruce J. McFarlane, A History of Australian Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 2011), 140–141.

  44. 44.

    Groenewegen and McFarlane, A History of Australian Economic Thought, 222.

  45. 45.

    H.W. Arndt, A Course through Life (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University, 1985). He then moved to the ANU in the early 1960s.

  46. 46.

    Groenewegen and McFarlane, A History of Australian Economic Thought, 181.

  47. 47.

    Arndt, A Small Rich Industrial Country; Groenewegen and McFarlane, A History of Australian Economic Thought, 183.

  48. 48.

    T.H. Irving, “Mortimer, Rex Alfred (1926–1979),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mortimer-rex-alfred-11181/text9925, published first in hardcopy 2000.

  49. 49.

    Arndt, A Course through Life, 65; Jemma Purdey, From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2011), 363–364.

  50. 50.

    Mortimer, Showcase State, 121.

  51. 51.

    Mortimer, Showcase State, 129.

  52. 52.

    Azeem Amarshi, Kenneth Good and Rex Mortimer, Development and Dependency: The Political Economy of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979), x.

  53. 53.

    Michael Sexton, The Great Crash: The Short Life and Sudden Death of the Whitlam Government, rev. ed. (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005); Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: His TimeThe Biography Volume II (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2012), 189–190.

  54. 54.

    Hank Nelson, Taim Bilong Masta: The Australian Involvement with Papua New Guinea (Crows Nest: ABC Enterprises, 1990), 217–219; Donald Denoon, A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012).

  55. 55.

    Alan E. Wilkinson, “The Politics of Australian Aid Policy, 1950–1972” (PhD Thesis, ANU, 1976), 371–376.

  56. 56.

    F.G. Jarrett, The Evolution of Australia’s Aid Program (Canberra: Australian Development Studies Network, 1994), 1.

  57. 57.

    Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004); David Lowe, “The Colombo Plan,” in Australia and the End of Empires: The Impact of Decolonisation in Australia’s Near North, 194565, ed. David Lowe (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1996); David Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan: Public Images of Australia’s Relations with Post-Colonial South and Southeast Asia in the 1950s,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (2002); David Lowe, “Journalists and the Stirring of Australian Public Diplomacy: The Colombo Plan Towards the 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 1 (2013); Nicholas Brown, “Student, Expert, Peacekeeper: Three Versions of International Engagement,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 57, no. 1 (2011): 39–45.

  58. 58.

    Marc Frey, “Control, Legitimacy, and the Securing of Interests: European Development Policy in South-East Asia from the Late Colonial Period to the Early 1960s,” Contemporary European History 12, no. 4 (2003); Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Daniel Gorman, “Britain, India, and the United Nations: Colonialism and the Development of International Governance, 1945–1960,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 3 (2014); Suzanne Moon, Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2007).

  59. 59.

    Scott MacWilliam, Securing Village Life: Development in Late Colonial Papua New Guinea (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), 3.

  60. 60.

    David Lowe, “Percy Spender and the Colombo Plan 1950,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 40, no. 2 (1994): 163.

  61. 61.

    P. Gifford, “The Cold War Across Asia,” in Facing North: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, ed. David Goldsworthy and P.G. Edwards (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 174; P.G. Edwards and Gregory Pemberton, Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts, 19481965 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 343; Gregory Pemberton, All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 38; Christopher Waters, “A Failure of Imagination: R.G. Casey and Australian Plans for Counter-Subversion in Asia, 1954–1956,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, no. 3 (1999): 352.

  62. 62.

    Oakman, Facing Asia, 67.

  63. 63.

    Shahar Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 62, no. 3 (2008): 357–359.

  64. 64.

    Andrew Rosser, “Neo-Liberalism and the Politics of Australian Aid Policy-Making,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 62, no. 3 (2008): 372. A similar point is raised in Jack Corbett, Australia’s Foreign Aid Dilemma: Humanitarian Aspirations Confront Democratic Legitimacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 20–21.

  65. 65.

    Faye Sutherland, “The Dynamics of Aid and Development: Australian and Asian Responses to Poverty in the Region 1950s–1990s” (PhD Thesis, University of NSW, 1997), 165.

  66. 66.

    Downs, The Australian Trusteeship Papua New Guinea, 116; W.J. Hudson and Jill Daven, “Papua and New Guinea since 1945,” in Australia and Papua New Guinea, ed. W.J. Hudson (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1971), 158; James Griffin, Hank Nelson and Stewart Firth, Papua New Guinea: A Political History (Richmond: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1979).

  67. 67.

    Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein Smith and Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 400; Denoon, A Trial Separation, 32.

  68. 68.

    MacWilliam, Securing Village Life, 5–7. Huntley Wright takes a similar approach to MacWilliam. Huntley Wright, “Protecting the National Interest: The Labor Government and the Reform of Australia’s Colonial Policy, 1942–45,” Labour History 82, no. May 2002 (2002).

  69. 69.

    I.C. Campbell, “The ASOPA Controversy: A Pivot of Australian Policy for Papua and New Guinea, 1945–49,” The Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 1 (2000): 98–99; Brian Jinks, “Alfred Conlon, the Directorate of Research and New Guinea,” Journal of Australian Studies 7, no. 12 (1983): 28.

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Ferns, N. (2020). Introduction. In: Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–1975. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50228-7_1

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