ABSTRACT
The label “modernization” has been widely used: in the 1950s it was popularized as an approach to social history that helps to establish a general research agenda as well as methods and theories cutting across the social sciences. The label soon became a controversial point of reference. To many it signified breadth of coverage of countries and periods, the search for theories fruitful for area studies, and the introduction of social science concepts and rigor into historical studies. Proponents argued that industrial development, democratization, urbanization, the demographic transition, and other powerful forces of social change, which began to transform western Europe before the 20th century and have been spreading to far corners of the world, should be treated together as part of this general process. In contrast, numerous critics saw the label as an ideological challenge born of Cold War thinking. In their view, the very breadth of modernization limited its specificity and objectivity, while claims that the experiences of the West offered lessons elsewhere were aimed at casting doubt on the communist model or on autonomous Third World paths of development. They insisted that the world economic system, which made countries dependent, retards development; so lessons of earlier modernization are of little or no relevance. The literature applying and responding to modernization theory left a strong imprint on scholarship, explicitly to the 1970s and often implicitly, with fewer references to the label, in recent years.
