ABSTRACT
How did analysts grapple with the issues of change after World War II in a milieu shaped by Cold War politics, national liberation movements, decolonization, and the formation of the Third World? From 1946 onwards, liberal analysts underpinned theories of capitalist economic growth and modernization by recycling social evolutionism and the ideas of progress and modernity. Third World and Marxian commentators pointed out that the world economy was characterized by uneven development and that the poor countries were not, in fact, becoming more similar to the capitalist ones. Many saw analogies between the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the present. They continued to investigate national and rural class structures and their potential as agents of reform or revolutionary change.
