By the Logic of a Rupture

This chapter begins with the twofold premise asserted in Chapter 1 that development discourse is at its heart a narrative of history, and that the narration of history is always/already a political act. The discourse of development is imbued with the baggage of history, both diachronically as a set of complex processes and arrangements which change over time, and epistemologically, as a conceptual framework that rehearses in a panoptical word the history of the Western liberal democratic state form. The fact that development is so heavily imbued with a narrative of history is evident from the fact that its earliest critiques (often in the form of ‘Third World’ nationalist and anti-colonial writers, dependency, world systems theory and post-development) have taken a revision of history as their entry point for critique. Within both the dominant historiography of the British empire and critical engagements with development, including various anti-colonial and neo-Marxist accounts, certain key moments are said to form the frame for periodizing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These moments of change and origin are often hotly contested, as is evidenced by the fierce debates between orthodox Marxists and the dependency school. ¹ The record of writing history is littered with historio-graphical debates, but what links the critical tradition in development from Peruvian writer Jose Mariategui in 1926 (who was kicked out of the Comintern for his Seven Interpretive Essays on the Peruvian Reality), to dependency to postcolonial theory are argumentative interruptions that have at their heart been challenges to the question of history. The tradition of critique towards development that has developed over the course of the twentieth century, has seen a gradual shift from interventions which theorize capitalism's ‘longue durée’ and situate empire as integral to European capitalism and development (such as the dependency and world systems writers) to more contemporary writers who have increasingly situated the genealogy of twentieth-century development in nineteenth-century empires, or attempted to disaggregate the notion of development via the adoption of postmodern epistemologies (such as the work of Cowen and Shenton an the post-development school). Thus in recent years a platform is gradually emerging for theorizing continuities between colonial and development discourse, where it was previously presumed to occupy a point of rupture.