ABSTRACT
The distinguished British historian E.H. Carr (1961) once observed that history is not a single, well-defined narrative but a terrain of contestation between competing and evolving interpretations whose influence is as much shaped by time and place as by any given set of facts. Thus, it is not surprising that the past and its legacies are constantly being reassessed or, to use the more familiar term, “revised” by successive generations of scholars. Perhaps nowhere has this been more the case than in the broad interdisciplinary field of “economic development.” This quintessentially American project embarked with unabashed optimism in the immediate post-war period has preoccupied some of the most gifted minds in economics, political science, sociology, and other disciplines for the better part of six decades.
