Development and Disorder: A History of the Third World Since 1945

Boon Ngee Cham is a professor of political science at York University.

Development and Disorder sheds considerable light on the inhibition of
the Third World’s quest for genuine developmental changes by global
forces.

Chapter 1 traces the evolution of the persistent Western belief in the
“superiority of American modernism.” Chapter 10 examines Western
definitions of “development” and provides a critical analysis of the
“rules of the game” that the West (principally the United States)
has established in an effort to pressure the Third World to
“develop” and “modernize.” Chapters 2 through 9 survey the
history of “development and disorder” in Latin America, the
Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China,
and the two Koreas. As these chapters suggest, Third World responses to
the externally imposed “rules of the game” differ according to
whether the respective elites are “Westerners,”
“anti-Westerners,” or “Third Worldists.”

This concise, forceful, and jargon-free study reveals much about the
persistent problems of political disorder and economic stagnation in the
Third World; both students and general readers would benefit from
reading it.