Taking its cue from another book, The Idea of Africa, this book presents the idea of the idea of development with a focus on Africa – its emergence, meanings, and connotations – and how its conceptualization is deeply rooted in colonialism. "The Idea of Development: A History" (2021) is written by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, both historians, and is published by Cambridge University Press. This is a great introductory book, particularly for an undergraduate course on critical development studies or historical courses related to colonialism. Each chapter concludes with additional reading lists and each chapter is evenly suited to a weekly reading (with 12 chapters, the book might have been designed to align more-or-less with a semester length). Lots of notes:

"Rennel extrapolated from Mungo Park's declaration that the Niger River follow flowed from west to east. According to nineteenth-century European understanding of geography, a river the size of the Niger needed to have a significantly large geographic source such as a lake or a mountain range. James Rennel literally drew Park's speculation about the mountain and assertion about the directional flow of the river onto the map of West Africa. This was how the European "scientific" imagination gave birth to the nonexistent Kong Mountains in western Africa. Although Rennel had no firsthand knowledge of the mountains and no evidence they existed, his position as a leading cartographer, combined with Park's apparent expertise in geography, lent scientific legitimacy to the Kong Mountains, which the Europeans believed were real for almost 100 years." (p. 39-41)

"Linnaeus eventually refined his system of classification and organized humans into four "races" based on their skin tone and continental origins. These four "races" were European, American, Asian, and African. Linnaeus's secularization of knowledge classification built the foundation for scientific constructs of race." (p. 60)

"Most of Broca's peers in the scientific community, predominantly white men themselves, were easily convinced that women, people of colour, the elderly, and the poor were "naturally" less intelligent than wealthy and healthy white men. As long as he provided "scientific" arguments about racial and gender differences, Broca and his colleagues believed their work was without bias and based in sound evidence, they were convinced their work was "objective"." (p. 67-68)

"The underlying arguments of eugenics, that elite Europeans were racially superior to the rest of humanity, was used to justify settlers' claims over land and right to rule. Campbell explained, "as well as expressing the cultural fears of colonialism, eugenics also expressed the modernity of the colonial project in Africa, the newness of settler society and the perceived wrongness of African development presented an ideal opportunity to create a society modeled on eugenic insights." In colonial Africa eugenic development policies became cultural practices as much as scientific programs. As occurred with physical anthropological theories of race, eugenicists masked cultural assumptions as scientific evidence designed to make the case for European racial superiority." (p. 71-72)

"Julian Huxley, the first director general of UNESCO, took the reins in 1946 determined to bring his ideas of evolutionary humanism to this new international organization. Huxley had been a well-known eugenicist before the Second World War... Huxley gradually abandoned references to "race" and "tribe" in favor of "culture," but he maintained a strong belief in social evolutionary theory. Before World War II Huxley was both an avowed eugenicist and anti-Nazi. Huxley renounced the overtly racialist ideas of many eugenicists of his time and argued that the improvement of humanity was an issue of culture rather than skin tone Huxley promoted evolutionary humanism, which was the theory that "more evolved" societies in the West could and should facilitate the development of "less evolved" societies through a combination of cultural, economic, and social interventions." (p. 74)

"For far too long, forced and coercive sterilization has been used to control population growth among "undesirable" groups in Africa and elsewhere, most recently among HIV-positive women in South Africa during the height of the HIV crisis in the 1990s. Many women around the world find access to birth control liberating, but the "right" to birth control also includes the "right" to have children. Awareness of these rights and of reproductive justice debates generally is crucial for understanding the family planning policies that continue to be foundational in contemporary International Development discourses." (p. 77)

"The organization of Africans into "tribes" was also part of the divide-and-rule approach of indirect rule. Colonial officials often privileged some ethnic groups over others. In British colonial Kenya, educated Kikuyu men (and some women) had greater access to colonial education and thus occupied many of the intermediary positions, or government jobs, in greater proportion than other Kenyans, the effect of which is still perceptible in Kenya today. Similarly, Belgian colonial discourses about the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis helped to fuel the conflict that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Belgians incorporated Tutsis into the colonial administration based on their claim that the racial stock of Tutsis was more evolved than that of neighboring Hutus." (p. 89)

"Many European and American women came to Africa in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to work in anthropology, nutrition, hygiene, child and maternal health, and education. In the Belgian Congo, for example, this work began when the Ligue pour la Protection de l'Enfance Noire (League for the Protection of Black Children) took up the issues of breastfeeding and birth spacing. However, metropolitan development funding was only available for such endeavors when direct economic benefits were evident. Investment in the health of wives and mothers, for instance, flowed only after officials recognized that this would increase the productivity of laborers, generate wealth for colonial industries, and reinforce the racialized colonial economy. In one way or another, the science of development always served interests in profit." (p. 111-112) 

Antony Anghie opened a new direction in the study of international law with his book "Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law" (2005), published by Cambridge. The book is a significant contribution (nearly 5,000 citations as of this writing, not including the citations to the papers that are included in the book). This highly influential work shows the power of academic work and of ideas, as its has influenced entirely new areas of research since. There is much worthy of quoting from this book, I've tried to select several that reflect the key arguments below, worth reading in full for those who have not yet done so.

"My broad argument is that colonialism was central to the constitution of international law in that many of the basic doctrines of international law -- including, most importantly, sovereignty doctrine -- were forged out of the attempt to create a legal system that could account for relations between the European and non-European worlds in the colonial confrontation. In making this argument, I focus on the colonial origins of international law; I attempt, furthermore, to show how these origins create a set of structures that continually repeat themselves at various stages in the history of international law. In so doing I seek to challenge conventional histories of the discipline which present colonialism as peripheral, an unfortunate episode that has long since been overcome by the heroic initiatives of decolonization that resulted in the emergence of colonial societies as independent, sovereign states" (p. 3)

"As against conventional histories, then, what may be required is the telling of alternative histories -- histories of resistance to colonial power, history from the vantage point of the peoples who were subjected to international law and which are sensitive to the tendencies within such conventional histories to assimilate the specific, unique histories of non-European peoples within the broader concepts and controlling structures of such conventional histories." (p. 8)

"Vitoria asserts that 'to keep certain people out of the city or province as being enemies, or to expel them when already there, are acts of war'. Thus any Indian attempt to resist Spanish penetration would amount to an act of war; which would justify Spanish retaliation. Each encounter between the Spanish and the Indians therefore entitles the Spanish to 'defend' themselves against Indian aggression and, in so doing, continuously expand Spanish territory" (p. 21-22)

"In looking within their own discipline for jurists who could act as a foundation for such a humanist project, the League lawyers returned to the work of Vitoria. They focused in particular on his argument that the Indians were the wards of the Spanish, and that Spanish governance of the Indians was to be dictated at all times by the interests of the latter. Vitoria, as discussed, characterized the natives as 'infants', further reinforcing the notion that they required guardianship. Consequently, the Mandate System was now presented as an elaboration of the important ideas first enunciated by Vitoria, that had been neglected and dismissed, together with so much else of value in international jurisprudence, as a result of the dominance of positivism, which now was itself discredited. The circle was complete: in seeking to end colonialism, international law returned to the origins of the colonial encounter" (p. 144-145)

"If my analysis is correct, then the tragedy for the Third World is that the mechanisms used by international law to achieve decolonization were also the mechanisms that created neo-colonialism; and that, furthermore, the legal structures, ideologies and jurisprudential techniques for furthering neo-colonialism largely were in place before Third World states actually attained independence. The Mandate System had devised a set of technologies that would compromise that independence and maintain -- indeed, entrench -- the division between advanced and backward states." (p. 192)

"Virtually every facet of the UN system participated in this project: the provisions in the UN Charter that dealt with non-self-governing and trusteeship territories, the famous General Assembly Resolutions articulating the right to self determination and the opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Western Sahara and Namibia, all addressed this question. The modern doctrine of self-determination, then, was formulated in response to the whole phenomenon of colonialism." (p. 196)

"A new 'natural law' of contracts emerges, a law by which the law of the Third World state is in effect selectively replaced by the law of England through the invocation of 'general principles of law'. Startling consequences follow from this reasoning: not only is the concession not governed by the law of Abu Dhabi, but it could, rather, be governed by the law of England because that law represented the 'modern law of nature'. As mentioned, these early decisions are now regarded as an embarrassment by arbitrators who now, like their counterparts in the field of public international law, have attempted to distance themselves from the colonial origins of their particular specialization, international arbitral law" (p. 229)

"Lord Asquith dismissed Abu Dhabi as having no law in the 1950s. By the time of the AMINOIL arbitration in 1982, the arbitrators insist by contrast that another Middle Eastern state, Kuwait, possesses a very sophisticated legal system. They assert that 'Kuwait law is a highly evolved system', even while gracefully making the transition to international law on the basis that 'established public international law is necessarily a part of the law of Kuwait' and, further, that 'general principles of international law are part of public international law'.120 The international law that proclaims general principles that protect acquired rights is thus transformed into the law of Kuwait itself. It is only at this point, when these self-negating, colonizing principles of acquired rights have become an integral part of its foundation, that the Kuwaiti legal system is recognized as having any validity. The outcome, then, for the Arab states is the same, whether through the reasoning of Lord Asquith (Middle Eastern states have no sophisticated laws) or the arbitrators in AMINOIL (Middle Eastern states have very sophisticated laws). The Middle Eastern state is bound by an international law that nullifies its sovereignty" (p. 243)

"Good governance, then, provides the moral and intellectual foundation for the development of a set of doctrines, policies and principles, formulated and implemented by various international actors, to manage, specifically, the Third World state and Third World peoples. Attempts by Western states to promote 'good governance' in the Third World – and this involves far-reaching transformations, relating to the promotion of democracy, free markets and the rule of law -- are directed at reproducing in the Third World a set of principles and institutions which are seen as having been perfected in the West, and which the non-European world must adopt if it is to make progress and achieve stability" (p. 249) 

A trip to Vietnam brought the occasion to remember that I had Walden Bello's "Ho Chi Minh: Down With Colonialism" (2007) on the shelf. The book is a collection of speeches and writings of Ho Chi Minh, with an introduction by Walden Bello. The Vietnamese revolutionary leader died in 1969, having fought the French, Japanese and Americans from Vietnamese soil. The book was – unexpectedly – so familiar to the Ethiopian thought and writing of the era, although that should not have been as both were Marxist-Leninist inspired struggles. Nonetheless, that the same slogans and language were used in East Africa and East Asia are a compelling case for the power of ideas. Some notes:

"Only by carrying out land reform, giving land to the tillers, liberating the productive forces in the countryside from the yoke of the feudal landlord class can we do away with the poverty and backwardness and strongly mobilize the huge forces of the peasants in order to develop production and push the war of resistance forward to complete victory." (p. xxiii)

"The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states all men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights. Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have violated our fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. Politically, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws..." (p. 51)

"The enemy wants to win a quick victory. If the war drags on, he will suffer increasing losses and will be defeated. That is why we used the strategy of a protracted war of resistance in order to develop our forces and gather more experience. We use guerrilla tactics to wear down the enemy forces until a general offensive wipes them out. The enemy is like fire and we like water. Water will certainly get the better of fire. Moreover, in the long war of resistance, each citizen is a combatant, each village, a fortress. The 20 million Vietnamese are bound to cut to pieces the few scores of thousands of reactionary colonialists." (p. 60)

"… our war of resistance is a long and hard, but surely victorious, one. It is long because it will last till the enemy is defeated, till he 'quits'. The eighty-year-long oppression by the French imperialists is like a chronic disease that cannot be cured in one day or one year. Don't be hasty, don't ask for an immediate victory: this is subjectiveness. A long resistance implies hardships, but will end in victory." (p. 123)

"The barbarous US imperialists have unleashed a war of aggression in an attempt to conquer our country, but they are sustaining heavy defeats. They have rushed an expeditionary force of nearly 300,000 men into the South of our country. They have fostered a puppet administration and puppet troops as instruments of their aggressive policy. They have resorted to extremely savage means of warfare - toxic chemicals, napalm bombs, etc. - and applied a 'burn all, kill all and destroy all' policy. By committing such crimes, they hope to subdue our southern compatriots… However Viet Nam has not flinched in the least." (p. 197)

"It is common knowledge that each time they are about to step up their criminal war, the US aggressors will resort to their 'peace talks' humbug in an attempt to fool world opinion and lay the blame on Viet Nam for an unwillingness to engage in 'peace negotiations'." (p. 198) 

Quite a number of books have followed in the tradition of Edward Said, critiquing and contesting the manufacturing of narratives. Nivi Manchanda's "Imagining Afghanistan" The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge" (2020) provides a deep dive into those narratives of Afghanistan. Chapters of the book explore the use of "tribe" and "tribalism", the colonial construction of narratives, the American military deployment of narratives, the portrayal of "warlords" and women in Afghan society, as well as masculinity and sexuality. For anyone interest in this topic, this is a rich book of details. In the specific, readers familiar with this tradition of writing will find a similar meta-narrative. A few notes:

The book: "partakes in the effervescent conversation about social science's implication in empire, both past and present, and brings to the table a rather peculiar example of this implication. This is the story of imperialism in Afghanistan, a story which is perhaps best designated as that which is the 'same but different'. It is the 'same' in that it displays, even exemplifies, a steady, if not quite consistent, lineage of colonial thinking about the Other." (p. 5-6)

As reported elsewhere, but in more detail here: "What the exhibition and its curators fail to mention is how these textbooks came into being. During the mid 1980s, a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) printed millions of textbooks in Peshawar that were distributed to schoolchildren across Afghanistan. The textbooks were designed to indoctrinate Afghans against the evils of the Soviet Union and made for immensely powerful propaganda. Specialists from the Afghanistan Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha received $51 million to develop a curriculum, which glorified jihad, celebrated martyrdom and dehumanised foreign invaders. Published in Dari and Pashto, these schoolbooks taught the alphabet through Kalashnikovs and counting through guns and bullets, and had elaborate mathematical questions which drew on conflict scenarios, deploying various firearms in inventive ways, for more advanced pupils. One example read: 'A Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second. A mujahid has the forehead of a Russian in his sights 3,200 meters away. How many seconds will it take the bullet to hit the Russian's forehead?' Although USAID funding for the project stopped in 1994, multiple copies of the texts remained in circulation in the 1990s and into the 2000s." (p 2-3)

Continues later: "… Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, founded in 1972, is still the world's only permanent research and training centre devoted solely to the study of Afghanistan.24 Set up to counterbalance the Soviets, following a lull in the 1990s, it found a renewed sense of purpose after 9/11. The centre has since provided 'training on Afghan history, culture, and language to U.S. Army Human Terrain System teams that were departing for Afghanistan'. It has trained over 600 military and civilian personnel to prepare them for service in Afghanistan. It also helped 'professionalize' members of the Afghan National Army between 2008 and 2010.25 Similarly, Indiana University recently inaugurated a National Resource Center for creating Pashto-language materials, focusing on providing 'key training for U.S. forces in Afghanistan'. Gene Coyle, a retired CIA officer, who has never worked in Afghanistan, serves as director…" (p. 9)