Crafting the Third World

Book excerpt: This innovative study compares the history of economic ideas and ideologies in Romania and Brazil - and more broadly, those in East Central Europe and Latin America - in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas previous histories of the idea of economic development have focused on 'First World' theorists, this book considers theorists in two 'backward' countries who made important contributions to the field. Latin America is well known to economic historians as the region that gave rise to the Structuralist school and Dependency movement. Less well known is the fact that East Central Europe is important as the early training ground and the empirical concern of the first generation of development economists. This comparative study examines the ways in which economists and other social scientists in Romania and Brazil confronted the issues of economic backwardness.