Global Moments and the Rise of Area Studies and Development Theory in Germany, 1914–1945

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have often portrayed development theory as a new discipline that grew out of America’s rise to global power during and after the Second World War. This article adds to the complex origin story of development theory by showing how questions of population growth in agrarian countries, poverty and unemployment, and anxieties about supply chains led German economists in the interwar years to anticipate post-1945 theories of and strategies for the economic development of ‘Third World’ countries. It argues that development theory arose not only from discrete intellectual or political trends affecting a single country, but also from broader structural processes that were changing the nature of global relations, such as world war and the increased movement of refugees. More specifically, this discipline was an imperial tool used by German elites, then later by Americans, to try to manage the effects of population growth and global interdependence in their nation’s favour by learning more about their less economically developed commercial partners. In contrast to American or British experts who saw migration as the best solution to the challenge of rural unemployment and ‘overpopulation’—a term new to the post-1919 world—German economists crafted new agrarian development schemes. They saw the development of south-eastern Europe as a way to embed these smaller states in a larger, regional German bloc.