Search Results

This chapter discusses the foundations of the most popular policy prescriptions that are offered to developing countries as blueprints for prosperity. It starts by sketching the historical intellectual background that determined economic policies in colonial times. It then reviews the various waves of development thinking that have dominated research and policy making since World War II. It also highlights some issues with the analytics of growth and the random search for binding constraints in developing countries. The chapter concludes with a review of the disappointing results of the lengthy policy prescriptions that developing countries typically receive and adopt. It emphasizes how new approaches should be complemented by more precise policy frameworks to guide government and private sector actions and encourage the process of industrial upgrading and structural change, which is at the core of all successful development strategies.

This chapter looks at the Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay in the nineteenth century. Some scholars have demonstrated that the rural Pampas also had a substantial black population from colonial times through the middle of the nineteenth century. During colonial times blacks do not seem to have played a creative role in establishing herding practices on the Pampas nor African grasses a major role compared to the American tropics, but the conjunction of a large number of Senegambians on Bonaerense ranches and the transformation of the colonial herding ecology in the early nineteenth century demands closer scrutiny. A shift in Atlantic networks that opened new markets for the estancias of the Pampas coincided with one that brought a substantial number of Senegambians to those estancias. Their expertise in African cattle herding thereby coincided with an opportunity to influence the nineteenth-century transformation of the colonial herding ecology.

This concluding chapter presents the author's remarks on the changing ideology of development, during an interview. He claimed that development in Jakarta has a history longer than the Suharto regime, which could be traced back to colonial times. Framing the post-Suharto era as a new time opened up ways to conceive many possibilities. For instance, the notion of rakyat (poor people) seemed to be the majority at the time when the middle class found themselves in decline as many of them had lost their jobs following the financial crisis. The remainder of the chapter discusses his opinion on several topics such as: the hierarchies within the category of the poor, and the autonomy of the informal time.

This chapter deals with the short (but extremely rich) autobiography of a Hindu (likely Kayastha) munshī named Nek Rai from the second half of the seventeenth century. First-person narrative texts like this, though somewhat rare, are crucial in order to understand how a literati culture was formed and transformed under the Mughals. During the shift from precolonial to colonial times, the reigning language in South Asia had been Persian—the same language the officials of the English East India Company had adopted. Crucial to Company operations was the munshī, who was mediator and spokesman (wakīl), but also the key personage who could both read and draft materials in Persian, and who had a grasp over the realities of politics that men such as Warren Hastings, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin found altogether indispensable.

This chapter focuses on four key policy-induced disadvantages that could plausibly explain the long-lasting negative impacts on Bihar’s economy. The first policy was the land revenue system, the Permanent Settlement, initiated by the British government in India in 1793. The second was the systematic neglect of the Bihar region from colonial times to the present day in terms of provision of public goods and allocation of expenditure on development. The third impediment was the Freight Rate Equalization Policy of 1948, a set of policies adopted by the central government since independence that went against the interests of Bihar. And finally, the set of policies followed within Bihar and the nature of leadership in Bihar for a fairly long spell, till 2005, also affected Bihar’s growth potential.

This chapter provides a background on the nature and limits of executive power under the US Constitution. It closely examines the constitutional text bearing on presidential power together with its historical context to discern its meaning and internal logic. It also cites the phenomenon of Donald Trump that made thinking seriously about the institution of the presidency more difficult than ever before as there has never been so polarizing a figure at the apex of politics. The chapter attempts to reconstruct the framers' design for the presidency based on the text they wrote, their experience of royal authority in colonial times, and the interpretative battles in the early years of the republic. It identifies the framers that wanted an effective president who would not be a king and points out how a republican executive was meant to function.

This chapter focuses on Castle Street, also called Dram Tree Park. The park is named for the fabled bald cypress that once stood on a miniature island just offshore of Sunset Park. It lasted from colonial times until the 1940s, when a workman unaware of the tree's significance cut it down. Legend has it that the “Dram Tree” was the landmark where inbound captains toasted the voyage with a celebratory round of grog for the crew, and outbound captains also lifted a dram, perhaps eager to leave behind the entanglements of shore. Dram Tree Park is in the throes of a major renovation—and a reclamation, since it turns out to be a hazardous waste site once occupied by the Wilmington Manufactured Gas Plant.