Their Future: A History of Ahistoricism in International Development

A compelling examination of how economic development projects ignore local history, and the effects of this shortsightedness

Foreign aid planners rarely consider the history of the societies in which they work, an oversight noted in the development literature but rarely examined. Aid programs costing billions of dollars operate largely in a historical vacuum, divorced from the knowledge of what succeeded or failed in the past. Michael Gubser chronicles the varieties of ahistoricism in inte...