The Development Reader brings together a set of key readings that explore the changing ways that ideas of development are understood, contested and put into practice. Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs, and section and individual extract introductions guide students through the material and bind the readings into a coherent whole.

The Development Reader brings together fifty-four key readings on development history, theory and policy: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. It shows how debates around development have been structured by different readings of the roles played by markets, empire, nature and difference in the organization of world affairs. For example, present-day concerns about economic liberalization echo long-standing debates around free-trade, extended divisions of labour and national economic policy. Likewise, old debates about empire are...