J. T. Way
Duke University Press, 2012
Using a wide array of historical and contemporary sources, Way explores the multiple intersections of development and individual life, focusing on the construction of social space through successive waves of land reform, urban planning, and economic policy. His explorations move from Guatemala City's poorest neighborhoods and informal economies (run predominantly by women) to a countryside still recovering from civil war and anti-Mayan genocide, and they encompass such artifacts of development as the modernist Pan-American Highway and the postmodern Grand Tikal Futura, a Mayan-themed shopping mall ringed by gated communities and shantytowns. Capitalist development, Way concludes, has dramatically reshaped the country's physical and social landscapes—engendering poverty, ethnic regionalism, and genocidal violence—and positioned Guatemala as a harbinger of globalization's future.
By Henry A. Selby, Arthur D. Murphy, and Stephen A. Lorenzen
University of Texas Press, 1990
The sufferings of “ordinary” people under harsh economic conditions can eventually lead to the fall of governments. Given this fact, it becomes important to know how “ordinary” people live—what privations they suffer and what strategies they use to survive in times of economic crisis. The Mexican Urban Household provides this information for Mexico near the end of the twentieth century.
Mexico is now a predominantly urban nation, and this study is the definitive work on the strategies of self-defense of its urban households. It is based on surveys of nearly 10,000 households, conducted during twenty years of field work in five very different cities, with the help of a staff of more than twenty Mexican social scientists, engineers, architects, and social workers.
Far from being a compilation of undigested statistics, however, The Mexican Urban Household uses its rich data to vividly reveal how Mexican families use their every resource to defend themselves against a political and economic system that overwhelms and exploits them. It describes how families band together, sometimes with three generations in one small house, to minimize expenses and pool resources. It explores the limited range of available jobs, from secure but scarce bureaucratic positions to more common and less reliable jobs in blue-collar industries and the informal economy. And, most important, it traces the high cost to families, particularly to women, of the endless struggle to make ends meet.
These important findings outline the dimensions of the economic crisis for ordinary Mexicans. It will be crucial reading not only for everyone interested in the future of Mexico but also for students of development throughout the Third World.
Yossef S. Ben-Porath
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Tom Wessels
University Press of New England, 2013
Tom Wessels
Brandeis University Press, 2023
Avner Ben-Ner and Benedetto Gui, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Margaret F. Stieg
University of Alabama Press, 2005
"This is a pioneering study and represents a major undertaking. . . . Stieg succeeds in making intelligible the diffuse and highly diversified nature of the historical periodical. At minimum, this title should be required reading of all history graduate students in methodology courses. Many senior historians would also benefit from a review of its contents. . . . Information and library science students specializing in scholarly communication should digest the entire study." —Journal of Education for Library and Information Science
E. Charles Adams
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Christopher Howe
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Eric Zencey
University Press of New England, 2012
Edited by John McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom
National University of Singapore Press, 2023
Somnath Gupt
Seagull Books, 2005

Edited by Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine, and Elisa Van Waeyenberge
Pluto Press, 2011
Any student, academic or practitioner wanting to succeed in development studies, radical or mainstream, must understand the World Bank's role and the evolution of its thinking and activities. The Political Economy of Development provides tools for gaining this understanding and applies them across a range of topics.
The research, practice and scholarship of development are always set against the backdrop of the World Bank, whose formidable presence shapes both development practice and thinking. This book brings together academics that specialise in different subject areas of development and reviews their findings in the context of the World Bank as knowledge bank, policy-maker and financial institution. The volume offers a compelling contribution to our understanding of development studies and of development itself.
The Political Economy of Development is an invaluable critical resource for students, policy-makers and activists in development studies.

Jude L. Fernando
Pluto Press, 2011
Jude L. Fernando explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments.
The book examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance.
This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.
Béla Greskovits
Central European University Press, 1998
Despite gloomy prophecies, democracy and the market economy seem to be taking root throughout Central and Eastern Europe, although set against a background of a recession deeper and longer than that of the Great Depression. How is this possible? Why did Eastern Europeans protest less about the brutal social consequences of systemic change than the people of Latin America a decade earlier? Why has the region-wide authoritarian or populist turnabout not occurred? Why has democracy in these countries proved to be crisis-proof? In what ways has economic crisis impacted on the politics of the region?
In addressing these questions, Béla Greskovits uses a comparative analysis of the structures, institutions, cultures, and actors shaping both the Eastern European and the Latin American transformations. He argues that structural, institutional, and cultural factors have put a brake on destabilizing collective actions and have paved the way for the emergence of the enduring, low-level equilibrium between incomplete democracy and imperfect market economy which seems set to characterize the Central and Eastern European experience for the foreseeable future.
Terry Leahy
Pluto Press, 2021
Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us revaluate what it means to be sustainable. Through innovative agriculture and settlement design, the movement creates new communities that are harmonious with nature. It has grown from humble origins on a farm in 1970s Australia and flourished into a worldwide movement that confronts industrial capitalism.
The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon the rich seam of publications and online communities from the movement as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organizations from around the world, Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts.
In the face of extreme environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, we urgently need a new way of living.

Terry Leahy
Pluto Press, 2021
Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us revaluate what it means to be sustainable. Through innovative agriculture and settlement design, the movement creates new communities that are harmonious with nature. It has grown from humble origins on a farm in 1970s Australia and flourished into a worldwide movement that confronts industrial capitalism.
The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon the rich seam of publications and online communities from the movement as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organizations from around the world, Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts.
In the face of extreme environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, we urgently need a new way of living.

John Hilary
Pluto Press, 2013
Capitalist growth is widely heralded as the only answer to the crisis still sweeping the global economy. Yet the era of corporate globalisation has been defined by unprecedented levels of inequality and environmental degradation. A return to capitalist growth threatens to exacerbate these problems, not solve them.
In The Poverty of Capitalism, John Hilary reveals the true face of transnational capital in its insatiable drive for expansion and accumulation. He exposes the myth of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR), and highlights key areas of conflict over natural resources, labour rights and food sovereignty.
Hilary also describes the growing popular resistance to corporate power, as well as the new social movements seeking to develop alternatives to capitalism itself. This book will be essential reading for all those concerned with global justice, human rights and equity in the world order.
William W. Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Augustin Landier and David Thesmar
University of Chicago Press, 2025
The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good.
Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs.
These tradeoffs—the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs—are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions.
The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values—justice, freedom, beauty— in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.
Roman Frydman
Central European University Press, 1993
Roman Frydman
Central European University Press, 1993
R. H. Helmholz, Charles M. Gray, John H. Langbein, Eben Moglen, Henry E. Smith,
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Michael Burawoy and János Lukács
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Edited by Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap
University of Chicago Press, 1994
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
Duke University Press, 2003
Reading governmental reports, memos, and policies, Saldaña-Portillo traces the arc of development narratives from its beginnings in the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through its apex during Robert S. McNamara's reign at the World Bank (1968–1981). She compares these narratives with models of subjectivity and agency embedded in the autobiographical texts of three revolutionary icons of the 1960s and 1970s—those of Che Guevara, Guatemalan insurgent Mario Payeras, and Malcolm X—and the agricultural policy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Saldaña-Portillo highlights a shared paradigm of a masculinist transformation of the individual requiring the "transcendence" of ethnic particularity for the good of the nation. While she argues that this model of progress often alienated the very communities targeted by the revolutionaries, she shows how contemporary insurgents such as Rigoberta Menchú, the Zapatista movement, and queer Aztlán have taken up the radicalism of their predecessors to retheorize revolutionary subjectivity for the twenty-first century.
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1991
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Steven G. Medema and Peter Boettke
Duke University Press, 0
Edited by Michael J. Andrews, Aaron Chatterji, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Edited by Ina Ganguli, Shulamit Kahn, and Megan MacGarvie
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Rudolf A. Raff
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Edited by James Hanken and Brian K. Hall
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Charles E. McLure, Jr., John Mutti, Victor Thuronyi, and George R. Zodrow
Duke University Press, 1990
David A. Dyker
Central European University Press, 1997
Edited by Olivier Jean Blanchard, Kenneth A. Froot, and Jeffrey D. Sachs
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Edited by Olivier Jean Blanchard, Kenneth A. Froot, and Jeffrey D. Sachs
University of Chicago Press, 1994
By Chris Rogers
University of Texas Press, 2016
Once spoken only in Santa Rosa Department, Guatemala, the Xinkan language family is unique within Mesoamerica, comprising four closely related languages that are unrelated to any of the other language groups used within the region. Descriptions of Xinkan date to 1770 but are typically only sketches or partial word lists. Not even the community of indigenous people who identify as Xinka today—the last speakers—have had access to a reliable descriptive source on their ancestral tongue. Preserving this endangered communication system in accurate, thorough detail, The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages presents a historical framework, internal classifications, and both synchronic and diachronic descriptions, incorporating all elements of grammar based on extensive unpublished data collected in the 1970s by Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman.
This valuable contribution is enhanced by author Chris Rogers’s emphasis on contextualizing the findings. Introducing the languages, Rogers presents important information regarding the social and cultural milieu of the speakers. He also traces a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Xinkan and reconstructs historical morphology and syntax. These revelations are of particular interest because the development of Xinka and the many aspects of Xinka morphosyntax have not been well understood. A sample text, “Na Mulha Uy,” is included as well. Solving numerous complex, centuries-old linguistic puzzles, The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages unlocks new potential for the rediscovery of a rich cultural history.
This book is a part of the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas publication initiative, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabarrok, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Edited by Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Mario Polèse
University of Chicago Press, 2009
As the world becomes more interconnected through travel and electronic communication, many believe that physical places will become less important. But as Mario Polèse argues in The Wealth and Poverty of Regions, geography will matter more than ever before in a world where distance is allegedly dead.
This provocative book surveys the globe, from London and Cape Town to New York and Beijing, contending that regions rise—or fall—due to their location, not only within nations but also on the world map. Polèse reveals how concentrations of industries and populations in specific locales often result in minor advantages that accumulate over time, resulting in reduced prices, improved transportation networks, increased diversity, and not least of all, “buzz”—the excitement and vitality that attracts ambitious people. The Wealth and Poverty of Regions maps out how a heady mix of size, infrastructure, proximity, and cost will determine which urban centers become the thriving metropolises of the future, and which become the deserted cities of the past. Engagingly written, the book provides insight to the past, present, and future of regions.
Tania Murray Li
Duke University Press, 2007
Demonstrating that the “will to improve” has a long and troubled history, Li identifies enduring continuities from the colonial period to the present. She explores the tools experts have used to set the conditions for reform—tools that combine the reshaping of desires with applications of force. Attending in detail to the highlands of Sulawesi, she shows how a series of interventions entangled with one another and tracks their results, ranging from wealth to famine, from compliance to political mobilization, and from new solidarities to oppositional identities and violent attack. The Will to Improve is an engaging read—conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and alive with the actions and reflections of the targets of improvement, people with their own critical analyses of the problems that beset them.
Johan Nylander
Hong Kong University Press, 2024
David Ian Shaman
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2009
Nobel Prize winning economist and former World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has repeatedly discussed the importance of transparency in policymaking at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. He believes a lack of transparency in the two institutions has lead to bad decisions. Bad decisions at IMF and the World Bank mean real pain for the world’s poor.
There is a perception that “the suits” close the World Bank’s doors to deliberate the fate of earth’s poorest populations and only when the doors are unlocked do people living in poverty learn what has been decided about their future. Meanwhile donations are down. The bank’s critical International Development Association’s funding has dropped dramatically. Managers are discouraged by studies examining the World Bank’s effectiveness. How, they wonder, could such large beneficences have so little impact on poor populations?
Events of the past two years have only increased the stakes. First, rising fuel prices caused a worldwide rise in the price of basic foods. Then the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression sapped donor nation’s coffers. By the end of the Bush administration in 2009, giving by the USA lagged more than any other wealthy nation.
In 1999, two Bank researchers understood the situation was already on a precipice. World Bank loans had ceased to make significant impact on poverty in many client nations. Certain governments and multi-national corporations were destroying environments and desecrating indigenous cultures, all to achieve short-term gains for a fortunate few.
Demonstrable successes were few, and every World Bank conference became a melee of demonstrators and police. The two researchers asked themselves whether it was possible to open up the institution by increased transparency, improve its accountability, and mute criticism. They decided to launch an internet-based broadcast to disseminate unedited videos of internal discussions and debates. The bank’s culture and bureaucracy, hardened over a half-century, presented them with a formidable foe. Some powerful officials feared the transparency initiative; others withheld public support while standing on the sidelines. The World Bank Unveiled documents this epic struggle. It is the story of a revolution to transform the World Bank and a case study of the power of the Bank to transform people’s lives.

Donald W. Katzner
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Stephen E Nash
University of Utah Press, 2006
Dendrochronology, the science of assigning precise calendar dates to annual growth rings in trees, provided accurate dates at a time when North American archaeologists had no absolute dating techniques available to guide their analyses. Time, Trees, and Prehistory examines the growth, development, application, and interpretive implications of North American archaeological tree-ring dating from 1914 to 1950.
The development of dendrochronology forced archaeologists to radically revise their understanding of the prehistoric past, compressing by nearly fifty percent the time scale of the archaeological record. Basketmaker sites, for instance, were once thought to be four thousand years old; tree-ring application demonstrated that these sites dated well into the present millennium. Classic sites in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were believed occupied for nearly a thousand years, but tree-ring dates demonstrated that such sites were often built, occupied, and abandoned in just over a century. Other similar changes in temporal scale forced archaeologists to reconsider their interpretations of the rate of prehistoric cultural change, population growth, and the degree of social and political complexity in the Southwest.
Time, Trees, and Prehistory examines archaeological practices of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and demonstrates that tree-ring dating set the stage that enabled revolutionary developments in archaeological method and theory in succeeding decades.
Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap, and Bernardo Mueller
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Edited by Heiwai Tang and Brian Wong Yue Shun
Hong Kong University Press, 2025
Edited by Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1982