This book is a 'stock-taking' of development theory at the end of the twentieth century. It argues that the assumptions on which development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The ex-colonial 'third world' for which development theory was originally developed has fractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the post-war regime of regulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed the scope for state economic intervention.

A much broader-based, more historical and more explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for.