Harvard University Press
Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development
Key Metrics
- David C Engerman
- Harvard University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780674011519
- 9.46 X 6.56 X 1.25 inches
- 1.61 pounds
- History > United States - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.
American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for--and the costs of--Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.
This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.
Author Bio
David C. Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history.
Building on his dual training in American and Russian/Soviet history at the University of California-Berkeley (where he received his Ph.D. in 1998), he wrote two books on the place of Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life: Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard UP, 2003) and Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford UP, 2009).
He has also researched and written on a variety of topics related to the history of development assistance, including a co-edited volume, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (U-Mass Press, 2003), and most recently a monograph, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard UP, 2018).
This research was also the topic of his presidential address for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2016. Research for The Price of Aid was supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Eisenhower, Johnson and Truman presidential libraries.
Engerman joins the faculty at Yale after nineteen years at Brandeis University. His new research focuses on the geopolitics of international economic inequality in the second half of the twentieth century.
Source: Yale University
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