THE TYPICALITIES OF THE ENGLISH? WALT ROSTOW,THE STAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, AND MODERN BRITISH HISTORY

Abstract

Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.

El Debate Historiográfico en torno al Sistema Nobi

“…Sin embargo, hay que matizar que para teóricos de la teoría de la modernización como Walt Whitman Rostow, existen casos excepcionales, tales como Reino Unido y su proceso de industrialización, siendo estos los ejemplos a seguir por las sociedades tradicionales para modernizarse. Ortolano (2015) alega lo siguiente respecto a Rostow y Reino Unido:…”

The Triumph of the Placeless

“…In this reading, flows to and from the reference economy (imports, exports, migration, knowledge, FDI, financial capital) and related influences are treated in a passing fashion, with limited consideration of where they come to and leave from (or indeed how long they stay), and instead a concentration on the 'attractiveness' of the reference place to such flows (e.g., Florida & Kenney, 1988;Capello & Lenzi, 2013). The focus on internal capitals perhaps made (some) sense when Smith was writing and England was the only industrial economy, but most place-development theory since has treated regions as self-governing 'little-Englands' (and countries as 'later-Englands') in ways which obscure the centrally important role of external forces on place development (Frank, 1966;Hobsbawm 1979;Hopkins et al 1996;Ortolano, 2015).…”