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Author(s): H. W. Arndt
Source: Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Apr., 1981), pp. 457-466
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1153704 .
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EconomicDevelopment:A SemanticHistory
H. W. Arndt
Australian National University
So commonplace has the concept of "economic development" become to
this generation that it comes as a surprise to find the Oxford English
Dictionary still unaware of "development" as a technical term in economics, as contrasted with its use in mathematics, biology, music, or
photography. Nor, incidentally, is there an entry on "economic development" in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The story of how the
term "economic development" entered the English language and came,
for a time at least, to be identified with growth in per capita income is
both curious and illuminating.
Mainstream Economics
Adam Smith spoke, not of economic development, but of "the progress
of England towards opulence and improvement."1 "Material progress"
was the expression almost invariably used by mainstream economists
from Adam Smith until World War II when they referred to what we
would now call the economic development of the West during those 2
centuries.2When Colin Clark in 1940 published his monumental comparative study of economic development, he still called it The Conditions of
Economic Progress (the title Marshall had had in mind for the fourth
volume of his Principles, which he had planned but never wrote).3
Economists and economic historians wrote about the rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution, the evolution of trade, or "The Growth
of Free Industry and Enterprise."4 But this historical process appears
1 Adam Smith, The Wealthof Nations, ed. E. Cannan,2 vols. (1776; reprinted.,
London: UniversityPaperbacks,1961), 1:367.
2 For quotationsfrom J. S. Mill, A. Marshall,K. Wicksell,L. Robbins, A. G. B.
Fisher, and others, see H. W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth (Melbourne:
LongmanCheshire,1978),chap. 2.
458
1929).
1oR. H. Tawney,LandandLabourin China(London:Allen & Unwin, 1932),p. 18.
H. W. Arndt
459
ProgressPublishers,1969),2:87.
12 Ibid., p. 92.
13J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1954), p. 573.
14For an account of this descent, see John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man
1956), pp. 54-55. In the last sentence of the quotation, Hegel's Entwicklungwas unaccountablytranslatedin the Englishversion as "expansion."
460
H. W. Arndt
461
462
onyms such as "opening up our natural resources"26or "the steady occupancy and proper advancement of the Colony,"27-the Canadian example
is the only one so far discovered before the 1880s, and in the United
States it does not seem to have been used at all in the nineteenth century.28
That "economic development" in the transitive sense entered the
language and became common in Australia, while being used much less
in Canada and not at all in the United States, is no historical accident.
In the United States, and for much of the time also in Canada, economic
development happened,as immigrants from Europe streamed in; settlers
went west to take up fertile land; communities established towns and
cities; private companies constructed railways; and mining, logging, manufacturing, banking, and other enterprises grew, within (and sometimes
without) legal rules made by government. In Australia's hostile environment, where settlers from the earliest convict days had to contend with
drought, flood, pests, distance, and more drought, economic development
did not happen. It was always seen to need government initiative, action
to "develop" the continent's resources by bringing people and capital
from overseas, by constructing railways, and by making settlement
possible through irrigation and other "developmental" public works.29
So well established did this notion become in Australia that by the 1920s
it was referred to as "the doctrine of development before settlement."30
Developmentand Welfare
Development of natural resources was not always viewed as a task of
government. The British authority on colonial policy, J. S. Furnivall,
referredto "the development of the material resources of Burma through
trade and economic enterprise,"31and it was probably also in this sense
that the term was used in an International Labour Office study of Brazil
which identified "continuous occupation and development of the country,
in space as in time," as "the primary condition for the economic exploita26E.g., ibid., pp. 282, 318.
27Latrobe, lieutenant-governorof Victoria (1851), quoted in Roberts, p. 287,
The fact that these synonymsbegan to be displacedby "development"in the 1830sand
1840s may be explainedby the vogue which ideas of evolution and developmentwere
enjoying about that time in naturalsciences,such as biology and geology; the Oxford
EnglishDictionarycites uses in more generalliteraturein the same period,e.g., Harriet
Martineau(1834), Dickens (1837), Emerson(1841), and Newman (1845).
28Thus the word "development"does not occur once in two works about aspects
of nineteenth-centuryeconomic historyin the United States, railwaypolicy and public
lands policy, the Australiancounterpartsof which use it constantly (see S. L. Miller,
InlandTransportation
[New York: McGraw-HillBook Co., 1933];and B. H. Hibbard,
A History of Public Land Policies [New York: Peter Smith, 1939]).
Economic Survey of Australia, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
30Ibid., p. 197.
31J. S. Furnivall, An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma, 3d ed.
H. W. Arndt
463
464
An interesting exception, though one that may prove the rule, is the
Chinese nationalist leader, Sun Yat-sen. In 1922, he published (in English)
a remarkable book on The InternationalDevelopmentof China, in which
he proposed a massive program for the economic development of China
with the aid of foreign capital. In breadth of imagination, it anticipates by
a generation much of the post-1945 literature on economic development.
"China must not only regulate private capital, but she must also develop
state capital and promote industry.., .build means of production, railroads and waterways, on a large scale. Open new mines.., .hasten to
foster manufacturing."38The reason for questioning whether Sun Yat-sen
should be regardedas an exception is partly that his thinking was probably
influenced by the October Revolution in Russia and thus indirectly by the
Marxist tradition39and partly that his use of "economic development" is,
after all, closer to that of Milner than of Marx: "The natural resources of
China are great and their proper development could create an unlimited
market for the whole world."40
Another exception, outside the mainstream of economic writing in
the English language, was the use of "economic development" in Australia
(and probably the other Dominions) where the distinction between the
transitive and intransitive meanings became blurred to the point of
obliteration. When, in 1931, D. B. Copland edited a special issue on
Australia for The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, he referred to it as "a survey of recent trends in Australian
economic development," and he wrote in the last chapter that "by the
end of 1929 Australia had reached the close of a period of rapid development and high prosperity" and that the growth of Australian manufacturing production during the years 1913-26 had represented "a natural
development in a country that had first pursued primary production,"
though "somewhat forced."41In such passages, neither he nor his readers,
one suspects, were any longer conscious of the transitive, as contrasted
with the intransitive, meaning; during the 1930s, "economic development"
was constantly used in Australia, and increasingly elsewhere, in this
ambivalent sense.
In 1939, Eugene Staley, starting where Sun Yat-sen had left off,
38 Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York: G. P.
Putnam'sSons, 1922),p. 8.
39Sun Yat-sen had expounded his grandiose ideas for railway developmentin
China before World War I, and although the book was not publisheduntil 1922, 2
yearsaftera visit to the Soviet Union, it was basedon lectureshe gave in 1918.But even
at that time, what was happeningin Russia made as great an impressionon him as
news of the GreatLeap Forwardin Chinawas to makeon Indianopinion 40 yearslater.
40 Sun Yat-sen, p. 5.
nomic Survey of Australia, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
H. W. Arndt
465
156.
versityPress, 1960).
466
53