Jacob A. Tropp

As the US government initiated various New Deal agrarian programs in the 1930s, American officials increasingly engaged in dialogues about state development planning with colleagues overseas, particularly from Great Britain and its colonies. In the 1940s and 1950s, the US then drew from its domestic experience as it launched a new “development” era of technical assistance initiatives in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This project introduces a revealing but neglected undercurrent inflecting these histories: how US government actors involved in “developing” Native American societies influenced the transnational production of “expertise” for American, other Western, and Third World practitioners during this foundational period in international development planning.