Interdependent Development

Rather than being a book about development per se, this work, first published in 1975, is instead a book about ideas about development, designed for those drawn by a concern over social injustice into the development field. In a selective review of theory, which gives particular emphasis to the spatial dimension in Western, Marxist and neo-Marxist thought, Harold Brookfield traces the evolution of ideas about world inequality and the problem of development from the days before the underdeveloped countries were considered to be a major problem, through the years dominated by economic growth, to the more searching approaches of the contemporary era. The central argument of the book is that development is a totality, which cannot properly be understood by separation into parts. The developed and underdeveloped countries constitute one interdependent system, and change in one cannot be understood without consideration of the other.