In 1900 an official commission landed in Manila to establish a colonial government for the Philippines. It included Ohio judge William Howard Taft and a young attorney, Daniel R. Williams, who kept his thoughts in a diary. “It is an interesting phenomenon, this thing of building a modern commonwealth on a foundation of medievalism – giving to this country at one fell swoop all the innovations and discoveries which have marked centuries of Anglo-Saxon push and energy,” he penciled on a damp page in October 1901. “I doubt if in the world's history anything similar has been attempted, that is, the transplanting so rapidly of the ideas and improvements of one civilization upon another.” It is a familiar enthusiasm, one that might have been expressed at different times by American missionaries in Hawaii, Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana, or economists in Chile. It is not altogether different from President Barack Obama's pledge to poor countries that “we can deliver historic leaps in development.”

The United States conducts foreign relations through diplomacy, trade, and war, but also through humanitarianism and science. Such interventions are called development, but development is also a way of seeing other peoples’ ways of life as an incomplete project, and the United States as an agent in fulfilling their ultimate destiny. Williams did not specify the “improvements” in store for Filipinos, nor did Obama say what “historic leaps” he had in mind (they probably defined development in vastly different ways) but their shared assumption that the United States was ahead of other nations and could lead them toward a better future is a persistent and powerful theme.

Foreign aid and technical assistance have been part of the diplomatic toolkit since 1948, but even earlier US foreign relations aimed not just to influence other countries but to modernize them: to push them to break with the past and begin a restless search for change and renewal. For over a century, development has been at the core of the American mission. It has justified the expenditure of billions of aid dollars, the upending of whole societies, and the bulldozing of landscapes, while inspiring visions of the final eradication of poverty, disease, and war.