In 1979, Immanuel Wallerstein proclaimed the death of modernization theory. The concept of modernization, he argued, had finally been recognized as a “cul-de-sac,” an intellectual obstruction that had confined decades of social scientific inquiry. Drawing scholars away from questions about the essential nature, historical construction, and lasting power of a capitalist world system, it had only encouraged “comparative measurements of non-comparable and non-autonomous entities.” As social scientists invoked objectivity, employed structural-functional indices, and ordered nation-states in terms of relative “progress,” they ignored the power that structured global flows of resources. The concept had been, perhaps, a “worthy parable” for its time. By inventing “development” and the “Third World,” well-intentioned liberal social scientists had offered “new hope” that destitute peoples might emerge into twentieth-century light. If the “underdeveloped were clever enough to invent an indigenous version of Calvinism … or if transistors were placed in remote villages, or if farsighted elites mobilized benighted masses with the aid of altruistic outsiders,” then the “underdeveloped too would cross the river Jordan and come into a land flowing with milk and honey.” The time had come, however, to reject modernization, “to put away childish things, and look reality in its face.”

While perhaps the most striking, Wallerstein’s was not the only unflattering epitaph for modernization theory. Starting in the mid-1960s and continuing on through the 1970s, a broad range of scholars generated a massive literature criticizing the idea that all of the world’s nations followed the same essential trajectory of growth, a pattern most clearly identified in the history of Western accomplishment.