title: Comparativ, Vol. 34 No. 6 (2024): Making the Village Fit for the Future: Rural Development in Twentieth-Century Asia
title: Making the Village Fit for the Future: Rural Development in Twentieth-Century Asia
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Comparativ
Publisher: name: Comparativ
Year: 2025

description: This journal issue re-evaluates rural reform in twentieth-century Asia. So far, historians have approached development outside the cities as a contingent dimension of empires and nation-states or as a derivative of urban planning efforts. By contrast, the case studies assembled here frame the history of villages and rural change as a decisive arena in which ideas and practices concerning the redesign of state and society were formulated, negotiated, and experimented with. Particularly during transitional years of accelerated historical change, such as after the world wars and during decolonization, the concept of the rural and rural communities functioned as a medium for diverse and often conflictive notions of the future, imaginations of socioeconomic order, and political aspirations.


The authors of these development paths were not only international development experts or urban elites but also (self-proclaimed) representatives among rural communities who wove their vested interests, ideas, and norms into the fabric of development and modernization. In that light, this journal issue proposes to investigate more in detail to which extent, for whom, and with what consequences negotiations about the meaning of the rural gave shape to developmental ideas more generally. In other words, the case studies analyse rural history and the conceptual history of the rural in Asia as key elements of twentieth-century development history.
description: Jie-Hyun Lim: Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, 344 pp....732-735
Simon Godard: Le laboratoire de l’internationalisme. Le CAEM et la construction du bloc socialiste, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2021, 325 pp....730-732
Silke Hackenesch (ed.): Adoption across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022, 229 pp....728-730
Faeeza Ballim: Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, 167 pp....726-728
Melanie Judgen, Dee Smythe (eds.): Unsettling Apologies: Critical Writings on Apology from South Africa (Law, Society, Policy Series), Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022, 312 pp....724-726
Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, Juliette Reboul (eds.): Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700–1930), Leiden: Brill, 2021, 434 pp....722-723
Janet Polasky: Asylum Between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023, 312 pp....719-721
Chris Gratien: The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022, 318 pp....716-719
The Transformation of the Perception of Change since the late Eighteenth Century...684-715
Modernization through Rural Development: German Development Aid in Southeast Asia in a European Setting, 1930s–1970s...662-683
Lost Rural Futures: Agrarian Nationalism and Industrial Dissent in Modern China...637-661
Gendered Development Work and Non-State Primary Healthcare Provisions: The Skippo Medical Van Scheme in Rural India, c. 1940s to mid-1970s...615-636
Introduction...601-614
Inhaltsverzeichnis | Contents...597-598
Editorial...599-600