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constitutes atheoryor is little more than
a taxonomy remains subject to debate,
although Rostow certainly did knit together
ideas that were found prominently among
his contemporaries, such as Albert
Hirschmann and Alexander Gerschenkron.
Yet his insistence on placing growth in a wider
historical and social context and on a disag-
gregated approach that reflects the uneven
nature ofdevelopment(cf.uneven develop-
ment) marks a substantial advance upon
abstracted and formal theories of economic
growth. And yet these same characteristics
expose its universalist cast: the model of eco-
nomic development derived from the stages
is teleological, mechanical, a-historical and
ethnocentric:. It isteleologicalin the sense that the end
result (stage 5) is known at the outset
(stage 1) and derived from the historical
geography of ‘developed’ societies, which
then form the template for the ‘under-
developed’, which are thereby denied an
historical geography of their own.
. It ismechanicalin that, despite the claim
that the stages have an inner logic ‘rooted
in a dynamic theory of production’, the
underlying motor of change is not
explained, so that as a result the stages
become little more than a classificatory
system based on data for fifteen countries
only, plus outline data for others.
. It isa-historicalin that notions of path-
dependency are ignored, so that it can be
assumed that the historical geographies of
the underdeveloped countries are un-
affected by that of the dependent, and so
the intervention of the latter into the for-
mer is simply an irrelevance – this position
is also profoundly a-geographical, as it is
incapable of recognizing that geographical
relationships are continuously formed and
re-formed across the world.
. It isethnocentricin espousing a future for
the world based on American history and
aspiring to American norms of high mass
consumption (seeethnocentrism).
Capitalist society is, following Rostow’s
logic, anecessary consequenceof development.
By concealing the social production of the
stages, capitalist societies may be reproduced
and extended by apparently neutral policies
advocating apparently universal processes of
growth. History, in other words, is serial repe-
tition (in the argot of the present: ‘there is no
alternative’). In the context of the 1950s and
1960s, the non-communist manifesto was
nothing short of anideologyforamerican
empire.
Rostow saw his academic work as part of a
political mission, and under Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson he held positions with
authority over US policy towards the Third
World (see Menzel, 2006). He was a brilliant
student – a Rhodes scholar in the 1930s – and
he gravitated towards imperial trade policy,
serving briefly, after a period on the Office of
Strategic Services during the Second World
War, as a professor of American History at
Oxford. He returned to the USA in 1947,
served as an assistant to Gunnar Myrdal at
the United Nations and at the tender age of
33 was appointed to the chair of Economic
History at MIT. It was here, during the
Korean War, that Rostow and a group of other
cold warriors developed a strategy for the eco-
nomic containment ofcommunism. Key to
this strategy, which emerged more fully in the
1960s, was the sense that containment was to
be achieved within the ‘emerging nations’ of
the Third World, that external foreign assist-
ance was key to shift poor nations from stages
2 to 3 (the alternative was the fostering of
preconditions conducive to communism), an
alliance with robustly anti-communist mod-
ernizing elites, and a strong state enhanced
by a large military budget to push forward
the long march through the stages to self-
sustaining capitalist growth. Of course, it all
went horribly wrong. The hubris of power
was radically compromised in Vietnam (in
which Rostow served a bleak and hawk-
like function under President Johnson: Milne
(2008) refers to him as ‘America’s Rasputin’),
in the collapse of the Alliance for Progress in
latin americaand in the ‘blowback’ from
supporting various dictators and psychopaths,
from Mubutu to Marcos. While Rostow’s car-
eer was blemished by Vietnam, it is perhaps
true that his concern with the political pre-
conditions for take-off – now the term of
art is ‘governance’ – is more relevant than
ever. rl/mwSuggested reading
Baran and Hobsbawm (1961); Keeble (1967).staples theory The theory that national and
regional economic and social development is
based upon the export of unprocessed or semi-
processed primary resources (‘staples’).
Although the theory has historical antece-
dents, and different (frequently truncated)
versions of it have been presented (e.g.eco-
nomic base theory), staples theory is mostGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 721 1.4.2009 3:23pmSTAPLES THEORY