The Marshall Plan: The Beginning of U.S. Development Assistance?

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Abstract

For decades, the Marshall Plan has served as the reference point for the beginning of U.S. foreign aid and development assistance. However, the Marshall Plan represents neither the first time the U.S. used foreign aid to achieve developmental goals nor the point at which foreign aid and development policy were recognized as lasting components of U.S. foreign policy. To make sense of this oddity, this paper explores the question of ‘what drove the introduction of U.S. development assistance before the Marshall Plan?’. I find that the U.S. first used foreign aid to achieve developmental goals in Latin America during World War II and that its introduction was driven by a desire to achieve security and containment goals in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, I argue that the history of U.S. development assistance in Latin America is a better reference point for the origin of U.S. foreign aid and development policy than the Marshall Plan. Using primary documents and secondary literature, I trace the origins and post-War trajectory of U.S. development assistance in Latin America during the 1940s. In so doing, I aim to make a number of contributions: first, to the substantial history of U.S. development policy; second, to transnational, historical scholarship on modernist project of ‘development’; and finally, to the ‘remaking’ of theories explaining the drivers and determinants of state involvement in development and welfare outside the national realm.

Author

• Amanda Marie Shriwise, University of Oxford