ABSTRACT
Introduction Up until the 1980s scholarly thinking about development was largely focused on macro-scale economic matters: it was just a case of getting the right economic structures in place and, bingo, ‘economic take-o’ would occur. Walt Rostow’s ‘ve stages of economic growth’ was one of the most inuential of these types of theory and postulated that for a traditional society to develop it had rst to manifest the ‘preconditions for take-o’ (largely a new external demand for raw materials, which would somehow stimulate increasing production and investment and drive social change) before it would indeed ‘take o’ (by developing manufacturing, transport systems and schools and universities), and so on until it reached the fth and nal stage of ‘mass consumption’ (Rostow 1960). While there was a certain neatness to this approach, it turned out that it did not actually work in practice. External demand for raw materials grew, but it did not appear to stimulate all the other changes that Rostow postulated. The ‘somehow’ that Rostow had glossed over seemed to be more complicated than originally envisaged.
