Winner of the 2024 Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Intellectual History Award
Winner of the 2024 Center for Presidential History Distinguished Book Award
The Poverty of the World:
Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1941-1968
Available from Oxford University Press in Hardcover, E-book, and Audiobook.
In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals and policymakers in the United States came to see poverty as a global problem. Applying Progressive and Depression-era insights about the causes of poverty to the post-World War II challenges posed by the Cold War and decolonization, they developed new ideas about why poverty persisted–and how it could be eradicated.
The Poverty of the World brings together the histories of US foreign relations and domestic politics to explain why, during a period of unprecedented affluence, Americans rediscovered poverty and supported a major policy initiative to combat it.
Revisiting a moment of triumph for American liberals in the 1940s, Jahanbani shows how the US’s newfound role as a global superpower prompted novel ideas among liberal thinkers about how to address poverty and generated new urgency for trying to do so. Their sense of responsibility about deploying American knowledge and wealth as a beneficent force in the world produced such foreign aid programs as the Peace Corps. As Americans came to recognize the problem beyond the country’s borders, they turned the idea of “underdevelopment” inward to explain poverty in urban neighborhoods and rural communities at home, inspiring Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and his domestic peace corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA).
Drawing on a wide variety of archival material, Jahanbani offers a bold revisionist interpretation of the the lives and work of prominent liberal figures in postwar American social politics, from Oscar Lewis to John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington to Sargent Shriver, to show the global origins of their ideas.
By tracing how American liberals invented the problem of “global poverty” and executed a war against it, The Poverty of the World sheds new light on the domestic impacts of the Cold War, the global ambitions of American liberalism, and the way in which key intellectuals and policymakers worked to develop an alternative vision of US empire in the decades after World War II.
Praise for The Poverty of the World
“The Poverty of the World is an important, thought-provoking contribution to history of the post-World War II United States and the world it tried to shape. Ambitious and wide-ranging, it shows how the problem of global poverty became an intellectual construct, a moral challenge, a policy focus, and a foundation point for a new, liberal vision of empire.”
Daniel T. Rodgers, author of Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age:
“In the 1960s, poverty was a problem the United States knew how to fix, and leaders in government and the economy believed the national security might depend on it. Jahanbani elegantly captures this moment of urgency and idealism that contrasts so sharply with today’s mood of malignant apathy. In a series of compelling intellectual biographies, Jahanbani relates the exploits of poverty-fighters who traversed the world searching for remedies that would be equally effective in Kolkata or Kansas City. Their plans were not so much tried and found wanting as found difficult and, unfortunately, not tried. The Poverty of the World provides the essential backstory to today’s debates on the chronic inequalities of wealth and privilege afflicting our communities and planet.”
Nick Cullather, author of The Hungry World
“Situating the US War on Poverty in a global frame, Sheyda Jahanbani excavates the ideas—about ‘underdevelopment,’ affluence, and the prerogatives of American empire—that animated liberal poverty fighters who positioned themselves as crusaders for democracy around the world. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, The Poverty of the World is full of fresh insights about the aspirations shaping postwar social politics, and the blind spots and contradictions that kept struggles for equity and justice so elusive.”
Alice O’Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara
“By showing that the postwar American liberal elite project of economic development in the Global South was contiguous both conceptually and politically with the so-called War on Poverty at home, Jahanbani’s landmark book reveals as a fiction the line usually drawn between foreign and domestic policy.”
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