Although there is much discussion in academic, journalistic and policy making circles about "development" today, there is very little consensus about what the term actually means. For example, while modernisation theorists claims that development is a sequence of structural changes that all societies eventually go through (modeled on an idealized and sanitized version of European 'development' that elides the foundational role of enslavement and colonialism), critical development theories argue that the notion of ‘development’ is merely a discursive device designed to reproduce and obscure unequal power relations and value drain from the global South to the global north. This class will interrogate the multiple meanings, approaches and functions of the concept of development. It will start with a history of the region's unequal incorporation into the global economy starting from the era of merchant capitalism and early imperialism to settler colonialism, tracing change and continuity in the era of post-colonial developmentalism and the current neoliberal era. The class will consider multiple scales of the development question including at the global, state and societal levels, covering the following themes: Colonialism and primitive accumulation; The discourse and politics of 'modernization'; Anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial developmentalism; Dependency and neocolonialism; Peasant struggles and food sovereignty; Uneven ecological exchange and peasant struggles; Neoliberalism, structural adjustment and 'bread revolts'; Urban growth, gentrification and dispossession; Feminized precarity; Higher education and brain drain; Social movements and alternatives to colonial-capitalist development.