"Ever-Widening Circles": Private Voluntary Development, Colonialism, and Arab Palestinians, 1930-1960

I engage questions about how historical actors envisioned the best way to approach “the local” as outsiders as they grappled with the collateral damage of processes of urban-industrial modernization. I use multi-archival research in the United States, England, Israel, and the West Bank to track how American private voluntary organizations and British colonial authorities deployed a shared strain of rural development among Palestinian Arabs amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Advocates of rural development were ambivalent about modernization and sought ways of nation-building that enabled local societies to retain their integrity and some measure of control over socioeconomic change. Towards this end, advocates promoted a rural development that was practical: immediately relevant for daily life and therefore very dependent on local contexts and the experiences and abilities of the students themselves. In this way, I encourage peacebuilding scholars to take seriously the “everyday” of colonial praxis and push historians of U.S. development towards the “everyday” of specific projects. And I argue that rural development was the predecessor to community development and that, rather than Asia, it is to the Middle East that U.S. community development primarily owes its emergence.