Arthur Lewis and the Classical Foundations of “Development”: Economic History and Institutional Change

Rather than challenging specific points of Boianovsky’s (2019) interpretation, this contribution takes a step back and asks: in what other ways it would have been possible to conceptualize and observe the influence of classical political economy on Lewis’s work? In doing so, we shift the focus from development economics to the broader sphere of “development.” The discourse built around “development” (of which development economics represented an important intellectual infrastructure) can be read as a framework rearticulating the relationship between past, present and future, and presenting a reflection on the relevance and applicability of European economic and political history to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.¹ This expansion of the field of discussion allows to emphasize the importance of classical political economy as a repository of historical narratives and forms of reasoning. We identify in economic history and in the relationship between institutional settings and political developments two “roads” acknowledged – but not taken – by Boianovsky and suggest that they can also contribute to illuminate the legacy of classical political economy in Lewis’s work.