From Tropicalism to Development: Coloniality and the Global Formation of Western Modernity

Andrés Bateman, Independent researcher

Modernity has long been portrayed in the social sciences as an internal European process that subsequently expanded to the rest of the world. Within this diffusionist narrative, Europe appears as the primary agent of historical transformation, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas enter modernity as passive recipients of institutions, technologies, and ideas already constituted in Europe. This paper challenges that narrative by arguing that modernity became global not because it possessed an intrinsic universality, but because Western modernity emerged and expanded itself through colonial domination. Drawing on world-historical and decolonial scholarship, as well as historical evidence on colonial extraction, slavery, and global commodity circulation, the paper reconceptualizes modernity as a dialectical global process emerging through asymmetrical interactions between metropole and colony. Building on the decolonial concept of coloniality, it argues that Western modernity rests on a durable matrix linking capitalism, racial classification, and epistemic hierarchy. The paper traces this dynamic through a genealogy connecting tropicalism and developmentalism as two historical articulations of colonial difference. Tropicalism constructed colonial territories as spaces of excess and backwardness, while developmentalism translated these hierarchies into economic and technocratic terms through the language of poverty and underdevelopment. By situating these discursive formations within the broader trajectory of Western modernity, the paper contributes to debates in historical social science on the global formation of modernity and the persistence of colonial hierarchies in modern institutions and epistemologies.

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 Presented in Session 6. Critical Perspectives on Colonial Projects across the Globe