Dear Sergio,

I will answer your question at the end of my message (but before, if I may, 
I will indulge into offering some comments about the very interesting 
debate that you have incited):

Development economists consider that the origin of the contemporary concept 
of development was President's Truman 1949 speech ('the so called Point 
Four'). That happens for two reasons. First, because he proposed 
development in a broad international perspective organised around aid and 
technical assistance (which are very much contemporary features of 
development practises). Secondly, because he was able to institutionalise 
development through the United Nations (think about the theoretical 
contributions by UNDP, ILO, UNCTAD). Indeed, most of what we call nowadays 
development cannot be seen without this international perspective (think 
about MGDs, Climate Change, etc).

It is true that Smith and Mill and Marx (to mention just a few) discussed 
much earlier than the WWII phenomena that are associated with development, 
broadly speaking. In fact, they talked about 'progress' (either material or 
moral), but never within the Human Rights framework adopted by the UN after 
Truman's speech (institutional aspect). Some might argue that colonialist 
policies were replaced by development policies and that the cold war 
produced different streams (for the heterodoxy we could mention the Bandung 
1955 conference, quite important for defining 'underdevelopment' followed 
by the New International Economic Order (NIEO) of the 60s and the 
Prebish-Singer group). I would agree with that.

But much followed after the 1950s and 1960s. A new world of development 
economics started after Robert Mcnamara's address to the board of governors 
of the World Bank in 1972 in which he talked about poverty, inequality and 
basic needs. Professor Des Gasper has written several papers on this 
subject. I understand that Sir Richard Jolly has also done a great job in 
putting an intellectual history of the UN together in several volumes that 
tell with details this story. They might be useful references to your 
project.

And then we have the human development perspective, that completed in 2010 
twenty years (based on the publication of the first Human Development 
Report). Indeed, the last Human Development Report brings a little bit of 
their history, but books by Mahbub ul Haq, Paul Streeten and Amartya Sen 
(see the nice collection put together by Sakiko Fukuda Parr some years ago 
with some of their contributions) can situate much better what happened in 
the last twenty years.

To conclude, my view is that unless you are interested in what specific 
authors have said about development, I would not delve into what economists 
said much earlier before the end of the WWII (Keynes might be an 
exception). I am aware that my comment might not be very popular and by no 
means I wish to suggest that the contrary comments you have received 
earlier are not very interesting and valid as a historical perspective to 
the subject, but I would focus on the contemporary meaning of the term.

And to answer your question, the best book I know on the topic is 'The 
History of Development: from western origins to global faith' (London, Zed 
Books, 2008 [was written earlier in French, but updated])

Kind regards,

Flavio


Flavio Comim
University of Cambridge, UK
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil