In his fascinating new book, Daniel Immerwahr seeks to transform our understanding of American approaches to international development in the postwar era. There has been, according to Immerwahr, a tendency among historians in recent years to retell variations of a “Modernization-Comes-to-Town” story. These tales focus on the role played by the elite architects of US modernization in designing American interventions in the developing world. They are stories of centralization and bureaucratization, of how American officials “flattened, distorted, dehydrated” local customs and practices in order to impose some version of Main Street, USA (5). This is not, however, the story that Immerwahr tells.

As Thinking Small demonstrates, the modernization narratives that stemmed from the academy and seeped into official US policy were “in constant conversation with a rival inclination, what sociologist Robert Nisbet called ‘the quest for community’” (4). According to Immerwahr, there was “a great appetite [among US policymakers] for the notion that the United States might engage with the rest of the world not as a broadcaster of some monolithic culture but as a sympathetic enabler of village-level democracy, plurality, and local knowledge” (3). Concepts of modernization, with all their industrializing and technocratic connotations, were deeply entangled with competing ideas that emphasized building local stability and combating poverty at a community level. Where the former sought to mobilize local technocrats to impose American visions of modernity, the latter believed that community development would allow local communities to adapt their traditions in order to feed their values up to the elites. That is to say, rather than meekly acquiescing to modernization, communitarians argued that they could shape modernization.

Immerwahr traces the cultural and intellectual enthusiasm for this form of “small groupism” to the early twentieth century. As a rival to concepts of individualism, centralization and bureaucratization, “small groupism” originated within sociology departments before being embraced by domestic- and foreign-policy officials. It had, however, a complex and at times ambivalent relationship with competing worldviews that might be considered antithetical, including theories of modernization. Communitarianism reemerged in the 1920s, finding its expression in aspects of the New Deal, such as the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, as well as in the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War. The domestic origins of communitarianism belied how easily some US officials would adapt it to suit their foreign-policy goals.

Communitarianism abroad was often built on racialized assumptions about the affinity of non-Western populations for tradition and a community archetype. In the case of India, which was on the receiving end of persistent American community-development efforts, there was division among Indian officials between advocates of high modernist Nehruism and Gandhian villagism, just as there was among US policymakers. Even so, there was considerable enthusiasm among Indian officials for the type of bottom-up, village-oriented community development promoted by American communitarians. For US policymakers, the vast, postwar development experiment in Etawah was a key example of how community development could both build an alternative path to modernity and bolster India's resistance to the growing appeal of communism.

However, community development often created unforeseen problems. Rather than challenging traditional social structures, community development was just as likely to reinforce the status quo, especially regarding the role of women in society and repression of so-called “untouchables,” India's lowest caste. The one exception to this was in Kerala precisely because it did not already have a strong village tradition in the same vein as Etawah. The communitarians’ good intentions, therefore, often resulted in complicated networks of power and authority, tradition and modernity.

Elsewhere, Immerwahr demonstrates how in the Philippines community development was used by Ferdinand Marcos's authoritarian regime to coopt village loyalty. In doing so, Thinking Small makes another valuable contribution to the growing literature on American development programmes by decentring the United States within the narrative. While the centre dictates, it is the periphery that implements, or at least so goes the story. Immerwahr is right to amplify, therefore, the ways in which Filipino policymakers and communities engaged, negotiated, and challenged American policies.

Immerwahr concludes by challenging scholars, policymakers, and aid practitioners alike to relinquish “the fantasy that community is the great untried experiment of the industrial age … to treat community with less reverence and with more curiosity, to move it from the altar to the dissection table” (184). If the historiography of US modernization and development is littered with grandiose, ill-conceived, and wasteful projects, then Immerwahr urges us to resist the impulse to assume that a focus on community can succeed where modernization failed. Not only does he decentre the United States, he also decentres modernization in the story of global postwar development. As Immerwahr so adeptly proves here, such an approach can fruitfully extend and deepen our understanding of America's engagement with the developing world during the Cold War.