Cooper, Frederick, and Randall Packard. International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley, Calif., 1997. A collection of essays that provides a good introduction to the field of development.
Cowen, M. P., and R. W. Shenton. Doctrines of Development. London, 1996. Traces the development ideas from origins in the European Enlightenment.
Curti, Merle, and Kendall Birr. Prelude to Point Four. Madison, Wis., 1954. An early study of development in American foreign relations prior to Truman.
Gilman, Nils. "Paving the World with Good Intentions: The Genesis of Modernization Theory, 1945–1965." Ph.D. dissertation. University of California. Berkeley, Calif., 2001. Links Rostovian theory to the Parsonian revolution in social science.
Latham, Michael E. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000. An outstanding study of modernization's place in the Kennedy administration's Cold War strategy.
Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York, 1958. A seminal modernization study and one of the best examples of the discourse at the height of its influence.
Maxfield, Sylvia, and James H. Nolt. "Protectionism and the Internationalization of Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey, and Argentina." International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 49–81. Reveals that the United States systematically encouraged the strategy of import substitution.
Packenham, Robert A. The Dependency Movement. Cambridge, Mass., 1992. Follows the rise and decline of dependency theory in Latin America and the United States.
Pletsch, Carl E. "The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975." Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 3 (1981): 565–590. Describes how academic politics and federal funding led American scholars to create the Third World.
Rostow, Walt W. The Stages of Economic Growth. Cambridge, 1960. The classic statement of Rostovian theory.
Simpson, Christopher, ed. Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War. New York, 1998. Explores how modernization theory emerged from a collaboration between academe and the security establishment.