For over a century, the poor countries of the global South has been the epicentre of social development and political conflict, in no small part because of high rates of poverty and inequality that far surpass the Global North, the major force contributing to global inequality. Development is a wide-ranging term encompassing social, economic, and political factors, and also embraces advancing the conditions of women, workers and improving ecological degradation. An Encyclopedia of the history and political analysis of the Global South is essential to understanding world history and the patterns of conflict and struggle over the past 250 years. The Encyclopedia of Development will include articles that identify the major factors in development as well as essays that challenge the dominant historical and political interpretations and narratives that privilege Western Europe and its settler-colonial states in North America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and beyond as the founts of democracy, social equality, civil rights, and social protections. We adapt an approach rooted in decolonization of the humanities and social sciences, which privileges the Global North as the principal location of social, economic, and political development and struggles for emancipation and socialism. To the contrary, the historical record demonstrates that the Global South, encompassing 85 percent of humanity, is at the forefront of political development. However, the South has been marginalized by academics and scholars from Western Europe and North America who have had hegemony over intellectual discourse and interpretative knowledge. 

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Development documents and analyses the history and successes and failures of attempts to improve poor countries from the 19th Century to the present. The Encyclopedia corrects potted interpretations by mainstream historians in the Global North through considering social development as a positive force for economic, political, and social justice. We consider social development that too often ignored or dismissed by scholars who focus on the North without consideration of the diversity and vibrancy of the South. From 1900 to the present, the West has controlled the intellectual discourse, which has largely ignored the aspirations of people in the Global South, home to about 85 percent of the world’s populations. 

By necessity, through adopting a Southern perspective, this Encyclopedia takes a world history approach to the study of social development, implies that Southern struggles for justice have been long suppressed by the historical, political, economic, and ideological discourse. This Encyclopedia aims to correct this pretentious vision that the North initiates and transmits social change. To the contrary, the North has sought to contain Southern social development through asserting that as the wellspring of intellectual knowledge, its social and political development take precedence over the South. This Encyclopedia challenges the dominant approach through providing a historical, political, and socio-economic approach to social development of the global South and poor countries worldwide. 

 Immanuel Ness has a long track record of producing Encyclopedia, handbooks, and other reference works and expertise in the topic of economic and political development. Ness is a political economist whose academic production focuses on Development in the Global South and professor of Political Science at City University of New York and visiting professor of sociology at University of Johannesburg. He is author or editor of Migration as Economic Imperialism (Polity 2023);  Global Perspectives on Workers and Labor Organizations (Palgrave 2019), Guestworkers and Resistance to Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2014); Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Development in the Global South (Pluto 2021); Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (Pluto Press 2016); Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South (Pluto Press); Immigrants, Unions and the New US Labor Market (Temple University Press 2005); Trade Unions and the Betrayal of the Unemployed (Routledge 1998) and numerous other publications. He served as Editor of Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (2016 and 2021, The Routledge Handbook of the Gig Economy; co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crisis; The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism (Oxford 2022), The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crisis (2021),  among many other books, journal articles, and chapters. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor and Society (Brill) and series editor of Studies in Political Economy of Global Labor and Work (Brill), series editor of Wildcat, Pluto Press; Anti-Imperialist Marxism, and Iskra Books.