In The Price of Aid, Engerman brings recently declassified Russian, British, American, Indian, and other archival documents together with an astounding array of secondary published material to reconstruct India’s “foreign economic relations” in the early years of the Cold War (170). Engerman studies the Cold War as an organizing principle of the world, one that remains crucial to the way that the international economic order took shape in the twentieth century, reconstructing how superpowers turned to foreign aid as a tool of the Cold War to influence geopolitics through economic means.
Because Soviet and American aid policies and practices in India had wide-ranging consequences for both the donor countries, too, this book is essentially based on three parallel national narratives, grounded in an international context. Thus, its main conclusion is that none of the national economic policies of the time were purely domestic. Engerman stresses the inherently political nature...