4 - American Knowledge of the World

Summary

Since the end of World War II, the production of American knowledge of the world has undergone both exponential expansion and a radical transformation. Before the war, missionaries and military planners and the earliest multinational corporations were the primary sites for the production of knowledge of the rest of the world. World War II and the coming of the global Cold War underscored for US elites the need to better understand the world, which underwrote the creation of standing intelligence agencies – agencies whose knowledge and personnel drew on and were interdigitated with growing US multinational corporations, a rapidly expanding academic enterprise grounded in Area Studies programs as well as development and international affairs programs, and world-spanning print-media empires.