The history of the foreign assistance policy of European countries has received comparatively little attention from economic, political or diplomatic historians. There is a remarkable lack of archive-based historical studies of intergovernmental and intra-governmental discussions about the aims, methods and priorities of foreign aid and its compatibility with national interests and capabilities. This is the more surprising since the ‘aid question’ constituted the third major field of international relations during the Cold War, and was tightly interlinked with the fields of security, finance and economics. In short, the Europeans' positions on development policy in relation to themselves, the United States and the Third World and between themselves have yet to be analysed. The only significant analysis so far of the inducements offered by the West to the Third World is the book by David K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World.

Development policies are commonly regarded as a phenomenon of the post-Second World War era. This essay looks at the historical antecedents of European development efforts and analyses the determining interests that motivated development policy in the twentieth century. The regional focus on south-east Asia allows for a differentiated appreciation of national approaches to European development policies. It shows that the legitimation of control and the securing of interests–security and economic interests, as well as notions of national prestige–are among the driving forces behind development policies. It also suggests that development policies were multifunctional from their inception.The author wishes to thank Heide-Irene Schmidt and Helge Pharo, the contributors to a workshop on early European development aid (held in Bochum, March 2003), as well as Jost Dülffer, Ruth Jachertz and Philipp Janssen for invaluable comments.

Development aid became a significant feature of British foreign and economic policy from the late 1950s. While giving a chronological account of policy developments in this field down to the publication of the Pearson report of 1971, this article is organised around three predominant themes. First, aid has to be seen in the context of Commonwealth relations, with the Commonwealth as both the major recipient of British aid and the main context in which it was organised and discussed. Second, policies on aid were closely tied to developments in policy on the balance of payments, the perceived state of which consistently influenced the volume of aid-giving. Finally, aid policy was part of a complex international debate about the concept of ‘need’, which at least in part shaped who were to be the recipients of aid, and at the same time about the proper measure of the ‘burden’ of aid which helped to shape the policy of the main givers.I am grateful to Astrid Ringe, Roger Middleton and Neil Rollings for allowing me pre-publication sight of their forthcoming handbook on Public Record Office documents on economic policy in the 1951–64 period. This article has benefited from the comments of Catherine Schenk and participants in the international symposium on aid at the University of Bochum, March 2003.

In the 1960s France's policy on development aid and co-operation had developed to a point where over 1.5 per cent of French gross national product was devoted to supporting growth and stability in African countries. Aid then became ‘global’ and encompassed private ‘aid’ from commercial sources; as such it helped France in its ambition to wield influence in international affairs. Its noblest aim was to create an area in which French culture, borne by thousands of volunteers and experts, would be mixed with the values of the host countries, but its impact was not great enough to prevent corruption or to save development from taking the wrong course.

By the end of the 1950s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had established its global approach in Dutch development policy, with the United Nations regarded as the ideal platform. This article argues that in the course of the following decade Dutch business interests succeeded in challenging the multilateral approach, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs shaping the legal instruments of foreign aid, such as tied aid and investment guarantees. The article further argues that despite this economic pragmatism the Minister for Development Co-operation managed to represent the Netherlands as a distinterested worldwide actor by the end of the 1960s.

The article argues that although the Federal Republic of Germany had a genuine interest in the development of the ‘Third World’, it was the pressure of the United States that urged West Germany to become a major donor country during the first development decade. Its economic and financial strength made West Germany the primary target of burden-sharing claims. Having accepted the position as a major contributor of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries, West Germany at first tried to pursue a development policy based on its own postwar experiences and economic concepts in reconstructing its economy. It operated within the framework developed by Western donor countries in the Development Assistance Committee and agreed to soften the terms of its foreign aid-giving during the second part of the 1960s. Its substantial and effective foreign economic assistance policy gave West Germany some leverage in pursuing its own political interests in other fields and in gaining political status in the international community.

In 1959, while it was struggling to modernise its economy and to tackle the internal north–south gap, Italy joined Western initiatives to increase the quality and quantity of assistance to developing countries. Politically, this was part of an effort to upgrade Italy's standing in the international arena and to develop a regional role in the Mediterranean. Economically, it could increase exports, but this had to be accommodated to a tight state bugdet and a small private capital market. Therefore in the Development Assistance Group/Development Assistance Committee Italy opposed both narrow definitions and automatic criteria for burden sharing. The 1962–63 structural crisis required a new policy and a limit to foreign aid commitments. Export credits remained the key instrument of Italy's development assistance, while ‘soft loans’ as requested by DAC resolutions were considered incompatible with Italy's capabilities and financial resources and had to be restricted to the multilateral level.

This article examines the origins of Norwegian development aid in the early 1950s and the institutional structure, the geographic spread and the goals of the Norwegian aid effort until the early 1970s. The article argues that Norwegian aid must be seen as the outcome of broad set of considerations of an altruistic, geopolitical and domestic political nature. Both domestic and international pressures from within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development contributed to substantially increasing Norwegian foreign economic assistance from modest beginnings. It is argued that oil wealth played a minor role in this transition.

As ever, the Third Reich and its aftermath are still proving a fertile ground for historians. The Nazi dictatorship and its review and reappraisal during the post-war years continue to fascinate historians. The books discussed in the following review highlight the cultural, political, economic and judicial consequences of the Third Reich for postwar Germany.

Leisure and tourism are not just pervasive social and cultural practices, they are also big business, with tourism now being the world's largest industry. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2001 tourism generated $462.2 billion in international receipts, despite declining from the previous year owing to the 11 September terrorist attacks. Thus, leisure and leisure travel have long been vital subjects for a variety of disciplines; economics, sociology, geography, anthropology and literary criticism, among them. Yet if leisure in general has in recent years drawn the attention of historians, tourism is just now coming into its own as an engaging historical subject. The works reviewed here indicate that leisure and tourism thrive as fields of interdisciplinary inquiries. They also demonstrate a new appreciation of tourism among historians, as an expression of individual and collective ‘experience’, as well as for its contributions to major developments, such as nationalism and regional development, class formation, and the rise of modern consumer cultures.

Does the turn of the twenty-first century set a new frontier in the writing of urban history? According to demographers we are advancing towards a fully urbanised world where for the first time the majority of the planet's population will live in cities, but for a European urban historian it is difficult to discern a period in contemporary history when this has not been the main trend. In fact, it has been precisely the overwhelming presence of cities in recent European history which has made it so difficult to define urban history as a distinct branch of knowledge. To some extent, the complexity of the urban fabric and the diversity of events which define an urban environment have often constrained the work of urban historians and the heuristic value of their research in comparison with the work of more established disciplines such as social and economic history, the history of planning and architecture or, even more recently, environmental history.

Esther Helena Arens is currently completing her dissertation, ‘The political economy of West German and Dutch development aid to Indonesia during the 1960s’, in the Department of History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn.