Question

Select the passages where economic historian B. R. Tomlinson demonstrates that the concept of the “Third World” was rooted in the ideological world of the Cold War.

The term “Third World” was used frequently in histories of the societies, economies and cultures of many parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. . . . (Like other collective descriptions of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific islands and Latin America—such as the “South,” the “developing world,” or the “less-developed world”—the designation “Third World” was more about what such places were not than what they were.)
Those who developed a concept of the Third World around a set of measurable criteria usually relied on identifying material circumstances. . . . However, all such attempts to establish a standard measurement of relative poverty that can distinguish various parts of the world from each other run into considerable difficulties. It has often been argued that the various countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention the Pacific islands and elsewhere) differ greatly in their size, political ideologies, social structures, economic performance, cultural backgrounds and historical experiences. These (differences exist not simply between Third World countries, but within them as well. There are rich and poor people, empowered and disempowered citizens, to be found inside all states and societies in the world.)

It was over broad issues of economic development that the fiercest battles for the concept of the Third World were fought. (Orthodox development economists in the 1950s and 1960s had suggested that the poverty of nonwestern economies was the result of low levels of savings and investment, and that these problems could best be resolved by increasing external influence over them to help local élites modernize their societies (in other words, make them more like those of the West) by providing technology and education to increase productivity and output.) * * *

To many radical critics, (these ideas, and the U.S. government’s development policies that flowed from them, seemed to mask a narrow political agenda that sought to justify the dominance of free-market capitalism as a model and mechanism for economic, social and cultural development.) One powerful reaction to this agenda was to argue that dependence on the West had distorted the economic and social conditions of non-western societies, leading to a common process of historical change in the periphery of the world economy brought about by “a situation in which the economy of certain countries [and hence their social and political structures] is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected.” * * *

The history of imperialism has been immensely important in shaping our view of the modern world, both from the top down and from the bottom up, but the phenomenon was also historically specific, and represents only one stage in the process of understanding the interaction between the local and the global. (To write the history of the “Rest,” as well as of the West, we need now to move on, and to construct new narratives of global history that go beyond the models of coherent and distinct communities, nations and states, arranged into hierarchies of material achievement and cultural power, and underpinned by universal institutional ideals of participatory democracy and free markets, that dominated thinking about international and local systems in the world for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.)

Answer 1

Selected passages that show Tomlinson tying the “Third World” concept to the ideological world of the Cold War:

1) "It was over broad issues of economic development that the fiercest battles for the concept of the Third World were fought. (Orthodox development economists in the 1950s and 1960s had suggested that the poverty of nonwestern economies was the result of low levels of savings and investment, and that these problems could best be resolved by increasing external influence over them to help local élites modernize their societies (in other words, make them more like those of the West) by providing technology and education to increase productivity and output.)"
- (Places the debate in the 1950s–60s and frames it as a contest over whether non‑Western societies should be remade along Western lines.)

2) "To many radical critics, (these ideas, and the U.S. government’s development policies that flowed from them, seemed to mask a narrow political agenda that sought to justify the dominance of free-market capitalism as a model and mechanism for economic, social and cultural development.)"
- (Explicitly links the Third World concept to U.S. Cold War development policy and the promotion of free‑market ideology.)

3) "One powerful reaction to this agenda was to argue that dependence on the West had distorted the economic and social conditions of non-western societies, leading to a common process of historical change in the periphery of the world economy brought about by 'a situation in which the economy of certain countries [and hence their social and political structures] is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected.'"
- (Shows the ideological counterargument — dependency theory — emerging as a critique of Western/Cold War economic influence.)

(You can also note the opening temporal framing — "the second half of the twentieth century" — which situates the term’s prominence squarely in the Cold War era.)