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Conceptual and Historical Foundations of Foreign Aid. Dustin Tingley, April 2017, Paper, "Foreign aid is a policy instrument of limited budgetary scope that nonetheless generates highly contentious debate. Yet while the contemporary scholarly literature almost exclusively considers aid in the post-World War II era, we argue that also considering aid in earlier periods of history helps to better understand the broader politics of foreign aid. Neglect of this deeper history of foreign aid specifically produces three misconceptions: that foreign aid is a uniquely modern policy instrument, that foreign aid is relatively homogenous in donor intent, and that foreign aid’s scope is primarily limited to the contemporary humanitarian interventions upon which the bulk of scholarly analysis is centered." Link