This project traces the historical conditions behind the ebb and flow of the decolonization-era Third-Worldism in the discipline's labor division. Relying on archives and interviews, I build on Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and Andrew Abbott's sociology of professions to historicize the discipline's relations of scholarly production as a "symbolic economy" in which the uneven distribution of resources and relations of production are masked by the discipline's claim to universality.