What is foreign aid? How can we understand the power relations intrinsic to the foreign aid system? How does it construct the debt of recipient countries? What are its political effects and impact on global dis/order? Annalisa Furia responds to these questions by developing an original interpretation of foreign aid as a particular domain of international government. By adopting a historical perspective, she demonstrates how foreign aid practices can be conceptualised as contemporary forms of gift-giving that have made recipient countries and populations governable due to a continuously renovated and ever-changing debt of development. The author argues that the recipient countries' debt is constructed as a debt of civilisation and capacity which, over the years, has translated into a debt of sovereignty/security and hence into a debt of order requiring new, sophisticated and increasingly intrusive technologies of control and intervention.