This paper makes a case for grounding the global in feminist, anti‐racist, and post‐colonial scholarship in order to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and history in critical geographies of development. I argue that the process of ‘doing development’ involves the imposition of power; hence, geographers' critical engagements with development need to consider the intersectionality of sex, race, and ethnicity that comprises identities of the subjects of development and of those who ‘do development’. This consideration would entail questioning the homogeneity of ‘Third World women’ as a singular category in need of development and recognising the normativity of women from the global North who, so far, have been the ‘doers’ or the key actors in global interventions.