Dependency Theory in Latin American History

Abstract

This article examines dependency theory, focusing especially on Latin America. Dependency theory includes different currents of thought stemming from analysis of extensive findings from literature, conferences, and discussions. Although it is of global dimensions, it has achieved greater impact in Latin America. At the end of the two world wars, many important colonial empires fell, including, after World War I, the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, and, after World War II, those that belonged to Great Britain and France, among others. After World War II, the United States of America emerged as a hegemonic power. In this context, new nation-states emerged in the wake of many years of colonial or semi-colonial status. They included China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Movements of national liberation in Asia and Africa; the emergence of new economies and polities influenced by colonialism and neocolonialism; criticisms arising from trends of thoughts in international organizations such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Non-Aligned Movement, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); and the aspirations for political and economic independence in Latin America achieved, in part, by implementing import substitution industrialization policies are expressions of a new reality that set in the wider context of the Cold War. In the social sciences, this reality is reflected in the appearance of topics under the term development theory, in which concepts such as economic backwardness, underdevelopment, modernization, and dependency are treated. Since the 1960s, dependency theory seeks to explain the characteristics of dependent development in Latin America, although it also includes consideration of Asia and Africa. Dependency theory responds to a different economic and social reality in Latin America, Asia, and Africa in comparison to developed countries. International capitalism developed such that some countries secured dominant positions early on, and others, including those in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, dependent ones later on. This article is characterized by two central features. First, the roots of the term and the concepts that underlie it are treated. Debates about the development of capitalism in underdeveloped societies and criticisms of the dominant economic theory in international trade (neoclassical economy) are considered. Second, emphasis is placed in the article on the fundamental part played by Latin America in theories on the origins of dependency theory and in the literature that has emerged on it.