Centre—Periphery Perspective

Abstract

While Marxists focused on the modes of production resulting in class formation and revolutionary class struggles, a new group of scholars taking their inspiration from Marxist theory propounded their theories of dependency. They did not believe that the ‘value system of the people’¹ or the masses and culture of a country were ‘so prone to excesses of scoundrels’² that these alone were to be blamed for underdevelopment in the non-Western world. On the contrary, dependency theorists were of the view that

both underdevelopment and development are aspects of the same phenomenon, both are historically simultaneous, both are linked functionally and, therefore, interact and condition each other mutually. This results… in the division of the world between industrial, advanced or ‘central’ countries, and underdeveloped, backward or ‘peripheral’ countries…³

Dependency was therefore defined as ‘a situation in which a certain number of countries have their economy conditioned by the development and expansion of another … placing the dependent countries in a backward position exploited by the dominant countries’.⁴