Gunder Frank held that Latin America was capitalist since the sixteenth-century conquest

Evidence

Gunder Frank certainly shares with the dependency theorists the necessity to begin from a world capitalist system in which development and underdevelopment were structurally related. However, he explicitly argued against the possibility of a genuine, indigenous program of economic development, of, say, a national-bourgeois type, as a possible path for Latin America out of its phase of dependent development. And this argument was supported by a startling thesis, which takes us back to the problems posed earlier. Gunder Frank argued that Latin America had been thoroughly incorporated into capitalist world relations since the period of the conquest by the European powers in the sixteenth century. Its underdevelopment stemmed from this dependent nature of its early insertion into the world capitalist market. Implicit in this thesis was the view that no structural differences remained between the more and the less developed sectors of these dependent social formations. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 606

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Gunder Frank’s core claim: underdevelopment follows from early, dependent insertion into world capitalism.
• XREF: connects to: Colonialism and capitalism have been entangled since the sixteenth century — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 41