Latin American underdevelopment results from capitalist incorporation dating to the sixteenth century

Evidence

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. “Dependency” he argued, was no recent phenomenon in the region. It was only the latest form of the longstanding “satellitization” of the Latin American economies within the framework of imperialist economic relations. The “expansion of the capitalist system over the past centuries effectively and entirely penetrated even the most isolated sectors of the under-developed world” (Frank 1969). The fundamental term for understanding this penetration and subversion by capitalist relations which had brought about the structural coupling of development and underdevelopment was that of a single continuum—the “metropolis-satellite polarization … one and the same historical process of the expansion and development of capitalism” which continues to generate “both economic development and structural underdevelopment.” This was the imperialist chain, which “extends the capitalist link between the capitalist world and the national metropolises to the regional centres … and from these local centres and so on to the large landowners or merchants who expropriate surplus from small peasants or tenants, and sometimes even from these latter to the landless labourers exploited by them in turn” (Frank 1969). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 606

Categorization

• XREF: Frank’s satellite-polarization continuum is a striking structural-resonance claim relevant to the reader’s economics-of-ideas thread. — connects to: Western wealth was built by actively creating underdevelopment elsewhere — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 293; Colonialism and capitalism have been entangled since the sixteenth century — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 41