Examines underdevelopment in Asia, Africa and Latin America through the analysis of unequal means of production and trade relations within the process of capital formation. Analyses how differential transformation of productive, social and political relations have led to capitalist development, and challenges classical and neo-classical development theories, international division of labour, doctrines of comparative advantage and free trade, etc.

Why, while Europe, North America, and Australia have developed, have Africa, much of Asia, and Latin America remained underdeveloped? Andre Gunder Frank sets out to answer this basic question by showing how world capital accumulation has led to the differentiation of these regions within the single world-embracing economic system. Unequal exchange between regions, combined with the differential transformation of productive, social, and political relations within regions, has led to the capitalist development of some areas and to the underdevelopment of others.

Most of Andre Gunder Frank's early work on the nature of underdevelopment focused on one continent: Latin America. Here he broadened his canvas and traced the world-wide effects of the process of capital accumulation from the period just prior to the discovery of America to the industrial and French revolutions. It is Frank's thesis that the world has experienced a single all-embracing, albeit unequal and uneven, process of capital accumulation centered in Western Europe, which has been capitalist for at least two centuries.

This book takes stock of political and economic development in the world today and reexamines development in an era of rapid social change. It also reflects on the work of Andre Gunder Frank, the creator of dependency theory.

Samir Amin analyzes the process of capital accumulation on a global level.

Upon its publication in 1989, this was the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Latin American School of Development and an invaluable guide to the major Third World contribution to development theory. The four major strands in the work of Latin American Theorists are: structuralism, internal colonialism, marginality and dependency. Exploring all four in detail, and the interconnections between them, Cristobal Kay highlights the developed world’s over-reliance on, and partial knowledge of, dependency theory in its approach to development issues, and analyses the first major challenges to neo-classical and modernisation theories from the Third World.