ABSTRACT
In many respects, world systems theorists went considerably further than some of their intellectual forbears. Clearly, they diverged sharply from classical Marxism, which regarded capitalism as a necessary stage in development. In addition, they extended, and perhaps distorted, the work of the Latin American ‘dependentistas’, who focused more specifically on the historical development of particular Latin American societies and on the dialectical relationships between the external structures of dependency and the internal structures of specific social formations (cf. Cardoso, 1977, p. 14).
