ABSTRACT
Celso Furtado, a Brazilian economist and historian, discusses the new international division of labor that emerged in the world economy between 1820 and World War I. During this period, the Latin American periphery specialized in primary production for the industrializing West, particularly England. Furtado constructed a typology of economies that exported raw materials, dividing Latin America into three primary producing zones: countries exporting temperate agricultural commodities (principally Argentina and Uruguay, which relied on extensive land use); countries exporting tropical agricultural commodities, such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee (lowland regions); and countries producing mineral products (Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, and later Venezuela, an oil producer). Furtado then describes the impact of the 1929 world economic crisis, which abruptly terminated this long phase of Latin American export expansion. This crisis was followed by the emergence of import-substitution industrialization (ISI), a crucial economic process that had profound political implications for dependency analysis, as we will see in Chapter 8.
