ABSTRACT
Following the end of World War II, a large number of societies, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, gained national independence from the Western colonialists. The emergence of these newly independent, or postcolonial, states, which later collectively came to be known as the Third World because of their common ‘backwardness’, led to the formulation in the West of the fi rst theory of development: modernisation theory (MT). Until the end of the 1960s, MT was the dominant perspective on development. After that, it came under serious criticism in the wake of widespread development disasters in the Third World. At the same time as MT was being reformulated, a more radical critique emerged, known as dependency theory (DT), calling for a complete rejection of MT. Events and intense intellectual exchanges, however, led to the revision of DT itself, resulting in world system theory (WST). The emergence of the HPAEs in Pacifi c Asia was the major empirical basis on which WST was built.
