ABSTRACT
The first task of this essay is to reflect on the meaning and purpose of the life work of Andre Gunder Frank. This has two elements: first, his historical and theoretical critique of capitalist development and imperialism; and second, his construction of a new world history and historiography, and an empirical history of capital operating on a world scale. In regard to the first, much of Frank’s life work offers a critique and a refutation of bourgeois economic theory, with a focus on the exploitative and oppressive relations between so-called “advanced” or core capitalist formations and so-called “less developed” and indeed underdeveloped peripheral capitalist formations in the era of modern history (extending back some five centuries in this context). In this, Frank’s life work was closely related to the work of other scholars moving in similar currents of thought, including his friends Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and some of Frank’s own students and correspondents in Latin America, such as Theotonio Dos Santos and Ruy Mauro Marini.
