ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Raul Prebisch's contributions to the analysis of the world system. It begins with a brief overview of Prebisch's analysis of the world system. The chapter focuses on analysis of the economic, political and geopolitical interconnections in Prebisch's world systemic outlook. It considers Prebisch's ideas and their linkages to other scholarly perspectives in which the centre/periphery dichotomy has been applied to social theory and the international. Although Prebisch had not shown much sympathy for critical perspectives of that time, things changed in the early 1940s when he left the Argentine Central Bank and returned to lecture in Economics at the University of Buenos Aires. This is the period in which Prebisch underwent his so-called theoretical liberation and the start of what he called 'a long period of heresies'. The post-1950 period saw Prebisch continue to refine his analysis of the world system as a single economic unit and the centre-periphery framework.
