ABSTRACT
By the 1970s the continued economic stagnation of much of the Third World made it apparent that the region was not conforming to Western models of urbanisation based on the 'generative' role of cities3 and the notion of inter-societal convergence. Dependency theory explained this by emphasising the hegemony of Western nations over the world economic order and the consequent ability of these states and multinational corporations to exploit peripheral areas.4 As we see below, this process began with the European colonisation of the Third World, which established an 'interdependent but unequal relationship' between coloniser and colonised (Spybey 1992 p. 225).5 Dependence formulations gained wide circulation largely as a result of research in Latin America by Frank (1967), who argued that the Iberian conquest absorbed pre-Columbian America into the world system of capitalism.6 Latin America was therefore linked into a chain of surplus extraction (initially in the form of silver, gold, cotton and sugar) which both 'developed' Spain and Portugal, and later Britain, and 'underdeveloped' Latin America. The fundamental premise of dependency theory was that development and underdevelopment were different outcomes of the same process.
