Underdevelopment

As a compound word, underdevelopment conveys that something is lacking, suggesting development that is of a lesser degree or somehow insufficient. Within the body of development thought, underdevelopment generally has been conceptualized in one of two ways. On the one hand, some have used the term to suggest the state of a country or region prior to economic development. This view was associated with modernization theories of development, which posit a linear form of progress in which developed countries show the way for underdeveloped countries. In this case, underdevelopment is a condition that development can redress. On the other hand, a more widespread understanding of the term refers to the theories of underdevelopment that were first postulated during the 1950s, albeit with longer roots in 19th-century discussions of regional economic difference. These theories argued that the condition of underdevelopment would not be alleviated by the diffusion of capitalist development but instead had been caused by processes of uneven capitalist development. From this perspective, underdevelopment in one place is part of the process and is a destructive result of development elsewhere.

Although the term underdevelopment is associated most closely with 20th-century dependency theory, its conceptualization finds close parallels in 19th- and early-20th-century discussions that took place in Russia over economic reform in the context of Russia's comparative economic backwardness. There the debate hinged on whether the country, as a latecomer in the capitalist world economy, was at such a disadvantage in securing export markets and in developing domestic markets that the prospect of capitalist industrialization was foreclosed. That question led to the critical debate—prompting Vladimir Lenin's theory of imperialism—as to whether Russia could advance directly from feudalism to socialism without first passing through a stage of capitalist industrialization.

Theorization of underdevelopment proceeded apace following World War II in the writings of scholars such as Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank. In theorizing the roots of backwardness, Baran stressed the importance of transfers of wealth from non-European countries to European ones, thereby placing resources in the hands of European capitalists and providing an exogenous contribution that boosted Western Europe's development. On the other side of the ledger were the underdeveloped countries, which suffered a serious setback to their primary accumulation of capital. Once underdeveloped, these countries then found indigenous industrial expansion to be inhibited because with limited internal demand, manufactured goods were easily supplied from abroad and so there were few opportunities for profitable investment. Postcolonial societies' development was constrained because foreign investors and domestic elite appropriated the economic surplus without investing in local production for domestic needs. Baran drew primarily from the historical experiences of India and the Soviet Union, with Japan providing a counterexample as the only country in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that escaped being turned into a colony or dependency.

Frank was one member of a group of Latin American scholars whose work contributed to the development of dependency theory. Building on the work of Baran, among others, Frank argued that the historical development of the capitalist system generated underdevelopment in what he termed the peripheral satellites, whose economic surplus was appropriated while generating economic development in the metropolitan centers in which that surplus was accumulated. His metropolitan–satellite model stood for relations between developed and underdeveloped countries as well as, within underdeveloped countries, between town and country, with attention paid to agrarian structure. Frank's historical arguments were based primarily on the examples of Chile and Brazil, cases he used to argue that the problem was not that capitalism had failed to reach remote areas but rather that these regions had been linked to global capitalism for centuries, with the result being the development of underdevelopment and the underdevelopment of development. Because Baran and Frank were concerned with interdependencies between developed and underdeveloped countries, their work was foundational to the genesis of world systems theory.

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