DEPENDENCY theory emerged in the 1960s and ’70s as a Marxist critique of the ideology of “modernisation” which argued that “poor” countries could “develop” by following the same path as ”wealthy” capitalist states.

Over a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto that “The bourgeoisie […] has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”  

In his 1867 preface to Volume one of Capital, Marx wrote: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”