Impact and Evaluation of Western European Colonialism and Colonization - Imperialism and Dependency Theory

Imperialism and Dependency Theory

Dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank argue that colonialism leads to the net transfer of wealth from the colonised to the coloniser and inhibits successful economic development. Critics such as Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, the Négritude movement (gathering Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor) argue that colonialism does political, psychological and moral damage to the colonised as well. Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy likened debating the pros and cons of colonialism to "debating the pros and cons of rape".

Critics of the alleged abuses of economic and political advantages accruing to developed nations via globalised capitalism have referred to them as neocolonialism, seeing them as a continuation of the domination and exploitation of ex-colonial countries, merely utilizing different means. Neocolonialism is in this sense a new form of imperialism, which had first been theorized by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg thought that the necessary economic expansion of capitalism automatically led to territorial expansion, in order to find new resources and markets.

However, the dependency theory and theories of economic underdevelopment of the Third World by colonial powers are contested by many economic historians. Bill Warren, a Marxist historian, disagreed with the dependency theorists:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

Other economists, such as Celso Furtado, have widely theorized on the specificities of third world economies, forming a concise theory of underdevelopment which understands it not simply as an early stage of a nation's economic history, but as a specific sort of modernized macroeconomic structure (a point of view which corroborates dependency theory, from a different perspective).