¹ Essentially dependency theorists argue that extensive ties with more developed countries produce basic structural distortions in Third World economies and societies, fostering inequitable distribution of wealth and power and retarding meaningful development (if not necessarily sheer economic growth). I survey this vast, heterogeneous, and rapidly growing literature in Dependency Approaches to International Political Economy: A Cross-National Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 28–34, 47–68Google Scholar.

Key works by the theorists referred to include: Amin, Samir, Accumulation on a World Scale, 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, “Associated-Dependent Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications,” in Stepan, Alfred, ed., Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies and Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 142–78Google Scholar; Cardoso, and Faletto, Enzo, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Santos, Theotonio dos, “The Structure of Dependence,” in Fann, K. T. and Hodges, Donald, eds., Readings in U.S. Imperialism (Boston: Porter-Sargent, 1971)Google Scholar; Sunkel, Osvaldo, “Transnational Capitalism and National Disintegration in Latin America,” Social and Economic Studies 22 (03 1973): 132–76Google Scholar; and Waller-stein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System vol. 1Google Scholar, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-System in the Sixteenth Century and vol. 2, Mercantilism and Consolidation of the European World-Economy 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1974 and 1980)Google Scholar.

² Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 458Google Scholar.

³ Leys, Colin, “Underdevelopment and Dependency: Critical Notes,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 7 (1977): 92–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 92, 94. This is in partial contrast to the Leninist literature of imperialism. For Lenin monopoly capitalism—imperialism—is the most advanced and progressive phase of capitalism, embodying the high degree of centralization and rationalization of production that must underlie a socialist society and lacking only the final step in the transition to socialism, the socialization of production. Lenin, of course, expended much effort in detailing how the socialist revolution should be pursued, but in many ways these efforts at specifying optimistic futures and ways of achieving them are no more convincing than are those of the dependency theorists. As put by Alfred Meyer, “instead of resigning themselves to the failure of the original Marxist prognosis, the Leninists are in continual search for forces that will carry on the fight for the socialist revolution in lieu of the Western proletariat. In that sense, Leninism is the last refuge of the optimism which characterized the doctrine of Marx.… Its loudly proclaimed faith in the inevitability of revolution is [, however,] matched by a crusader-like activism opposed to it.… Leninism is Marxism beset with many inner doubts–a distrust of history, of the masses, even of… conscious leader-ship. This leads to… preoccupation with manipulation, organization and coercion.” Meyer, , Leninism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 247Google Scholar.

⁵ See, for example, Varynen, Raimo, “Interdependence Versus Self-Reliance,” Alternatives 3 (05 1978), pp. 506–510Google Scholar.

⁶ The most consistently negative assessments of dependency theory seem to derive from the left rather than the right: in this tradition are Laclau, Ernesto, “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America,” New Left Review, no. 67 (05–06 1971): 19–38Google Scholar; Kay, Geoffrey, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Brenner, Robert, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104 (05–06 1977): 25–92Google Scholar. I accept some of this criticism, although I think there is some danger of these disputes within the left eventually degenerating into hairsplitting scholasticism and scriptural exegesis (what did Marx really mean?), the internecine warfare of “tiny, ferocious creatures devouring each other in a drop of water” (Lichtheim, George, Imperialism [New York: Praeger, 1971], p. 11Google Scholar) to which the left is so strongly inclined. Criticism of dependency theory from the center or moderate left is usually much gentler, conceding dependency theorists' real contribution to development theory and cautioning only against some of its excesses; see, for example, Smith, Tony, “The Underdevelopment of Development Literature: The Case of Dependency Theory,” World Politics 31 (01 1979): 247–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sloan, John W., “Dependency Theory and Latin American Development: Another Key Fails to Open the Door,” Inter-American Economic Affairs 31 (Winter 1977): 21–40Google Scholar; and Bath, C. Richard and James, Dilmus D., “Dependency Analysis of Latin America: Some Criticisms, Some Suggestions,” Latin American Research Re-view 11 (1976): 3–55Google Scholar. My position is that dependency theory makes an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary North-South relations and that many of its broad claims are empirically justified. My criticisms here are not of dependency theory perse, but of its tendency to overstate its case, oversimplifying the complex reality of North-South relations and thus limiting its usefulness to Third World policymakers.

⁷ As is evidenced by some of my own work, which is crossnational and quantitative in form. See my Dependency Approaches and “The Impact of Foreign Investment in the Mining, Agricultural and Manufacturing Sectors on Social Distribution in Third World Countries,” Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming.

⁸ Even Gabriel Almond, one of the fathers of abstract modernization theory, came eventually to recognize the desirability of “taking the historical cure.” Almond, Flanagan, and Mundt's useful collection of “historical case studies of political development” appeared in the waning moments of modernization theory's dominance of the literature and has, unfortunately, received little attention recently. See Almond, , “Approaches to Development Causation,” in Almond, , Flanagan, Scott C., and Mundt, Robert J., eds., Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 1–42Google Scholar.

⁹ dos Santos, , “The Structure of Dependence,” p. 226Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Thomas, Hugh, A History of the World (New York: Harper& Row, 1979), p. 374Google Scholar; and Masefield, G. B., “Crops and Livestock,” in Rich, E. E. and Wilson, C. H., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 289–93Google Scholar.

¹¹ There is an enormous literature describing sugar cultivation and slavery in the British West In-dies. Among the more interesting discussions are Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1626–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, 1972)Google Scholar; and Sheridan, Richard B., Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

One of the curious things about the exploitation represented by the sugar trade—and, indeed, trade in gold, tobacco, coffee, spices, dyes, and many other colonial products—is how the colonies were exploited to obtain what were for the colonizers essentially luxuries. The reasons for this are obvious—before the nineteenth century long-distance trade was too expensive and risky to be relied upon for essentials—but it does say something about the claim of dependency theorists that not only did the development of the west undermine Third World economies but that the exploittion of nonwestern areas actually formed the basis of the early development of western capitalism. I would not wish to carry this criticism of dependency theory too far: the determination of what is “essential” is a social as well as a biological issue. Moreover, many products that would appear to us to be luxuries had or were thought to have medicinal or preservative functions in early colonial times; see Wallerstein, , The Modern World System, vol. 1, pp. 331–33Google Scholar for a discussion of this point in reference to pepper. Of course, the accumulation of wealth that was made possible by early long-distance trade, whatever the nature of the products traded, had consequences in itself for the development of the West, although the importance of this source of wealth for specifically capitalist accumulation is very controversial among historians; see, for a discussion, Hill, Christopher, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), pp. 82–83 and 245–46Google Scholar. I thank Claudio Katz of York University and Loyola University of Chicago for bringing this latter issue to my attention.

Interestingly, one product of contact with preindustrial areas that manifestly did help make industrial development possible in many European countries—by allowing cultivation intensive enough to support rapidly growing populations—was the introduction of the potato from Peru, which involved no exploitation at all; see Thomas, , A History of the World, pp. 377–82Google Scholar.

¹² See, for example, Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969)Google Scholar.

¹³ Wallerstein, , The Modern World System, vol. 1, p. 100Google Scholar. I emphasize the Caribbean in this article, but most of the discussion applies to Commonwealth sugar growers in the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well. For a good critical discussion of sugar cultivation in Mauritius see Houbert, Jean, “Neo-Colonialism Refortified? The Case of Mauritius,” in Kemp, A. G., ed., Africa and the E.E.C. in the Aftermath of Lomé and UNCTAD IV (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University African Studies Group, 1977), pp. 74–97Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Ireland would surely come close. For one of the best applications of center-periphery imagery to a concrete historical situation see Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Bowie, John, The Imperial Achievement (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), p. 115Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Thomas, , A History of the World, p. 376Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For an interesting discussion of the development of free trade in western Europe see Kindleberger, Charles, Economic Response: Comparative Studies in Trade, Finance, and Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 39–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Black, Clinton V., History of Jamaica (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 178–79Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Mclntyre, W. David, The Commonwealth of Nations: Origins and Impact, 1869–1971 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 313Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Winks, Robin, Canadian-West Indian Union: A Forty-Year Minuet (London: Althone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1968)Google Scholar.

²¹ Robinson, Joan, Economic Philosophy (Chicago: Aldine, 1962), p. 45Google Scholar. See, on this topic, Levi, Werner, “Third World States: Objects of Colonialism or Neglect?” International Studies Quarterly 17 (06 1973): 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² The production of sugar is an industrial as well as an agricultural process: an important part of sugar's market value is added in refining. While cane sugar refineries are usually located in major port cities, beet sugar refineries have long tended to be located in the midst of growing areas; this was especially true in central and eastern Europe, where beet refining played a large role in rural industrialization in the late nineteenth century, but was also true in such areas as the Brabant in Belgium. This dual farmer/worker constituency may help explain the continued power of the beet sugar lobby in EC politics. More immediately important is the central role of rural bases of support for the ruling coalitions of the principal EC members, particularly the right-center parties in France and the Free Democrats in West Germany. For an historical discussion of beet sugar re-fining in Europe see Milward, Alan S. and Saul, S. B., The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 189–90, 286–87Google Scholar.

²³ The preference afforded colonial and Dominion exporters was slim, only one-sixth of the regular duty; see Mclntyre, , The Commonwealth of Nations, p. 323Google Scholar. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada were at this time gradually coming to be known as “Dominions,” while the rest of the Empire remained, of course, “colonies” or “protectorates” of various categories. The term “Commonwealth” to describe independent former British colonies came into general use only in the 1930s.

²⁴ Mclntyre, , The Commonwealth of Nations, p. 323Google Scholar; Kavanagh, Dennis A., “Crisis Management and Incremental Adaption in British Politics: The 1931 Crisis of the British Party System,” in Almond, , Flanagan, and Mundt, , eds., Crisis, Choice, and Change, pp. 152–223Google Scholar.

²⁵ United Kingdom, British Information Services, Britain and the Commonwealth (New York, 1977), pp. 17–20Google Scholar.

²⁶ The only detailed discussion of the negotiation of the CSA is Moynagh, Michael, “The Negotiation of the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement, 1949–1951,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Political Studies 15 (07 1977): 63–76Google Scholar. The CSA originally covered Australia, the British West Indies, Fiji, East Africa, Mauritius, and South Africa, but South Africa withdrew from the CSA—and from the Commonwealth—in 1961. In later years a slightly higher price was offered to developing CSA members (i.e., all but Australia). When the Lome Convention's sugar policy was being renegotiated it was understood from the first that Australia would be excluded.

²⁷ See Moynagh, “Negotiation,” for a detailed discussion of the British negotiating position.

²⁸ For recent overviews of CAP machinery and policies see Feld, Werner, “Implementation of the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy: Expectations, Fears, Failures,” International Organization 33 (Summer 1979): 335–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fennel, Rosemary, The Common Agricultural Policy of the European Community (Montclair, N.J.: Allanhall Osmun, 1980)Google Scholar; and Marsh, John S. and Swanney, Pamela J., Agriculture and the European Community (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980)Google Scholar. For a detailed discussion of the application of CAP provisions to sugar production see United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Report on World Sugar Supply and Demand, 1980 and 1985 (Washington, D.C., 1977)Google Scholar. Technically, the Lomé Convention links the ACP and the “European Economic Community (EEC),” with a brief supplementary agreement on products covered by the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) appended. I have, however, followed the EC's preferred self-designation as the “European Community,” an overall organization incorporating the EEC, the ECSC, and the European Atomic Energy Community. I have avoided the unwieldy, if technically correct, form “European Communities” (in the plural, since there are three), which the EC itself avoids except for legal purposes.

²⁹ See Curtin, Timothy, “Towards Eurafrica? Africa's Relations with the Enlarged EEC,” Moorgateand Wall Street (Spring 1973): 59–79Google Scholar; and Campbell, Lord of Eksam, , “The Bitter Sweet World of Sugar,” The Round Table, no. 242 (04 1971): 217–24Google Scholar.

³⁰ Basic figures for sugar production and trade are found in United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Foreign Agricultural Circular: Sugar: World Sugar Supply and Distribution, 1954/1955–1977/1978, FS 2–79 (Washington, D.C., 10 1979)Google Scholar. Sugar statistics (including those referred to in this article) almost always apply only to centrifugal sugar; noncentrifugal sugar is produced by a wide variety of technologically primitive methods and consumed locally in several Third World countries, especially in South Asia, but it is almost never traded internationally.

³¹ The United States Sugar Act expired on 31 December 1974, after some forty years of formal import quotas for sugar, but American sugar producers are still heavily subsidized and protected from foreign competition. See Gerber, David J., “The United States Sugar Quota Program: A Study in the Direct Congressional Control of Imports,” The Journal of Law and Economics 19 (04 1976): 103–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Livernash, Bob, “Power of Sugar Lobby Wanes, But It Still Helps Write the Bill,” Congressional Quarterly 37 (5 05 1979): 831–35Google Scholar.

³² The Economist, 26 June 1971, p. 14.

³³ Dodoo, C. and Kuster, R., “The Road to Lome,” in von Gesau, F. A. M. Alting, ed., The Lomé Convention and a New International Economic Order (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1977), p. 49Google Scholar. For critical discussions of the Sugar Protocol see Harris, Simon and Hagelberg, G. B., “Effects of the Lomé Convention on the World's Cane-Sugar Producers,” ODI Review 2 (1975): 38–52Google Scholar; and Dolan, Michael, “The Lomé Convention and Europe's Relationship with the Third World: A Critical Analysis,” Revue d'Intégration Européenne 1 (05 1978), pp. 383–86Google Scholar. My account of sugar negotiations relies heavily on Webb, Carole, “Sugar Politics in the European Communities,” Government and Opposition 11 (Autumn 1976): 464–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which is available in expanded form as “Mr. Cube versus Monsieur Beet: The Politics of Sugar in the European Communities,” in Wallace, Helen, Wallace, William, and Webb, Carole, eds., Policy-Making in the European Communities (New York: John Wiley, 1977), pp. 197–226Google Scholar.

The development of ACP solidarity in the Lome negotiations is a story in itself, detailed in Gruhn, Isebill V., “The Lome Convention: Inching Toward Interdependence,” International Organization 30 (Spring 1976): 241–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The negotiations must be viewed in light of the United Nations Sixth Special Session, which had convened only the preceding spring to launch the “New International Economic Order”; this was a time of high expectations on the part of the Third World in the wake of the oil price rises of 1973 and the high price of commodities generally. It is note-worthy that a key role in coordinating ACP overall policies was played by the Jamaicans, and that the real break in the development of a common ACP negotiating policy came at a meeting in July 1974, in Kingston, Jamaica. Sugar was an important trade product for the Jamaicans, but just as crucial were the symbolic importance of sugar as a longstanding example of much of what the Third World saw as unjust about its position in the world political economy and the role of a Jamaican government that saw itself as a leader in articulating the underdeveloped countries' cause.

³⁴ Less than 1 % of total nonsugar ACP exports to the EC are excluded from Lome commodity provisions because they compete with CAP products.

³⁵ “Lomé Dossier,” The Courier, no. 31 (03 1975), pp. 73–74Google Scholar; “Lomé II Dossier,” The Courier, no. 58 (11 1979), p. 15Google Scholar. The “Lomé Dossiers” are special editions of The Courier that include the entire text of the Lome treaties and a variety of supporting material.

³⁶ This is about 500,000 metric tons less than CSA quotas, but recall that the Sugar Protocol does not cover Australia, while the CSA did.

³⁷ Commission of the European Community, Annual Report on the Development Cooperation Policies of the Community and its Member States (Brussels: EC, 1979), p. 24Google Scholar. World sugar prices have recently risen substantially.

³⁸ See Dolan, , “The Lomé Convention,” pp. 383–86Google Scholar; and Harris and Hagelberg, “Effects of the Lome Convention.”

³⁹ Commission of the European Communities, The Development Cooperation Policies of the European Community from 1971 to 1976 (Brussels: EC, 1977), p. 16Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Sugar production in western Europe in fact increased substantially during the five years that Lomé 1 was in effect: between the 1975–76 and the 1979–80 marketing years, production of raw centrifugal sugar (some of it unsupported) increased 33% in France, 22% in West Germany, 15% in Italy, 80% in Britain (although from a much lower base), and 34% in Belgium-Luxembourg, the Community's largest producers in order of volume of production. These figures are computed from data provided in United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Foreign Agricultural Circular: Sugar, FS 2–80 (Washington, D.C., 06 1980), p. 16Google Scholar.

⁴¹ The Economist, 18 October 1980, p. 93. As will be seen, this deficit was eliminated in 1980 with the return of high sugar prices.

⁴² European Community press release 448.421 (15 February 1980).

⁴³ See van Meerhaege, M. A. G., International Economic Institutions (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971): 135–43Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ This meeting is “described in the Economist, 10 June 1978, p. 72. At about this time the European sugar lobby was actually able to bring about a levy on isoglucose (corn/maize sweeteners), the main competition for sugar in most areas of the world, which would effectively have eliminated this source of competition from the Community. In October 1978, however, this levy was ruled invalid by the European Court of Justice.

⁴⁵ The large Community export subsidies of 1975–79 were eliminated by the higher prices of 1980. The Commission, however, appears convinced that the recent increase in world sugar prices is largely the result of speculation and cannot be expected to last; see Europe (May-June 1980), p. 52. This conviction was clearly evidenced in the reluctance of the EC to grant Zimbabwe the modest sugar quota (25,000 metric tons) it had received under the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement, as part of its terms of accession to the Lome Convention. In the end the Community granted Zimbabwe's quota only on the assumption that it would be made up from other ACP countries' short-falls or, if shortfalls were not forthcoming, would be dispensed by the Community as food aid; Community beet sugar growers were thus spared further competition for their product. See the Economist, 18 October 1980, pp. 50–51. As I write in January 1981, sugar prices are again declining.

⁴⁶ The Brazilian government has set a target of a near-doubling of acreage devoted to cane by 1985 and hopes for a substantial increase in exports as well as in domestic use of cane-derived fuel. See the Economist, 13 September 1980, pp. 82–88.

⁴⁷ Lodge, Juliet, “New Zealand and the Community,” The World Today 34 (08 1978), p. 308Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Thus Andre Gunder Frank suggests that “the expansion of the capitalist system over the past centuries has effectively and entirely penetrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world” (p. 4). Luis Vitale, referring to Latin America, agrees, arguing that “Spain during the period of American conquest was a country in transition from feudalism to capitalism… [and its] conquest [of America] had a capitalist purpose” (pp. 36–37). And Walter Rodney proposes, in similarly expansive terms, that “the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist expansion. African and Asian societies were developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist powers” (p. 22). Like the mythical Proteus, “capitalism” seems capable of trans-forming itself at will into any of an infinity of forms: for all too many dependency theorists and their western enthusiasts, profoundly different relationships are dismissed as no more than various “reflections” of a vast and amorphous “context” of capitalist relations at the global level. See Frank, Andre Gunder, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” in Cockroft, James D., Frank, , and Johnson, Dale L., eds., Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America's Political Economy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972)Google Scholar; Vitale, Luis, “Latin America: Feudal or Capitalist?” in Petras, James and Zeitlin, Maurice, eds., Latin America: Reform or Revolution? (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1968)Google Scholar; and Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972)Google Scholar. Fortunately the more sophisticated dependency theorists, like Cardoso, move beyond such reductionism. For a good discussion of these issues see Michael Bratton, “Types of Underdevelopment? Problems of Comparison,” paper prepared for presentation at the 1980 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 28 April 1980.

⁴⁹ Cane sugar is almost always shipped in a semiprocessed state called “raw,” which travels well and can be stored for long periods of time; final processing is usually done in the consuming country.

⁵⁰ See the Economist, 9 November 1974, p. 84.

⁵¹ Webb, , “Sugar Politics,” p. 469Google Scholar.

⁵² See, for an example of a similar conclusion drawn from a very different relationship, Moulton, Anthony D., “On Concealed Dimensions of Third World Involvement in International Organizations,” International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978): 170–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Cardoso, and Faletto, , Dependency and Development, p. xviiiGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ World sugar cane production is, of course, affected to some degree by all of these natural hazards, but in general sugar cane is a relatively hearty tropical product.

⁵⁵ See Stone, Carl, “An Appraisal of the Co-operative Process in the Jamaican Sugar Industry,” Social and Economic Studies 27 (03 1978): 1–20Google Scholar, on the prospects of recent experiments with sugar cooperatives in Jamaica.

⁵⁶ Green, Reginald H., “The Lome Convention and Neo-Capitalism,” The African Review 6 (1976), p. 53Google Scholar.