Andre Gunder Frank

Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian, born in 1929 and died in 2005, who made major contributions to theories of global economic development. He is best known for promoting dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984, drawing on Marxian concepts of political economy while rejecting Marx's framework of fixed historical stages. His most significant publication, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), is regarded as one of the formative texts of dependency theory, arguing that the underdevelopment of poorer regions was produced by their integration into the capitalist world economy rather than being a separate, earlier stage of development. He later wrote ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age and, with Barry Gills, co-authored The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, arguing for a world system reaching back to the fourth millennium BC. Over his career he held professorships at nine North American universities, three in Latin America and five in Europe, including the University of Amsterdam from 1981 to 1994.