Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Spatial models
As with the neo-classical view, a spatial model can be constructed of the
dependency interpretation of world development. Central countries, like those of
western Europe in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, were enriched and
developed as they engaged in industrialization and new technologies, their
industrial march being fuelled by cheap raw materials from their colonies.
Peripheral countries, according to Frank in one of his more controversial
statements, actively underdevelop, or have negative development, as their
preexisting artisan industries are forced out of production by the influx of
metropolitan goods and the refusal to allow the domestic industries to export.
Slater (1976) produced a simple model of the modern spatial structure of
dependency, showing a centre which was linked directly and without
intermediaries to each of its colonies or dependencies, explaining that the lines
enabled the centre to exert control over each dependency, whether through
economic forces or political power, while none of these dependencies had any
means of linkage to its neighbours which might join together to form a concerted
opposition to the centre.
Internal colonialism
This centre-periphery model is mostly international in level, but it may be
applied also at an intra-national, regional level. The internal colonialism model
of Gonzalez Casanova shows one way in which a regional dependency can be
elaborated (Gonzalez Casanova 1969, Walton 1975). In rural regions of Mexico,
an elite rules the local economy, white or mestizo in race, living in the towns and
cities, and owning the rural land as well as the urban trading houses which
receive farm products. The rural workers are either landless or live on tiny farms
that they rent from the elite group, and have rental obligations, including payment
of rent in kind, which ensure that they can never emerge from the depths of
poverty. The conditions of dependency are comparable to those of Frank.
For a developed country, the model was elaborated in Wales (Wyn Williams
1977). He presented the Welsh area as an internal colony for England, especially
South Wales, where economic development had been led by English firms and
entrepreneurs in the coal and metalworking industries, and the economic surplus
extracted for England, while a cultural suppression of Welsh identity was going
on, including the virtual extinction of the Welsh language.
Problems in the dependency model
Difficulties in the translation of the dependency model into the twentieth
century, and into a spatial frame, were debated widely, and by geographers
particularly in a series of articles in
Professional Geographer
in 1982 and 1983
(e.g. Reitsma 1982, Smith 1982). One strong contribution by geographers,
