D. C. M. Platt: The Anatomy of “Autonomy”

Abstract

The concept of dependency, Platt asserts, is “scarcely sustainable” because its historical foundation is unconvincing. “Students of chrono-politics (history),” he implies, find unacceptable the notion that “development and expansion” of Western Europe's economy dominated and conditioned that of Latin America since the conquest. The fact that Dos Santos' definition of dependency denies the presence of autonomous development in Latin America is “critical.” Economic autonomy, according to Platt, is the leitmotif of Latin America's evolution, certainly to the close of the nineteenth century, when there “finally awoke metropolitan interest in the neglected periphery.”