Traditions within development thought sceptical of market-led

development and which emphasise the unevenness and instabilities

of global capitalism are experiencing some renewed interest.

One such tradition is dependency studies: a school of thought once

prominent in the field of development. We critically review the

dependency tradition alongside a more recent branch of critical

inquiry into development, namely decoloniality. One of our core

contributions is to clarify what makes the decolonial tradition substantially

distinct from dependency and other traditions in development

thought. We locate decoloniality in the context of the

“cultural turn” that swept through social theory from the 1970s.

Our paper problematises decoloniality’s critique of Modernity as

inherently colonial and oppressive and finds that its core features

are idealism and the strong risk of cultural relativism. We assert that

the substantive commitments of the dependency tradition are its

strength and reject the equivalence drawn by decolonial theorists

between “Eurocentrism” and belief in Enlightenment values and

methodologies. Drawing on the work of Samir Amin, we emphasise

the need for development theory to retain an analytic focus on

a materialist analysis of global capitalism; we echo Amin’s critique

of culturalism and endorse his defence of universalism.