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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.

From “dependency” to “decoloniality”? The enduring relevance of materialist political economy and the problems of a “decolonial” alternative