Revitalising Dependency Theory: Where is Malaysia/Southeast Asia?

Jun 18, 2026 | ISU 1

 

By Christopher Choong

Dependency theory in international political economy1

Over the past few years, there has been some commendable intellectual energy devoted to revitalising dependency theory for contemporary political economy analysis. Notably, Ingrid Kvangraven from King’s College London has debunked longstanding misconceptions about dependency theory and developed the vision of approaching it as a research programme2. Other historical, theoretical, and empirical efforts have revisited the interpretive framework of dependency theory for the twenty-first century3, adapting and extending the classic studies of dependency and applying it to current issues such as the digital economy4, financialisation5, gender, race and more6.

Dependency is broadly defined as “a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another”7. It takes the world economy as its unit of analysis, rather than individual nation-states, and focuses on the structural dynamics of global capitalism. A dependency research programme, in turn, has the core tenets of adopting a global historical analysis, theorising the global economy as polarising, and featuring domestic structures of production and external constraints in the Global South8. However, this way of studying the international has been a neglected tradition in International Political Economy, where the renewed research agenda is articulated as having the conceptual tools to engage more effectively in policy debates while privileging the interests and standpoints of the Global South9.

While different strands of dependency scholarship from Latin America and Africa have been drawn to inspire this intellectual endeavour, Southeast Asia remains largely absent from the conversation. To the extent Southeast Asia is mentioned10, it is sometimes invoked as a counterfactual to dependency theory, with the region’s growth and industrial achievements cited as empirical evidence11 to disprove the premise that peripheral countries could not industrialise by integrating into the world economy dominated by metropolitan capital—although not all strands of dependency theory dismiss the possibility of industrialisation in the periphery.

Malaysia’s economic success from the 1960s to the 1980s was previously noted as a “critical test for the neocolonial thesis or the dependency school.”12 Furthermore, the endurance of pre-capitalist modes of production in the region allegedly challenges the idea that pre-capitalist formations were adversely modified under conditions of capitalist integration13—the idea, also known as the development of underdevelopment thesis, is associated with the neo-Marxist dependency theorist, Andre Gunder Frank. As noted by the political economists Richard Higgott and Richard Robison in 1985, “there has been little or no Southeast Asian scholarship to date that can claim to have attempted to advance the study of the region in a theoretically specific and systematic manner comparable to that of authors such as Baran, Frank, Laclau, Cardoso, Dos Santos, Furtado, Sunkel, O’Donnell or Evans writing on Latin America, or Amin, Rodney, Ake, Meillassoux, Mamdani, Leys or Shivji writing on Africa.”14 More than 40 years later, the Southeast Asian lacunae remain intact.

The neglect of Southeast Asia is regrettable as it is the region most penetrated by metropolitan industrial capital15 at least until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997/1998, underpinned by the internationalisation of production, a new international division of labour, and novel permutations of state capitalism. Hence, this essay revisits dependency scholarship in Malaysia to make the broader argument that engagement with such scholarship in Southeast Asia not only has the potential to enrich political economy analysis but also brings distinct contributions to ongoing efforts to revitalise dependency theory. More pertinently, political economy studies of race and gender in the region, which have intersected with different configurations of international/national capital, can help address the race and gender lacunae of dependency theory. Such intersections resonate with recent calls to bring dependency theory into closer dialogue with anti-colonial16 and feminist17 scholarship.

Revisiting dependency scholarship in Malaysia

It should be clarified at the outset that dependency scholarship in Malaysia does not refer to a dogmatic commitment to a set of theoretical propositions, nor does it necessarily represent a coherent and systematic way of theorising. Instead, the body of work is constituted by an inclination to utilise Malaysia as an empirical source to engage with dependency theory and historical materialist approaches, such as world-systems theory and the neocolonial thesis.18 While dependency scholarship was influential in Malaysia during the 1950s and 1960s19, subsequent studies were also published, especially in the 1980s.

One of the defining works, published in 1960 under the title Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy20, was written by the economist and trade unionist James Puthucheary while he was in prison. Drawing on the ideas of Gunnar Myrdal and Hans Singer (the latter known for his structuralist critique of the Economic Commission of Latin America)21, Puthucheary argued that underdevelopment in Malaya was not merely due to “the lack of natural resources and the smallness of the market” but was “created by the capital development which has already taken place.”22 Puthucheary demonstrated how corporate Malaya was structurally owned and controlled by foreign capital via the British agency houses, which were invested in extracting primary commodities to feed metropolitan industrial needs. Profits were repatriated rather than channelled to spur industrialisation in Malaya. Puthucheary characterised such dependent economies as “outposts of the economy of the industrial countries.”23

The social anthropologist Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, in one of his early works published in 1979, adapted the ideas of dependency theorists Walter Rodney and Andre Gunder Frank to study the Malay peasantry. Like Puthucheary, he explained the underdevelopment of the rural peasantry as the result of its integration into the world capitalist economy, where “these relationships have been proven to be one-sidely advantageous, i.e. the development of the centre is at the expense of the continuing underdevelopment of the periphery.”24 Following capitalist integration, rural plantation agriculture was similarly subject to international price fluctuations while subservient to the industrial demands of Britain, an economic condition Shamsul labelled “the dependent and installed mode of production”25.

In a nuanced analysis published in 198226, the political economist Lim Mah Hui delved into the dependency debate surrounding Bill Warren’s claims that imperialism had played a progressive role in spreading capitalism to Third World countries, thereby paradoxically undermining the imperialist project itself. Grounded in the empirics of the Malaysian economy, Lim surmised that genuine capitalist development had indeed occurred in the country since the 1950s, as evidenced by rapid industrialisation and the development of productive forces in manufacturing and agriculture. However, Lim cautioned against Warren’s sweeping dismissal of external constraints confronting peripheral countries, and instead highlighted foreign control (despite the decrease in foreign ownership) and new forms of dependency on “foreign markets, foreign technology and foreign supply of capital and intermediate goods”27. He also weighed in on the debate over domestic class formation, specifically whether the local capitalist class was “comprador” or “independent” in character, eventually suggesting an “interdependent yet contradictory relation between indigenous and foreign capital”28. A similar critique of Warren’s optimistic view of imperialism was made by Hua Wu Yin, also a political economist, in the 1983 book Class and Communalism in Malaysia, pointing to how “the repatriation of profits by foreign investors… is likely to retard the ‘development’ of indigenous capital and its linkages with the local economy.”29

However, the more interesting aspect of dependency scholarship in Malaysia is that it has not shied away from engaging with the question of race and, to a certain extent, gender. In fact, numerous studies focus on race and ethnic relations as their primary subject of inquiry. Hua, for example, was mainly concerned with racialised communalism in Malaysia. His principal thesis was that the ruling class could not satisfy the material needs of the masses due to its dependence on metropolitan capital and therefore had to resort to communalism as a repressive, racialised mode of political settlement30. In a 1986 article titled The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya, the sociologist Charles Hirschman suggested the need to go beyond cultural explanations of “primordial bonds” to unpack the “race problem” in Malaya31. He arguably foregrounded dependencies wrought by British colonialism/imperialism as a global historical framework for studying race relations and their entanglements with domestic class formation (and antagonism).

Lim, in another article published in 1980, grounded ethnic relations in world-systems theory, positing that such relations could not be adequately examined at “the level of inter-personal interactions or at the level of cultural and social exchange… but at the level of economics – more specifically at the levels of the relations of production and exchange.”32 Similarly, Azlan Tajuddin, a sociologist at La Roche University, employed a world-systems approach to analyse ethnic divisions and democratisation in Malaysia in his 2012 book Malaysia in the World Economy (1824-2011)33. Articulating the historical-world systemic framework as the capitalist world economy, Tajuddin drew on world-systems scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein and Thomas Shannon to challenge modernisation theories, most notably, on their proposition that industrial development in the Global South can only be achieved through the infusion of Global North investments, organisational standards, work ethics, and cultural values. He argued that Malaysia’s “managed” democracy, imposed by the local ruling elite, emerged as a political form due to ethnic and class dynamics rooted in Malaysia’s dependent development, leading to state-driven industrialisation being seen as “the only logical path toward the pursuit of happiness.”34

On gender, Hua, who was mentioned earlier, contested Warren’s claims not only by articulating the racial implications of rural outmigration (for the urban electorate) but also pointed to the mobilisation of “the super-exploited class of women” from rural areas to help resolve “the crisis in metropolitan capitalism that necessitated a search for cheap wage-zones to increase productivity.”35 The concept of super-exploitation is a key concept in dependency theory, with intersectional potential to engage deeper with the analysis of gender and race36. Hua unpacked the feminisation of wage labour in Malaysia via the concept of super-exploitation while incorporating feminist criticisms of gendered (and racialised) ideas of manual dexterity37 and nimble fingers38 of the “oriental female”39.

A 1991 article by the anthropologist Carol McAllister also centres feminist perspectives in her global historical analysis of Negeri Sembilan women in Malaysia40. Using the Trotskyist formulation of uneven and combined development, a theory arguably compatible with dependency theory41, McAllister examined women’s everyday resistance “through their continuing participation in matrilineal and Islamic traditions”42. She highlighted how traditional and modern practices co-existed and were “combined” as they were incorporated into “the international wage-and-market economy”43. However, McAllister did not conceptualise women’s agency as merely the outcome of the country’s specific integration into the world capitalist economy. Instead, she prioritised women’s experiences in “issues of residence, family, marriage, childcare” and “cultural processes such as education, religion, ritual, and even play”44 to broaden understanding of the processes of uneven and combined development (beyond work and property), while unsettling the simplistic dichotomy of traditional and modern.

Two other works worth mentioning are the anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s Spirit of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia45 and the sociologist Diana Wong’s Peasants in the Making: Malaysia’s Green Revolution46. Both published in 1987 and based on fieldwork conducted from 1979 to 1980, they examined the experiences of working-class and peasant women within the context of their incorporation into the world capitalist economy. Although these two publications do not directly speak to dependency scholarship, they—and works of a similar nature—can be fertile ground for harnessing the intersectional potentialities of dependency theory47 and inscribing gender onto historical materialist analysis of the polarising global economy.

Researching dependency in Southeast Asia

While the exposition of dependency scholarship above focuses on Malaysia, the broader argument is for the recovery of dependency theory in Southeast Asia. Doing so, as suggested at the start of this essay, not only enriches studies on the political economy of the region but also makes distinct contributions that can deepen and extend efforts to revitalise dependency theory as a research programme. Researching dependency in Southeast Asia has mutually generative effects on the political economy of Southeast Asia and the dependency research programme, in which two potentialities are unravelled in this concluding section. First, there is the potential for critical reassessments of past and present events in the region, given the current historical conjuncture of global capitalist crisis underpinned by the shift from liberal containment to defensive imperialism48. Second, there is the potential for recovering a global historical materialist understanding of race and gender while visibilising racialised-gendered relations of dependency in the world capitalist economy.

On the first potentiality, the present moment of global capitalist crisis, as manifested in several Southeast Asian countries undergoing premature deindustrialisation49, offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the empirical evidence from the region used to contest dependency theory. The point here is not to return to the fatalism of a misconstrued notion of dependency (that peripheral economies cannot industrialise), but to draw on a longer time horizon to engender a more circumspect interpretation of the region’s growth and industrial achievements while examining “how internal dynamics… in relation to the dynamics of centre countries… enforce certain patterns of industrialisation”50. Dependency theory, as a historical materialist approach to the international, must be able to explain dependency on a world scale, and in this regard, accounting for Southeast Asia (beyond its role as a “counterfactual”) is crucial for articulating the uneven and combined dynamics of dependency51.

At the same time, situating the political economy of industrialisation/deindustrialisation within a dependency framework provides an alternative to neoliberal52 and neo-institutionalist53 framings of the middle-income trap that do not account for dependency and structural effects of capitalism. It means not premising technological and productivity gaps on the lack of (neoliberal) integration into the world economy, but starting the interrogation with the terms and conditions in which Southeast Asian countries were incorporated. Understanding the longue durée of dependency also involves sourcing lessons from the rich archives of anti-colonial and anti-imperial resistance, rather than exceptionalising the present imperial power of the United States of America (without negating discontinuities and change).

On the second potentiality, the political economy of Southeast Asia is rife with racial and gender dynamics, which can address the race-gender lacunae of dependency theory. It has already been shown via the race and gender dimensions of dependency scholarship in Malaysia discussed above. But it can be extended to wider Southeast Asia, in which racialised54 and gendered55 social formations are colonial legacies56 and postcolonial realities57 (see, for example, Fantasising the Feminine in Indonesia)58. Although there are laudable efforts to reconcile dependency theory with anti-colonial/anti-racist ideas59 and feminist economics60, the encounters of Southeast Asia with metropolitan capital suggest that these dynamics must be understood in historically grounded ways. New forms of work in the region, such as the proliferation of digital care platform work61, further underscore the need to understand emerging forms of racialised and feminised relations62 of dependency in the world economy.

Centring racialised, gendered bodies and experiences in articulating the global structures of dependency also averts the critique of developmentalism inherent in the classic works of dependency theory63. It broadens the scope of industrial policy64 in a region where state-led industrialisation, with its sectoral concerns and domestic value-added production, tends to be valorised as “development”, at risk of only “changing the identity of the owners of industrial capital”65 from foreign to local capitalists. In other words, visibilising racialised-gendered relations of dependency redirects the gaze to links between “economic upgrading” and “social upgrading”66—without conflating them. Finally, anchoring race and gender in dependency theory shifts the focus on interpersonal, behavioural, and cultural explanations to the global systems of production, circulation, and distribution, where racial and gender hierarchies are not only embedded but also essential to the functioning of the world capitalist economy.

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    1. I would like to thank Dr Belén Villegas Plá, Fatin Nadhirah, and Jeremy Lim for their constructive comments and literature recommendations. I welcome further feedback and suggested readings on the topic. ↩︎
    2. Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, ‘Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Programme’, Development and Change 52, no. 1 (2021): 76–112 ↩︎
    3. José Miguel Ahumada and Miguel Torres, ‘Dependency Theory: An Underdevelopmental Thought from Latin America to the Entire World’, in Global Handbook of Inequality, eds. Surinder S. Jodhka and Boike Rehbein (Springer International Publishing, 2024), 1-21 ↩︎
    4. Sebastián Fernández Franco et al., ‘Dependency in the Digital Age? The Experience of Mercado Libre in Latin America’, Development and Change 55, no. 3 (2024): 429–64 ↩︎
    5. E. Perez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo, Financialization, Deindustrialization and Instability in Latin America, Working Paper Series no. 547 (Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2021) ↩︎
    6. Aldo Madariaga and Stefano Palestini, Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe (Springer Nature, 2021). ↩︎
    7. Theotonio Dos Santos, ‘The Structure of Dependence’, American Economic Review 60, no. 2 (1970): 231–36. ↩︎
    8. Kvangraven, ‘Beyond the Stereotype’. ↩︎
    9. Felipe Antunes de Oliveira and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, ‘Back to Dakar: Decolonizing International Political Economy through Dependency Theory’, Review of International Political Economy 30, no. 5 (2023): 1–25. ↩︎
    10. de Oliveira and Kvangraven, ‘Back to Dakar’. ↩︎
    11. Stephen D. Krasner, ‘International Political Economy: Abiding Discord’, Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1994): 13–19. ↩︎
    12. Charles Hirschman, ‘Development and Inequality in Malaysia: From Puthucheary to Mehmet’, Pacific Affairs 62, no. 1 (1989): 72–81. ↩︎
    13. Richard Higgott et al., ‘Theories of Development and Underdevelopment: Implications for the Study of Southeast Asia’, in Southeast Asia – Essays in the Political Economy of Structural Change, eds. Richard Higgott and Richard Robison (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). ↩︎
    14. Higgott et al., ‘Theories of Development and Underdevelopment’. ↩︎
    15. Higgott et al., ‘Theories of Development and Underdevelopment’. ↩︎
    16. Felipe Antunes De Oliveira, ‘Who Are the Super-Exploited? Gender, Race, and the Intersectional Potentialities of Dependency Theory’, in Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe, ed. Aldo Madariaga and Stefano Palestini, International Political Economy Series (Springer International Publishing, 2021). ↩︎
    17. Belén Villegas Plá, ‘Dependency Theory Meets Feminist Economics: A Research Agenda’, Third World Quarterly 45, no. 8 (2024): 1325–42. ↩︎
    18. The literature reviewed here is not exhaustive. Markedly absent is the book by the economist Martin Khor Kok Peng (2019), The Malaysian Economy: Structures and Dependence. In addition, there is the article by the anthropologist Zawawi Ibrahim, ‘From a ‘World-system’ to a Social Science Knowledge ‘Scape’ Perspective: Anthropological Fieldworking and Transnationalising Theory-making in the ‘Periphery’’, who brought a critical lens to the epistemology of world-systems theory. It is also reflected in the latter’s book, The Malay Labourer: By the Window of Capitalism (Zawawi, 2000). ↩︎
    19. Hirschman, ‘Development and Inequality’. ↩︎
    20. James Joseph Puthucheary, Ownership and Control in the Malaysian Economy: A Study of the Structure of Ownership and Control and Its Effects on the Development of Secondary Industries and Economic Growth in Malaya and Singapore (Eastern Universities Press, 1960). ↩︎
    21. Kvangraven, ‘Beyond the Stereotype’. ↩︎
    22. Puthucheary, Ownership and Control. ↩︎
    23. Puthucheary, Ownership and Control. ↩︎
    24. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, ‘The Development of the Underdevelopment of the Malaysian Peasantry’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 9, no. 4 (1979): 434–54. ↩︎
    25. Shamsul, ‘The Development of the Underdevelopment’. ↩︎
    26. Mah Hui Lim, ‘Capitalism and Industrialization in Malaysia’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14, no. 1 (1982): 32–47. ↩︎
    27. Lim, ‘Capitalism and Industrialization’. ↩︎
    28. Lim, ‘Capitalism and Industrialization’. ↩︎
    29. Wu Yin Hua, Class and Communalism in Malaysia (Zed Books Ltd., 1983). ↩︎
    30. Hua, Class and Communalism. ↩︎
    31. Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, Sociological Forum 1, no. 2 (1986): 330–61. ↩︎
    32. Mah Hui Lim, ‘Ethnic and Class Relations in Malaysia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 10, nos 1–2 (1980): 130–54. ↩︎
    33. Azlan Tajuddin, Malaysia in the World Economy (1824–2011): Capitalism, Ethnic Divisions, and ‘Managed’ Democracy (Lexington Books, 2012). ↩︎
    34. Tajuddin, Malaysia in the World Economy. ↩︎
    35. Hua, Class and Communalism. ↩︎
    36. Antunes De Oliveira, ‘Who Are the Super-Exploited?’ ↩︎
    37. Linda Y. C. Lim, ‘Women Workers in Multinational Corporations: The Case of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia and Singapore’, Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies 9 (1980): 1–60. ↩︎
    38. Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, ‘“Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers”: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review 7, no. 1 (1981): 87–107. ↩︎
    39. Hua, Class and Communalism. ↩︎
    40. Carol McAllister, ‘Uneven and Combined Development: Dynamics of Change and Women’s Everyday Forms of Resistance in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia’, Review of Radical Political Economics 23, nos 3–4 (1991): 57–98. ↩︎
    41. Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, ‘The Rise of the Latin American Far-Right Explained: Dependency Theory Meets Uneven and Combined Development’, Globalizations 16, no. 7 (2019): 1145–64. ↩︎
    42. McAllister, ‘Uneven and Combined Development’. ↩︎
    43. McAllister, ‘Uneven and Combined Development’. ↩︎
    44. McAllister, ‘Uneven and Combined Development’. ↩︎
    45. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, Second Edition (State University of New York Press, 1987). ↩︎
    46. Diana Wong, Peasants in the Making: Malaysia’s Green Revolution (ISEAS Publishing, 1987). ↩︎
    47. Antunes De Oliveira, ‘Who Are the Super-Exploited?’ ↩︎
    48. Walden Bello, ‘King Donald and His Asian Vassals’, Foreign Policy in Focus, 2025, https://fpif.org/king-donald-and-his-asian-vassals/. ↩︎
    49. José Gabriel Palma and Jonathan Pincus, ‘Is Southeast Asia Falling Into a Latin American Style “Middle-Income Trap”?’, in The Great Upheaval: Resetting Development Policy and Institutions in the Asia-Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2022). ↩︎
    50. Kvangraven, ‘Beyond the Stereotype’. ↩︎
    51. de Oliveira, ‘Dependency Theory Meets Uneven and Combined Development’. ↩︎
    52. Pietro Masina, Southeast Asia, the Middle-Income Trap, and the World Bank: A Critique of Neoclassical Mythology, hal-03744657 (SEATIDE Integration in Southeast Asia: Trajectories of Inclusion, Dynamics of Exclusion, 2016). ↩︎
    53. Richard F. Doner and Ben Ross Schneider, ‘The Middle-Income Trap: More Politics than Economics’, World Politics 68, no. 4 (2016): 608–44. ↩︎
    54. Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey, ‘Introduction Why Race Mattered: Racial Difference, Racialized Colonial Capitalism and the Racialized Wars of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Southeast Asia’, in Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia, eds. Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). ↩︎
    55. Juanita Elias, ‘The Gendered Political Economy of Southeast Asian Development’, in The Political Economy of Southeast Asia, Fourth Edition, ed. Toby Carroll et al., Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). ↩︎
    56. Diana S. Kim, Rethinking Colonial Legacies across Southeast Asia: Through the Lens of the Japanese Wartime Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2025). ↩︎
    57. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 1995). ↩︎
    58. Laurie Jo Sears, Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Duke University Press, 1996). ↩︎
    59. Antunes De Oliveira, ‘Who Are the Super-Exploited?’ ↩︎
    60. Villegas Plá, ‘Dependency Theory Meets Feminist Economics’. ↩︎
    61. Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, Fault Lines at the Front Lines: Care Work and Digital Platforms in South and Southeast Asia (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2021). ↩︎
    62. Paula Rodríguez-Modroño et al., ‘A Social Reproduction Analysis of Digital Care Platform Work’, New Political Economy 29, no. 4 (2024): 616–27. ↩︎
    63. de Oliveira and Kvangraven, ‘Back to Dakar’. ↩︎
    64. Sam Ashman et al., ‘Radical Perspectives on Industrial Policy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy, eds. Arkebe Oqubay et al. (Oxford), 2020, 178–204. ↩︎
    65. Ashman et al., ‘Radical Perspectives on Industrial Policy’. ↩︎
    66. Donatella Alessandrini, ‘A Not So “New Dawn” for International Economic Law and Development: Towards a Social Reproduction Approach to GVCs’, European Journal of International Law 33, no. 1 (2022): 131–62. ↩︎