The Antofagasta Company: A Case Study of Peripheral Capitalism
s Western Europe entered the mature stages of the industrial revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, Latin America was encompassed and deeply affected by its capitalist development. The capital reserves, entrepreneurial expertise, and technological advances of Europe entered that region on an unprecedented scale and drew upon its natural resources. Contemporary dependency theorists perceive in this process a distinct form of capitalism to which they attribute many of Latin America's current economic agonies. Central to this phenomenon, termed peripheral capitalism, was an alliance of a cooperative domestic bourgeoisie and more powerful European capitalists. This alliance, it is reasoned, provided foreign investors access to national decisionmaking processes and allowed them to foster policies which advanced their interests but had detrimental effects on national development. It left the domestic bourgeoisie with an ambivalent attitude toward economic nationalism. Furthermore, its exploitation of the region's surplus labor supply created conditions of unequal exchange leading to transfers of value to the European core which steadily impoverished the Latin American periphery. Through the importation of factors essential for modern economic enterprises, it also precluded the necessity for a fundamental reordering of Latin America's traditional economic and social structures. As a result, when industrialization did take place it failed to serve as a growth pole initiating changes characteristic of development.' Perhaps no nation's history more closely approximates this process