Biography of André Gunder Frank

André Gunder Frank, born Andreas Frank (24 February 1929 in Berlin; died 23 April 2005 in Luxembourg), was a German-American economist, sociologist and economic historian. His work on dependency, underdevelopment and world systems challenged the usual postwar narratives of development.

Berlin and exile

Frank was born in Berlin as the son of the writer Leonhard Frank. The family left Germany around the Nazi seizure of power. Frank spent part of his childhood in Switzerland and later moved to the United States. He studied at Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, where he completed his doctorate in 1957.

Latin America

In the early 1960s Frank turned away from a purely U.S. academic career and moved to Latin America. He worked in Brazil, Mexico and Chile, among other places. Experiences in Latin American universities and political debates became decisive for his theoretical work. After the military coup in Chile in 1973 he left the country.

Underdevelopment

With texts such as The Development of Underdevelopment and the book Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, Frank attacked the idea that poor countries were at an earlier stage of the same development path. For him, underdevelopment was produced through historical incorporation into capitalist world markets, dependencies between center and periphery, and political power relations.

World system

Later Frank worked with long historical perspectives. He taught at the University of East Anglia and the University of Amsterdam, among other institutions. In books such as World Accumulation, The World System and ReOrient, he foregrounded global interconnections, Asia, trade and shifts of power across centuries. He also disagreed with other world-systems approaches when he thought they reasoned too much from Europe.

Luxembourg

André Gunder Frank died in Luxembourg on 23 April 2005. He was 76 years old. His work remains connected with debates about dependency, global inequality, capitalism and the question of how world history is told when Europe is not treated as its natural center.