For two centuries we have thought about temporality and history with the category of progress: from the first formulations of the Enlightenment to the Rostow theory of development stages. An important criticism of the latter author comes from the Latin American dependentista school which – starting with Raúl Prebisch – explains the differences in economic development not in temporal terms (backwardness / modernity) but in spatial and geopolitical terms (center / periphery). This article reviews the various authors of the dependentista school, unfairly underestimated and now almost forgotten.