The work of the economist and social scientist, Raymond Crotty, was celebrated at the weekend Desmond Greaves summer school in Dublin.
Mr Crotty, who died in 1994, is best remembered for his constitutional challenge to the Government's ratification of the Single European Act in 1987.
Dr Peader Kirby, of DCU, said Mr Crotty had first made his name as an historian of Irish agricultural production. He added that only with Ireland in Crisis: A Study of Capitalist Colonial Undevelopment, in 1986, had his work been brought to the attention of the international development community, he added.
Prof Lars Mjoset, of the University of Oslo, outlined Mr Crotty's ideas on world history. He said the beginning of modern economic development resulted from the emergence of a genetic mutation for lactose tolerance in central Asia.
That tolerance implied an advantage in terms of food supply which led to the production of a population surplus.
Four millennia ago, driven by the problems of overpopulation, those lactose-tolerant pastoralists invaded the fertile, crop-growing areas of Eurasia, he added.
In Europe, those invasions created individualist capitalism, an economy based on the savings and resulting investments of individual peasants relying on cattle, cultivating food and wine fodder, and building shelter for the harsh winter.
Prof Joe Lee, of the Glucksman Institute, New York, and UCC, said the economic success experienced by Ireland was heavily dependent on external factors and a unique conjunction of conditions which would not be repeated in the future.
Young people now had a self-confidence which was new in Ireland. They had not encountered the economic, political and cultural defeats and setbacks which had affected previous generations, he added.