How Europe underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

312 pages

English language

Published Jan. 6, 1981 by Howard University Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-88258-096-8
OCLC Number:: 7552523

(9 reviews)

"This book derives from a concern with the contemporary African situation. It delves into the past only because otherwise it would be impossible to understand how the present came into being and what the trends are for the near future. In the search for an understanding of what is now called underdevelopment in Africa, the limits of enquiry have had to be fixed as far apart as the fifteenth century, on the one hand and the end of the colonial period, on the other hand."-

20 editions

kab reviewed How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

1 star

DNF 12% Excruciatingly of another era. Starts from false premises, does not question that man must dominate nature and that progress follows a single inexorable path from hunting communalism to slave-owning states to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Permanent growth and producing for an anonymous market remain the aim while the summit of development is when the state accumulates the surplus. Among alarming postulations:

However morally indefensible slavery may have been, it did serve for a while to open up the mines and agricultural plantations in large parts of Europe and notably within the Roman Empire.