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

(7 reviews)

Work of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present.

In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

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.