How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment 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. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today.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.

“"A masterpiece." --Andy Higginbottom, Redline "Appearing in 1972, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a genuine tour de force. It fused, as had never been done in a single volume before, African history in the global sense and underdevelopment theory, Marxism and black nationalism, intellectual passion and political commitment. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa instantly joined a select pan-Africanist canon that would be read at least as much outside as within the academy, an exclusive category that included the two texts that had greatly influenced Rodney's intellectual development, notably James's Black Jacobins and Williams's Capitalism & Slavery , along with Black Reconstruction , W. E. B. Dubois's magisterial work on the struggle for democracy in the United States during the post-Civil War, post-slavery era. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , however, differed from the above-mentioned works, which were written long after the events they charted occurred. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , by contrast, was more urgent and immediate, having been produced in the heat of battle, which is to say amid the ongoing struggle of Africans against capitalist and neocolonialist underdevelopment. His purpose in writing the book, Rodney explained in the Preface, was 'to try and reach Africans who wish to explore further the nature of their exploitation, rather than to satisfy the 'standards' set by our oppressors and their spokesmen in the academic world." --Michael West, Groundings”

For anyone who genuinely wants to understand why black life continues to be devalued, and the global nature of the problem, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) is a must-read. BBC History Magazine

Walter Rodney was an internationally renowned historian of colonialism and a leader of Black Power and Pan-African movements across the diaspora, most notably the Guyanese Working People’s Alliance. His life and work brought together struggles for independence on the African continent with the strivings of the black working classes of North America and the Caribbean basin. On June the 13th, 1980, Rodney was assassinated, most likely by the then-president of Guyana. He was 38 years old.

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