How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Name: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Author: Walter Rodney

by Walter Rodney

Africa isn't poor. It was made poor.

For you if

you've suspected the global economy wasn't an accident and need the proof

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Africa is not underdeveloped. It was underdeveloped — deliberately, systematically, over five centuries — by the same economic forces that made Europe rich. That's the argument Rodney makes in 1972, and he makes it by going all the way back: through precolonial African societies that were building their own institutions and trade networks, through the Atlantic slave trade that gutted them, through colonialism that rewired entire economies to serve European industry, and through the independence movements that inherited the wreckage. This is the book that makes the global economy legible as a machine — and once you see how it works, "development aid" looks like an entirely different thing. Walter Rodney was assassinated in Guyana in 1980. Read this knowing someone thought these ideas were worth killing him for.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: anti-colonialism capitalism critique colonialism's legacy economic inequality imperialism and exploitation true cost of empire who tells history
Topics: african post-independence era atlantic slave trade colonialism in africa decolonization of africa

Rodney was 30 when he wrote this — a Guyanese scholar who had already been banned from Jamaica for running unauthorized community education sessions with poor Black residents, who had taught at the University of Tanzania, and who was building toward the political organizing that would get him killed. That context matters: this isn't armchair theory. The Marxist framework is visible throughout, and you don't have to accept the full political program to find the argument devastating — the data and the logic hold on their own terms. We put this in SEE THROUGH IT because it is, first and foremost, a pair of glasses. The phrase "developing world" doesn't survive contact with this book.

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Omeros

Derek Walcott