How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

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.

A powerful work that reveals the truth behind why Africa has fallen so far behind developmentally compared to Europe and the US.

The reason is simple: first Europe stole millions of human beings from Africa, committing systematic genocides for over a century. This left Africa without the labor needed to develop itself and left Europe and the US with a slave workforce used to develop their own economies, creating massive wealth.

Much of the wealth and power garnered by this slave labor was then leveraged to further exploit Africa, draining it of its natural wealth shortly after draining it of its labor. Colonization's sole purpose is to drain the wealth of weaker nations for the benefit of stronger nations and international corporations. Many of the corporations who benefited from colonial exploitation of Africa still exist today:
Cadbury, Firestone, Unilever, De beers, and more.

The colonies weren't developed to process their natural wealth into high-value products. Of course not. Then the workers would rise up like they did in Europe. If Africans just do the high-labor, low-skill work, then the laborers can be replaced without issue. And they can become further indebted by selling back the high-value commodities they helped make. Export cheap cocoa, import expensive chocolate. Export cheap rubber trees, import expensive tires. Export cheap bauxite, import expensive aluminum products. It wasn't mysterious “market forces”. It was, and is, deliberate & intentional exploitation by powerful countries against weaker countries.

What's worse was the colonial education system, designed not to teach them about their own country's history, culture, peoples, indigenous flora and fauna, etc. but strove to teach them about such things of the colonizing country, all with the direct assertion that their own subjugation is justifiable. Such propaganda was heavily internalized.

I think he spiritual sequel to this book is “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism” by Ha-Joon Chang (2007) which picks up where this book left off: Neoliberalism (AKA Neocolonialism), where countries are pressured into gutting any policies that help their people in order to prioritize exploiting the natural wealth for the benefit of the international corporations.

All of this is still going on today. One long unbroken chain of exploitation stretching back from the time of Columbus. This is why they say “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.” Because everything we buy is in some small way associated with this global system of exploitation. This will always be the case until the system, as it exists today, is destroyed.