walter rodney book how europe underdeveloped africa

The Indian nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji in his acclaimed Poverty and the Un-British Rule in India (1901) wrote about how India enriched Britain in what he describes as ‘drain of wealth.’ His fellow Indian contemporary, Romesh Dutt in his Economic History of India (1909) also advanced a theory of underdevelopment in India which he linked to colonial rule. These theories of imperialism relate colonial capitalism to exploitation and expansionism. More recently, Kohli (2020) argues similarly that British and American imperialisms have shaped the world principally through the pursuit of economic domination and expansionism. Later theorists such as Cohen (1971) took a similar view arguing that imperialism was essentially about power, domination and expansionism.

Hobson (1902), Hilferding (1909), Luxembourg (2013), and Lenin (1917) all linked imperialism to capitalism, arguing in various ways that imperialism was rooted in expansionism and exploitation. The early part of the twentieth century saw a series of books published, many of them written by Marxist theorists, on the nature of imperialism and its impact on other societies. It is therefore timely, after half a century, to reassess Rodney’s text and to locate its place within Africa’s economic historiography. Time has not diminished the ideas propounded in the book nor the power of the argument.

The gulf of inequality between Africa and the West has widened, while poverty in Africa is worse today than it was fifty years ago. Many of the issues that Rodney raised and addressed in his book are still with us. Far from being a mere historical document, the book is of contemporary relevance.

Many contemporary Africanist scholars, particularly those working in developmental studies, African politics and culture are treading the same grounds that Rodney trod half a century ago. Not only was the book ground-breaking in the area of African studies, it became required reading not only in universities across Africa but also in secondary schools. Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972, to wide acclaim.

Walter rodney book how europe underdeveloped africa