CAPSULE REVIEW

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
by Walter Rodney

  Reviewed by Earth Preservation Project

June 3, 2024

Fifty-two years after its publication, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a masterpiece that still deserves our consideration. According to Rodney, poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment are by no means an inherent phenomenon, but “a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation”. Analyzing the economic control and power relations between Africa and Europe, he argues that there is a causal link between the underdevelopment of the former, and the development of the latter. Since the advent of the slave trade in the 15th century, Africa’s labor and wealth have been exploited, robbed, and directed outward by Western colonial capitalists. This has systematically reversed African nations’ progress and stifled their potential for prosperity, while serving European metropoles. These dynamics are still in place today, which is precisely why this timeless classic offers an invaluable lesson – that exploitation is at the center of understanding the issues that continue to plague the Global South. As nations in Africa, Latin America and some parts of Asia are grappling with political and economic factors relating to their maldevelopment, seeking new pathways rests on the liberation from vicious cycles of dependence and breaking free from the shackles of exploitation — an aspect of the struggle that must not be overlooked.