[Pen-l] Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Posted originally to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list on Yahoo.)

I want to wrap up the discussion on dependency theory by referring to a 
jewel that I stumbled across on the Marxism Internet Archives a week or 
so ago. Written in 1973, Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped 
Africa” is one of the few Marxist books that I read while in the 
Socialist Workers Party that did not have the imprimatur of Pathfinder 
Press. Rodney’s book had a huge impact on the left back then and even 
inspired a similar treatment in Manning Marable’s 1983 “How Capitalism 
Underdeveloped Black America”.

Although Rodney’s book was not published by Monthly Review, it certainly 
was seen as a companion volume to such MR classics as Eduardo Galeano’s 
“The Open Veins of Latin America” and Pierre Jalee’s “Pillage of the 
Third World”, two other books that I found time to read even though they 
were not published by SWP authors. I only regret that I had not read 
more such books since the cumulative effect might have been to persuade 
me to turn in my resignation earlier.

Walter Rodney was born into a working class Guyanese family in 1942. He 
received his PhD in 1966 on the basis of a dissertation on the slave 
trade. Clearly he was following in the tradition of fellow Caribbean 
Marxist Eric Williams, the author of “Capitalism and Slavery,” a book 
also based on a PhD that was strongly influenced by CLR James.

Rodney began teaching at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 
1968, a natural base for the political organizing that would lead to his 
banning from the country by the Jamaican Labor Party. This led to 
widespread protests which were met by police violence. After being 
expelled from Jamaica, Walter taught in Tanzania until 1974 where he 
developed the ideas incorporated in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.

In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana where he again combined teaching with 
political activism. While running for office in the Guyanese elections 
in 1980, he was killed by a remote control bomb.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/walter-rodneys-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa/
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