It is a book replete with spelling and grammatical errors to the extent that they often impinge on one’s concentration. He shows us a rich and complex patchwork quilt of interlocking societies and civilisations. There are a few points where Rodney’s book shows its age. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2018. Then there was the export of ivory from Africa, providing the raw material for industries in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and North America – producing items ranging from knife handles to piano keys. Rodney notes, rather tellingly, that in ‘the simplest of societies where there were no kings, it provided impossible for Europeans to strike up the alliance which was necessary to carry on a trade in captives on the coast.’ (91) At the same time some rulers of powerful states did resist; the Angolan state of Matamba, for example, with ‘Queen Nzinga at its head … tried to coordinate resistance against the Portuguese … and this left Matamba isolated…. Most importantly of all Rodney’s systematic unfurling of all these processes decisively dispels the enduring myth that – despite its brutalities – colonialism nevertheless yielded a progressive modernisation of the continent. At the same time, Rodney draws attention to numerous examples of heroic resistance on the part of states and communities whose ability to resist was nevertheless meagre in light of European technological supremacy. At the same time such groups often existed alongside more developed societies: the Benin Kingdom whose powerful industry and sophisticated division of labour underlay the creation of a plethora of great art, including the famous bronze heads, or further to the North, the great civilisation of Medieval Mali whose capital, Timbuktu, was a centre for learning across the continent and beyond (at its height a quarter of its population attended its great universities), or the Fatamid dynasty of Egypt which introduced the new industries of ‘papermaking, sugar refining, porcelain, and the distillation of gasoline’ while the ‘older industries of textiles, leather and metal were improved upon’ (57). (179). He shows us a rich and complex patchwork quilt of interlocking societies and civilisations. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. But also in terms of ships. Book review:How Europe underdeveloped Africa: By Walter Rodney This book is an economic analysis of how Europe engaged in an unequal relationship with Africa and subsequently exploited the continent country and specifically how this form of colonialism differed from other parts of the world. In any event, Rodney’s description of the great civilisations of old Africa is one which combines high culture, technological innovation, city building, art and education – with glittering powerful elites and ruthless aristocratic dynasties and more often than not the intensive and debilitating exploitation of those at the bottom. But the 10 million figure neither takes into account the number of people (captured slaves) who died on the journey from the inland to the great ports of West Africa and nor does it account for the number of those who died in the slaving wars which were facilitated by European commercial interests. Walter Rodney The abandonment of traditional iron smelting in most parts of Africa is probably the most important instance of technological repression. At the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade, there was a level of parity between Africa and Europe in many respects. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today. Secondly, Rodney is, in the current writer’s view, far too uncritical about the Stalinist states of the USSR, China and North Korea which he repeatedly lauds as genuinely socialist.

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