Reconsidering a Classic: Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

Watch video of one presentation that is part of a yearlong series sponsored by Vanderbilt History Seminar devoted to exploring the theme of Rich & Poor across historical space and time.

The seminar on March 19, with commentators Pius Adesanmi and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, focused on Walter Rodney’s influential and much debated book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, originally published in 1972.  Rodney was a Guyanese scholar educated first at the University of the West Indies and then at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.  His pioneering work focused both on the slave trade and on the European colonization of Africa.  Rodney was also active politically in Guyana, where he was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight.