Bishop Maury (of France) Argument against France’s ending the slave trade and giving freedom to its slave colonies, presented in the French National Assembly, 1791. ‘If you were to lose each year more than 200 million livres that you now get from your colonies if you had not the exclusive trade with your colonies lo feed your manufactures, lo maintain your navy, lo keep your agriculture going, lo repay for your imports, lo provide for your luxury needs, lo advantageously balance your trade with Europe and Asia, then I say it clearly, the kingdom would be irretrievably lost.’ Malachi Postlethwayt, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in North America, 1745 ‘British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation.’ How Europe Underdeveloped Africaīy Walter Rodney Chapter 3: “Africa’s Contribution to European Capitalist Development––The Precolonial Period”
On our website, we’ve also included Rodney’s 1970 essay, “ The Imperialist Partition of Africa,” which echoes some of the key insights of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
The text was first published by Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications (London) and Tanzanian Publishing House (Dar-Es-Salaam). An excerpt can only unfortunately provide a hint of the magnitude of its achievement. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a text that should be read in its entirety. The excerpt here is the third chapter, in which Rodney demonstrates three key points: first, European capitalism would have been inconceivable without the wealth generated by enslaved African and Indigenous American laborers second, European anti-Black racism emerged as an ideological justification for slavery third, and relatedly, while it would be fatal mistake to fail to base racism in its material context – the capitalist mode of production – it would be likewise erroneous to reduce it to class. Its thesis is that ‘development and underdevelopment are not only comparative terms, but they also have a dialectical relationship to each other.’ The reasons for African ‘underdevelopment’ were not a result of nature or African ‘culture,’ as bourgeois ideologues past and present would hold, but of the devastation brought first by European slavery and later by European colonization. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is universally described as a classic of Black political thought, African history, and Marxist political economy, and as formative in the field of African Studies.
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