How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Walter Rodney

Oct 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Mirron Willis

About this audiobook

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

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About the author

Walter Rodney is recognized as one of the Caribbean's most brilliant minds. Rodney attended Queens College, in Guyana, and graduated first in his class in 1960. He attended UWI Mona Campus in Jamaica, and graduated with 1st class honors in History in 1963.

Prolific audiobook narrator Mirron Willis has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards and an Audie Award. An accomplished actor, he has appeared on stage, in films, and on television. His many theater credits include roles in Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Knock Me a Kiss, and A Raisin in the Sun.

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, writer, and speaker. An outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, she is the author of several books, including Are Prisons Obsolete? and Women, Race, and Class. Angela is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.