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Imperialism Reading Group - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney - Week 2
(hexbear.net)
This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. Last week's thread is here.
The book we are currently reading through is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group, or if you no longer wish to be pinged.
This week, we will be reading the first section, "A General Overview", of Chapter 2: How Africans Developed Before The Coming Of The Europeans - Up To The Fifteenth Century. This is roughly 15 pages.
Next week, we will be reading the second section, "Some Concrete Examples", of Chapter 2: How Africans Developed Before The Coming Of The Europeans - Up To The Fifteenth Century.
Great section. This discussion reminds me of another book, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World where John Thornton describes the concept of "wealth" in Subsaharan Africa. In much of the continent land was plentiful so land was not the measure of wealth like Europe. Cattle was the larger measure of wealth. He differs from Rodney here and Thornton described the capture of humans during war as "slavery." While they both talk about how slaves and their children were eventually added into their tribe, Thornton described that many wars were done for the purpose of expanding one's tribal population. Thus when Portuguese and other Europeans started buying chattel slaves, they were tapping into an existing network of human capture (which ballooned like crazy due to European trade). I look forward to Rodney's take on this in a later chapter.
I also appreciated the comment on how Africans largely preferred their own manufactured products to cheap European goods. Rodney rightly points to the scale of production as the developmental difference and I look forward to him discussing this more in another chapter. There's obvious parallels to England's deindustrialization of India.