A new edition of Walter Rodney’s highly popular text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is on its way. It is due in September 2026.
The late Dr Walter Rodney
Verso, the London based publishing outfit, is issuing the edition. The content may not be different but the new edition has Angela Davis writing the Foreword.
Progressive Geographies, the online outfit which conveyed the good news, describes the text as “an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present”.
It further adds: Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today”
Angela Davis who wrote the Foreword to the new edition
“In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism”, concludes Verso.
Walter Rodney’s text was the staple of the ‘reading African subject’ and across the world when the reading culture was high. As many would say, neoliberalism has, to a great extent, cut that to almost nothing now as the ‘reading subject’ has disappeared substantially. This is observed most among students who are reportedly happier with PowerPoint presentation and infographics nowadays. Among their parents, Executive Summary replaces ‘long read’ and podcasts.
Although there are those saying it is now a case of ‘how Africans are under developing Africa’ through looting and repression, Rodney’s text looks incapable of fading.
