How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney argued that Africa's poverty was not a starting point but a product: centuries of slave trading and colonial extraction actively drained the continent to build Europe. Writing as a historian and activist in Dar es Salaam, he turned underdevelopment from a condition into an act with a culprit. The book became a founding text of dependency theory and of Pan-African economic thought.

Its legacy. It remains a fixture of African university syllabi and radical politics.