How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a book written by Walter Rodney in which he portrays an Africa that was deliberately exploited and underdeveloped by European colonial regimes.

Rodney argues that a combination of power politics and economic exploitation of Africa by Europeans led to the poor state of African political and economic development evident in the late 20th Century. In the book's preface, Rodney praises the state of Tanzania, which had pursued the sort of Marxist political ideology that Rodney advocated.

Written in 1972, the book was enormously influential in the study of African history. In the late 1990s many academics became more sharply critical of the book's central thesis and argued that the book oversimplifies the complex historical forces surrounding the colonial era.