Development and Underdevelopment
Name:
1. Drawing on your own reading and slides, explain how Rodney defines development. Provide two quotes from the reading that illustrate this definition. 2. Drawing on your own reading and class lecture, explain how Rodney defines underdevelopment. Provide two quotes from the reading that illustrate this definition. 3. Explain how development and underdevelopment are related. 4. How, if at all, are the processes Rodney identifies that drive development and underdevelopment relevant today? How might development in the global North entail underdevelopment in the global South?
Sample Solution
Development and Underdevelopment
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a 1972 book written by Walter Rodney that describes how Africa was deliberately exploited and underdeveloped by European colonial regimes. As a corrective, Rodney defines development as a “many-sided process.” He defines it at the individual and the social level in terms of “increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility, and material well-being. For Rodney, underdevelopment is a condition historically produced through capitalist expansion and imperialism, and very clearly not an intrinsic property of Africa itself. He thus situates underdevelopment within the contradictory process of capitalism, one that both creates value and wealth for the exploiters while immiserating the exploited. Rodney writes: “the peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profit from the human labor that always lies behind the machines.”
