history essay

2. Why do leftist intellectuals always say things like: “the social services provided by a country are of importance equal to that of its material production in bringing about human well-being and happiness” (p. 17). What do you think of this claim?

3. What is “brain drain” (p. 18)? And is this still a thing in the contemporary world?

4. Explain: “much of the national income which remains within the country goes to pay individuals who are not directly involved in producing wealth but only in auxiliary services—civil servants, merchants, soldiers, entertainers. What aggravates the situation is that more people are employed in those jobs than are really necessary to give efficient service; and to crown it all, these people do not reinvest in agriculture or industry. They squander the wealth created by the peasants and workers by purchasing cars, whisky, and perfume” (p. 19).

5. Explain: “in describing a typical underdeveloped economy it is essential to point out the high disproportion of the locally distributed wealth that goes into the pockets of a privileged few” (p. 19).

6. Rodney is using a very specific definition of “wealth” (pp. 19-20). What does he mean by this term? Who actually produces “wealth”?

7. Explain: “the interpretation that underdevelopment is somehow ordained by God is emphasized because of the racist trend in European scholarship” (p. 21).

8. Explain: “so long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of these elements” (p. 22).

9. Explain: “the United States has a small proportion of the world’s population and exploitable natural wealth but it enjoys a huge percentage of the wealth which comes from exploiting the labor and natural resources of the whole world” (p. 24). You do realize that the relatively cushy lifestyle that we lead here in America (even in Lacey, WA) is totally grounded—still, today—in this global reality, right?

10. What is the difference between a bourgeois scholar and a socialist scholar?

11. Explain: “the peasants and workers of the dependencies are awakening to a realization that it is possible to cut the tentacles which imperialism has extended into their countries” (p. 25).

12. Explain: “a formerly colonized nation has no hope of developing until it breaks effectively with the vicious circle of dependence and exploitation which characterizes imperialism” (p. 26).

13. Explain: “equally important has been the role of education in producing Africans to service the capitalist system and subscribe to its values. Recently, the imperialist have been using the new universities in Africa to keep themselves entrenched at the highest academic level” (p. 26).

14. Explain: “the American imperialists go so far as to take the folk music, jazz, and soul music of oppressed black people and transform this into American propaganda over the Voice of America beamed at Africa” (p. 26).

15. Explain: “political instability is manifesting itself in Africa as a chronic symptom of the underdevelopment of political life within the imperialist context. Military coups have followed one after the other, usually meaning nothing to the mass of the people, and sometimes representing a reactionary reversal of the efforts at national liberation” (p. 27).

16. Explain: “every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow” (p. 28).

17. Why is Rodney suspicious of the word “civilization” (p. 34)?

18. Explain: “in a few instances, religion also provided concepts in the struggle for social justice” (p. 36).

19. Rodney points out that chattel slavery did not exist in Africa—“there were few slaves and certainly no epoch of slavery” (38)—discuss.

20. What did economic and political organizations in Africa look like before 1500?

21. Explain: “after all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests” (p. 47). Discuss this definition of the ‘state’.

22. Explain: “the landlords exempted themselves from tax—a typical situation in feudal societies, and one which fed the fires of revolution in Europe when the bourgeois class grew powerful enough to challenge the fact that the feudalists were using political power to tax everyone but themselves” (p. 51).

23. How did Europe become the dominant power in the world over the course of the 16th-19th centuries?

24. When Rodney says that development and underdevelopment “have a dialectical relationship to one another” (p. 75), what does he mean?

25. Explain: “Europe allocated to Africa the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world” (p. 77)

26. Explain: “some African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. A chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves) and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with divisions within African society” (p. 79).

27. Explain: “in the small territory the Portuguese later claimed as Guinea-Bissau, there were more than a dozen ethnic groups. It was so easy to set one off against another than Europeans called it a ‘slave trader’s paradise’.” (p. 79)

28. Explain: “of course, it is only as a last resort that the capitalist metropoles need to use armed forces to insure the pursuit of favorable policies in the dependent areas. Normally, economic weapons are sufficient” (p. 81). Does this still ring true in the neoliberal 21st century?

29. Why does Rodney quote Marx on p. 83? What is the point both he and Marx are trying to make?

30. Why is the story of John Hawkins (the Caribbean ‘hero’—alongside such greats as Columbus et al.—taught to black students in Caribbean schools) such a great and typical example of the behavior of Europeans over the past five centuries?

31. Explain: “this kind of argument is worth noting more as an example of the distortions of which white bourgeois scholarship is capable than as something worth serious consideration” (p. 83).

32. What is Rodney doing when he points out that “throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for most of the nineteenth century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in western Europe… the African contribution to European capitalist growth” (p. 54).

33. Did you realize the extent to which the slave trade (i.e., exploited African labor) actually brought about the so-called “modern world”? Why or why not?

34. Explain: “Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North American than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans. Like other parts of the New World, the American colonies of the British crown were used as a means of accumulating primary capital for re-export to Europe” (p. 86).

35. Did you realize the New York City was the slave trading capital of the world up until 1862 (it wasn’t the Big Apple, but rather the Big Whip)? Why or why not?

36. Explain: “slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital” (p. 87) and “it can be affirmed without reservation that the white racism which came to pervade the world was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production” (p. 88).

37. Explain: “occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so their labor power could be exploited… having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons” (p. 89).

38. Explain: “when the French Revolution was made in the name of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, it did not extend to black Africans who were enslaved by France in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, France fought against the efforts of those people to emancipate themselves, and the leaders of their bourgeois revolution said plainly that they did not make it on behalf of black humanity” (p. 89).

39. Explain: “racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade” (p. 90).

40. Have you hear the Industrial Revolution described this way before?—“the peasantry had been brutally destroyed and the labor of men, women and children was ruthlessly exploited. Those were the great social evils of the capitalist system” (p. 135)—why or why not?

41. Explain: “that penetration of foreign capitalism on a world-wide scale from the late nineteenth century onward is what we call ‘imperialism’. Imperialism meant capitalist expansion. It meant that European (and North American and Japanese) capitalists were forced by the internal logic of their competitive system to seek abroad in less developed countries opportunities to control raw material supplies, to find markets, and to find profitable fields of investment” (p. 136). Does this sound somehow familiar?

42. Explain: “imperialism is essentially an economic phenomenon, and does not necessarily lead to direct political control or colonization” (p. 137).

43. Explain: “European imperialists in Africa boasted that what counted was the fact that they had the Maxim machine gun and Africans did not” (p. 137).

44. Explain: “there is a curious interpretation of the Scramble and African partition which virtually amounts to saying that colonialism came about because of Africa’s needs rather than those of Europe. Africa, they say, required European colonization if it were to advance beyond the stage it had reached in the late nineteenth century” (p. 138).

45. Explain: “Britain accepted granting dominion status to its old colonies of white settlers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; but it withdrew self-government from the West Indies when the white planters were ousted from the legislative assemblies by black (or brown) people. As far as Africa is concerned, Englishmen violently opposed black self-government” (p. 141).

46. Explain: “it was economics that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent’s raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the decision that the form of control should be direct colonial rule. Africans everywhere fought against alien political rule, and had to be subdued by superior force” (p. 141).

47. Explain: “colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus provided by African labor out of African resources. It means the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped” (p. 149).

48. Explain: “after feudalism in Europe had ended, the worker had absolutely no means of sustenance other than through the sale of his labor to capitalists” (pp. 149-150).

49. How did global capitalism exploit African laborers more than North American or European workers (pp. 150-151)?

50. What did Rhodesia and South Africa look like in terms of wage differentials between black and white workers (p. 152)?

51. What are “superprofits” and how do you get them?

52. Explain: “in Britain, the notorious slave trading port of Liverpool was the first to switch to palm oil early in the nineteenth century when the trade in slaves became difficult or impossible. This meant that Liverpool firms were no longer exploiting Africa by removing its labor physically to another part of the world. Instead, they were exploiting the labor and raw materials of Africa inside Africa” (p. 156).

53. Explain: “in a way, the companies were simply receiving tribute from a conquered people, without even the necessity to trouble themselves as to how the tributary goods were produced” (p. 158).

54. Explain: “that is why colonial governments were repeatedly speaking about ‘the maintenance of law and order’, by which they meant the maintenance of conditions most favorable to the expansion of capital and the plunder of Africa” (p. 164). Also, in U.S. history, the tag phrase “law and order”, when spoken by politicians (from Nixon to Trump), literally means the maintenance of conditions favorable to white supremacy and the backlash against civil rights movements.

55. Explain: “European colonizers insured that Africans paid for the upkeep of the governors and police who oppressed them and served as watchdogs for the private capitalists. Indeed, taxes and customs duties were levied in the nineteenth century with the aim of allowing the colonial powers to recover the cost of the armed forces which they dispatched to conquer Africa” (pp. 164-165).

56. Explain: “as John Stuart Mill said, the trade between England and the West Indies in the eighteenth century, was like the trade between town and country. In the present century, the links are even closer and it is more marked that the town (Europe) is living off the countryside (Africa, Asian, and Latin America)” (p. 177).

57. Explain: “the fruits of human labor went to a given minority class, which was of the white race and resident in Europe and North America. This is the crux of the dialectical process of development and underdevelopment, as it evolved over the colonial period” (p. 180).

58. Explain: “the most convincing evidence as to the superficiality of the talk about colonialism having ‘modernized’ Africa is the fact that the vast majority of Africans went into colonialism with a hoe and came out with a hoe” (p. 219).

59. Explain: “the factor of dependency made its impact felt in every aspect of the life of the colonies, and it can be regarded as the crowning vice among the negative social, political, and economic consequences of colonialism in Africa, being primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the colonial relationship into the epoch that is called neo-colonialism” (p. 236).

60. What did colonial education in Africa look and sound like? (pp. 246-248). Discuss the terms: assimilée, assimilado, civilisado, évoluéi.

61. What is a “miseducated black person” (p. 248); why and how did they end up that way?

62. Explain: “naked force was best kept in reserve, rather than utilized for everyday affairs. Only education could lay the basis for a smooth-functioning colonial administration… just as in Europe the workers received education so they would be more efficient and produce extra surplus for the capitalists” (p. 257).

63. What does it mean to make “the best indigenous elements into complete Frenchmen”? Why select a small elite group of ‘natives’, indoctrinate them, turn them into colonialist cadres, and get them to run things for you?

64. Rodney mentions that “being a cadre involved not just training for a practical job but also political orientation to serve as a leading element in the system” (p. 258). Discuss.

65. Explain: “to a greater of lesser extent, all colonial powers produced similar cadres to manage and buttress their colonial empires and elsewhere” (p. 258).

66. European-trained native cadres became the neo-colonial rulers of many independent African nations in the two decades following WWII. Why is it important that it was these specific people who took over? Rodney suggests that this was a colonial tactic to delay or hijack the African revolution (pp. 258-259). What does he mean?

67. Explain: “In retrospect, it is now very clear that one of the most significant aspects of the colonial education system was that provided by the armed forces and police… like their civilian counterparts, the future police and military elite were at one time trained to be simply low-level assistants to the colonial overlords; but once independence was in sight they were judged by the colonizers to have the requisite qualities of colonial cadres—fit to be part of the ruling class of neo-colonial Africa” (p. 260).

68. Explain: “when the Mau Mau war for land and liberation broke out in Kenya, one of the first things the British government did was close [184 schools]… Europeans knew well enough that if they did not control the minds of Africans, they would soon cease to control the people physically and politically” (pp. 271-272).

69. What did Europeans fear most about education in Africa (pp. 272-273)? Were they justified in their fear?