This book was a detailed look at exactly how trade and colonization was and continues to be A MASSIVE WEALTH TRANSFER from Africa to Europe (and the US).

A great read. I love a book that says no, colonialism was 100% a bad thing.

I love that Rodney used a Marxist analysis. Marx is more than communism—he was an economist who emphasized distribution, exploitation, and the real world. The perfect framework for colonial economics. But in one section, Rodney situated pre-colonial African economies on a specific interpretation of Marx’s history of European economic development—and this was both Eurocentric and not my favourite interpretation of Marx.

Put VERY simply, there’s a school of Marxist thought that conceives of the stages of economic development as an objective, deterministic, teleological standard. And they use this standard to map Marx’s analysis of heavily industrialized capitalist Western European societies on to countries with a “more primitive” (their words) economic system (usually serfdom in Russia). I don’t love how teleological and deterministic this interpretation is (I think Marx should be read in a more radical and freedom-emphasizing way). And who cares how other economic histories map into to Europe’s? Why are we making Western Europe the standard?

But the rest was perfect!