One of the more striking recent trends in the study of African history has been the mushrooming of studies focusing on the “underdevelopment” of Africa (or some part of it) following the publication of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. Part of the appeal of the “underdevelopment” literature is that it stands the apologists for colonialism on their heads. Barely more than a decade earlier, as the 1950s were coming to a close, one could readily find settlers, shopkeepers, colonial bureaucrats, and others arguing that the mounting pressure for independence in sub-Saharan Africa should be resisted because European rule had brought “development” to the continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that after a decade of independence there should be a ready audience for the argument that colonial rule did not “develop” African economies but, to the contrary, actually “underdeveloped” them—and perhaps we should also not be surprised that “underdevelopment” is often not defined oris defined inconsistently.

The central focus of this essay will be the main difficulties of studying either “development” or “underdevelopment” and, in particular, the problems of determining the causes of either of these states at any given period in Africa's history. All the examples from the “underdevelopment” literature will be drawn from Rodney's book, primarily because the work seems representative of the growing body of literature on this subject and because it has been by far the most influential of the studies dealing with the topic in Africa. I would like to emphasize that in the following discussion my approach is more that of the economist than of the historian, a point which will be clearly reflected in the few points I have chosen for illustration.