This book examines three important, interconnected themes that link Africa and the capitalist world-system of the last 500 years. If Africa will play a significant role in resolving the structural crisis of the modern world-system, it is crucial there continue to be a well-informed and intellectually relevant debate about the issues involved.

Paying for the state.

Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation offers a groundbreaking analysis of the strategic role Africa plays in the global capitalist economy. The exploitation of Africa’s rich resources, as well as its labor, make it possible for major world powers to sustain their authority over their own middle-class populations while rewarding African collaborators in leadership positions for subjecting their populations into poverty and desperation. Middle-class obsessions such as computers, mobile phones, cars and the petroleum that fuels them, diamonds, chocolate – all of these products require African resources that are typically obtained by child or slave labor that helps to generate billionaires out of foreign investors while impoverishing most Africans. Oritsejafor and Cooper demonstrate that "primitive accumulation," believed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx to be a process that precedes capitalism, is actually an integral part of capitalism. They also validate the thesis that capitalism incorporates racism as an organizing tool for the exploitation of labor in Africa and on a global scale. Case studies are presented on Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Congo, Tanzania, Somalia, Angola, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, and South Sudan. There are also chapters analyzing the interests of Russia and China in Africa. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African politics, development, and economics.

In The World-System and Africa, Immanuel Wallerstein examines three important, interconnected themes that link Africa and the capitalist world-system of the last 500 years. While drawing attention to the structural crisis of the modern world-system, Wallerstein uses the first set of essays to explore the impact of this worldwide structural crisis on Africa. Next, he turns to identity politics, a political stance that came to prominence in the last thirty years, and considers the world-system context for the African dilemmas posed by this approach. Not unique to Africa, identity politics has become central to political struggles everywhere in the world-system. Finally, Wallerstein reflects on African thinkers’ analyses of current affairs both in the world-system and in Africa. Coming from someone who has been involved in writing about Africa for over seventy years, Wallerstein argues that if Africa is going to play an appropriate and significant role in resolving the structural crisis of the modern world-system, it is crucial that there continue to be a well-informed and intellectually relevant debate about the issues involved, the moral choices to be made, and the political strategies to follow.

The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West Africa’s Gambia River, for over a thousand years. Drawing on archives, oral traditions and published works, Donald R. Wright connects world history with real people on a local level through an exploration of how global events have affected life in Niumi. Thoroughly revised and updated throughout, this new edition rests on recent thinking in globalization theory, reflects the latest historiography and has been extended to the present day through discussion of the final years of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s regime, the role of global forces in the events of the 2016 presidential elections and the changes that resulted from these elections. The book is supported throughout by photographs, maps and Perspectives boxes that present detailed information on such topics as Alex Haley’s Roots (part set in Niumi), why Gambians take the risky "back way" to reach Europe, or "Wiri-Wiri," the Senegalese soap that has Gambians’ attention. Written in a clear and personal style and taking a critical yet sensitive approach, it remains an essential resource for students and scholars of African history, particularly those interested in the impact of globalization on the lives of real people.

This book discusses the prospects for the development of the African continent as part of the emerging system of international relations in the twenty-first century. African countries are playing an increasingly important part in the current system of international relations. Nevertheless, even 60 years after gaining their independence, most of them are confronted with regional and global issues that are directly related to their colonial past and its influence. Due to Africa’s wealth of natural and geopolitical resources, the possibility of interference in the internal affairs of African countries on the part of new and traditional global actors remains very real. Leading Africanists, together with international scholars from both international relations and African studies, examine the experience of decolonization, the impact of the emergence of a unipolar world on the African continent, and the growing influence of new international actors on the African continent in the twenty-first century. In addition, the importance of African countries’ foreign policy concepts and ideological attitudes in the post-bipolar period is revealed. “This volume strengthens the intellectual bridge between Russian, African and Western scholars of international relations. Strongly recommended!” Vladimir G. Shubin, Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences “This book presents a wide range of prominent global scholars who bring a wealth of knowledge on the subject of Africa and the world.” Gilbert Khadiagala, Jan Smuts Professor of International Relations and Director of the African Centre for the Study of the USA (ACSUS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. “As a genuine contribution to the field of international relations and Global South Agency, this book should be in every institution of higher education’s library.” Lembe Tiky, Director of Academic Development, International Studies Association.

“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.