Persistent Underdevelopment

This is a revised edition of a seminal work on the nature of underdevelopment. It includes a new foreword and appendixes on the significance of plantations to Third World economies and the contribution that George Beckford made to Caribbean economic thought.

First published in 1996, this insightful and informative text examines the post-emancipation and recent economic history of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Jay R. Mandle offers an explanation of the region’s continuing underdevelopment. Through the use of an analytical framework derived from the works of Marx and Kuznets, the book focuses attention on technological change as the driving force behind economic modernization. Persistent Underdevelopment begins by exploring how plantation agriculture had a limiting effect on industrial growth. Ultimately, plantation dominance receded; technological stagnation continued, however, and, under British colonial policy the Caribbean failed to modernise. The post-World War II era brought new efforts at modernisation through the economic policies of the left regimes of Manley, Burnham and Bishop. The concluding chapters point the way to policies that would enable the Caribbean to escape its current poverty and become an effective participant in world markets, finally achieving the goal of modern economic development.

First published in 1996, this insightful and informative text examines the post-emancipation and recent economic history of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Jay R. Mandle offers an explanation of the region’s continuing underdevelopment. Through the use of an analytical framework derived from the works of Marx and Kuznets, the book focuses attention on technological change as the driving force behind economic modernization. Persistent Underdevelopment begins by exploring how plantation agriculture had a limiting effect on industrial growth. Ultimately, plantation dominance receded; technological stagnation continued, however, and, under British colonial policy the Caribbean failed to modernise. The post-World War II era brought new efforts at modernisation through the economic policies of the left regimes of Manley, Burnham and Bishop. The concluding chapters point the way to policies that would enable the Caribbean to escape its current poverty and become an effective participant in world markets, finally achieving the goal of modern economic development.

First published in 1996, this insightful and informative text examines the post-emancipation and recent economic history of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Jay R. Mandle offers an explanation of the region' s continuing underdevelopment. Through the use of an analytical framework derived from the works of Marx and Kuznets, the book focuses attention on technological change as the driving force behind economic modernization. Persistent Underdevelopment begins by exploring how plantation agriculture had a limiting effect on industrial growth.

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis 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.