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Article
Colonial Terrorism, Global Capitalism and African Underdevelopment: 500 Years of Crimes Against African Peoples
The Journal of Pan-African Studies (2013)
  • Asafa Jalata, University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Abstract

This article critically explores the essence and characters of European colonial terrorism and its main consequences on various African peoples during racial slavery, colonization, and incorporation into the European-dominated capitalist world system between the late fifteenth and twentieth centuries. It employs multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terrorism to critically explain the connections among all forms of violence, the emergence of globalization, and African underdevelopment. The piece focuses on four central issues: First, it conceptualizes and theorizes terrorism to clarify its roles in creating and maintaining the global system. Second, it focuses on the first wave of European colonial terrorism that was practiced via racial slavery by concentrating on the dialectical connections among various forms of violence and genocide to demonstrate the processes and consequences of merchandising some young Africans. Third, the paper deals with the second wave of European colonial terrorism by explaining the processes of colonizing the whole continent by violently destroying African peoples and their institutions to enrich European colonialists and their African collaborators and their governments and companies. The dehumanization, impoverishment, and perpetual underdevelopment of Africans and the African Diaspora groups in the West cannot be adequately understood outside of the parameters of European colonial terrorism and the incorporation of Africa into the global capitalist system.

Keywords
  • Colonial terrorism,
  • global capitalism,
  • racial slavery,
  • colonialism,
  • poverty,
  • cultural and economic crises,
  • crimes against Africans,
  • and underdevelopment.
Publication Date
Winter March, 2013
Citation Information
Asafa Jalata. "Colonial Terrorism, Global Capitalism and African Underdevelopment: 500 Years of Crimes Against African Peoples" The Journal of Pan-African Studies Vol. 5 Iss. 9 (2013)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/asafa_jalata/57/