| | This book is a study of the process through which the contradictory nature of imperialist exploitation between 1900-1939 laid the basis for the genesis of the current agrarian crisis in northern Nigeria. The central question which Robert Shenton sets out to investigate is how it was possible that northern Nigerian society was integrated into the world capitalist system and yet failed to develop the vastly augmented forces of production integral to the development of capitalism in the West. In seeking to answer this question and explain why northern Nigeria underwent a process of social transformation which undermined its ability even to reproduce itself in a manner consistent with its own continued survival, Shenton adopts Geoffrey Kay's theoretical model as articulated in the latter's Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis. Shenton's study is therefore also an effort at a concrete historical application and elucidation of Kay's thesis to the effect that' ... capitalism has created underdevelopment not simply because it has exploited the underdeveloped countries but because it has not exploited them enough' . |
