Samir Amin, already a major figure in the political economy of development, was the author of the first article in the first ever issue of ROAPE, in 1974. As the editorial noted, the article was “a summary of his basic model of the workings of the international system as a whole, presented at length in his two recent books” (the two- volume Accumulation on a World Scale, Monthly Review Press, 1974).

This timely book should be required reading on any statistics and media studies programme in African universities, if not everywhere. As an accompaniment to standard statistics texts, it would act as a constant reminder to students as to the limitations of statistical methods without due regard to the socio-economic context in which the data is being collected, analysed and presented