Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

by Bronwen Everill

ISBN: 9780008581152

Published: 2024-10-10

The West does not understand African economics. In a fearless, funny polemic, a historian exposes the blinkered assumptions of centuries of Western interventions on the continent. We need to think differently about African economics. For centuries, Westerners have tried to 'fix' African economies. From the abolition of slavery onwards, missionaries, philanthropists, development economists and NGOs have arrived on the continent, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Their experiments have invariably gone awry, to the great surprise of all involved. In this short, bold story of Western economic thought about Africa, historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail because they start from a misguided premise: that African economies just need to be more like the West. Ignoring Africa's own traditions of economic thought, Europeans and Americans assumed a set of universal economic laws that could be applied anywhere. They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth,...