Bronwen Everill is the 1973 College Lecturer in History at Gonville & Caius College and Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition and she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. ... Read more Read less
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.
'A wry, rollicking, and provocative history of international economics' Michael Taylor, author of The Interest
‘A thought-provoking analysis of Africa's relationship with economic imperialism’ Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It’s A 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 they thought could be applied anywhere.
They enforced specifically Western ideas about growth, wealth, debt, unemployment, inflation,
women’s work and more, and used Western metrics to find African countries wanting.
The West does not know better than African nations how an economy should be run. By laying bare
the myths and realities of our tangled economic history, Africonomics moves from Western ignorance
to African knowledge.
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