Africonomics - by Bronwen Everill (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A bold, concise history of Western economic interventions in Africa, by the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge

For centuries, Westerners have tried to "fix" African economies. From the abolition of slavery onward, 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.

Historian Bronwen Everill argues that these interventions fail, and frequently cause harm, 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, Americans and Europeans 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Africonomics:
"A thought-provoking analysis of Africa's relationship with economic imperialism."
--Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It's a Continent

"Outstandingly analyzes the shortcomings of a certain approach to thinking about Africa, and . . . implicitly indicates the other side of the coin: the forces for change that will continue to shape the continent from within."
--Kofi Adjepong-Boateng, Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge

About the Author

Bronwen Everill is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the author of Not Made by Slaves and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. She teaches writing at Princeton and is a research affiliate of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University.