Africonomics
A History of Western Ignorance
Published on 14. August 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-0-00-858118-3 (ISBN)
Description
'A historically insightful read'
Financial Times
'A wry, rollicking, and provocative history' 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.
*Shortlisted for the BCA African Business Book of the Year*
Financial Times
'A wry, rollicking, and provocative history' 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.
*Shortlisted for the BCA African Business Book of the Year*
Reviews / Votes
'The west's economic agenda - while full of good intentions - created significant problems for the continent... A historically insightful read' Tej Parikh, Financial Times Best New Books on Economics'The history of interactions between Western economists and the African continent provides a vast array of erroneous assumptions ... Africonomics and the lessons therein bear reading and rereading' Morten Jerven, Literary Review
'Cheerfully provocative ... sparkles with some illuminating moments' TLS
'In this wry, rollicking, and provocative history of international economics, Bronwen Everill shows us how, over the course of centuries, Western ideals have collided repeatedly and disastrously with African realities - and how even the best-intended of interventions have often paved a road to hell' 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
'This book outstandingly analyses the shortcomings of a certain approach to thinking about Africa, and it 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
REVIEWS FOR NOT MADE BY SLAVES:
'Impressive...[Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day' Wall Street Journal
'Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of capitalism' Financial Times
'Offers a penetrating new perspective on abolition in the British Empire ...Impressive' Jacobin
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers
Product notice
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
207 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-00-858118-3 (9780008581183)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
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10/2024
William Collins
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10/2024
William Collins
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Person
Bronwen Everill is the author of Not Made by Slaves and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. She has held a Leverhulme Fellowship, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and was the Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. She now teaches at Princeton and is a Research Affiliate at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.