Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

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.