‘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.