Africonomics
A History of Western Ignorance
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eye-opening account, historian Everill (Not Made by Slaves) outlines the biases, projections, misunderstandings, and irrationalities underlying Western economic intervention in Africa since the 18th century. For example, European interventionists argued that the existence of the African slave trade, along with large swaths of underdeveloped land, indicated moral deficiencies in Africans, who needed to be turned into disciplined, high-productivity farmers. But, as Everill notes, this viewpoint ignored Africans' differing definitions of wealth (in parts of Africa, land was a communal resource, and wealth was measured in terms of people, not property), not to mention the fact that the slave trade was a European-enforced institution (one African king who tried to intervene was deposed in a European-backed coup). Europeans likewise ignored obvious similarities in economic thought—the 19th-century British marriage market, for instance, could be seen as an example of wealth-in-people; and many British proverbs emphasized the kind of work-smart-not-hard ethos held by the "low-productivity" African farmers. Often, Everill shows, the reforms were not as "scientific... and timeless" as imagined. For instance, 19th-century British officials pushed for "rational" paper currency instead of "irrational" shells and glass beads—even though the British themselves had only just managed to stabilize paper by backing it with gold, a similar commodity currency. Surveying today's "international development" efforts, Everill damningly finds such mismanagement still reigns. It's a laser-focused, relentless deconstruction of European "reform" in Africa.
