Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

“It is about how, starting in the late 18th century and continuing pretty much up to the present, over and over again, even the best-intentioned Western interveners in Africa have consistently misunderstood the economic systems in whatever bit of Africa they happen to be in. Over and over and over again, they failed to recognize the extent to which these African economies were highly developed and indeed often reflected the kinds of economic principles and policies that economists today expect. But instead of seeing that, Westerners—ranging from those who were trying to abolish the slave trade to those advocating post-war development—kept insisting that Africa was a backward agricultural region that needed to modernize, to industrialize, to integrate, to develop. People in Africa, they insisted, didn’t understand anything about economics, so Africans needed Westerners to explain to them how to organize things. And over and over, these Western ideas were wrong, unhelpful, and frequently had terrible consequences for the African economies that were the objects of Western intervention.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 British Academy Book Prize

Rebecca Earle, Historian