'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*
