Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

"This is not a history of African economic development or of the economies of any or all African countries. 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. There’s an interesting discussion of the slave trade, for example. In the 19th century, well-intentioned people from Britain wanted to abolish not just the transatlantic slave trade—which of course only existed because of Europeans in the first place—but also the internal slave trade in Africa. That had existed before the arrival of Europeans, but had been transformed substantially. Europeans came along and said, ‘We’ve ended the transatlantic slave trade. Well done us. Now we’ve got to stamp out the remaining slave trade in Africa, which is also horrible.’ That was a worthy goal, but it was based on not understanding how the slave trade functioned in these African countries. They tried to stamp out the slave trade without realizing the knock-on consequences that this was going to have on what were very complicated, integrated economic systems where control over labour was really important. You couldn’t simply pull out that element without the entire system collapsing and leaving nothing in its place. Everill is an economic historian, and she does a fine job of explaining economic concepts in simple language, which makes Africonomics accessible to non-specialists. For example, she explains the concept of comparative advantage like this: ‘If you and your seven-year-old daughter are going to be doing some household tasks, one of you could mow the lawn and the other empty the dishwasher. You could do either. Your daughter could probably manage both too, but might she not be better off emptying the dishwasher while you mow the lawn?’."