Overview

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. 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.

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Bronwen Everill is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the former director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the author of Not Made by Slaves and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. She teaches writing at Princeton and is a research affiliate of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University. Shannon McDermott is an autistic/neurodivergent actor, audiobook narrator, voice-over actor, author, singer, and disability advocate who aims to normalize neurodivergent and disabled voices in the entertainment industry. She has a diverse performance resume in stage, film, musical theater, and improv. She is best known for her work with independent film company, Blinky Productions. When not narrating, you can find her roaming the aisles at Comic-Con in self-built comic/screen accurate cosplay. She also is a highly skilled, full-time belly rubber to her two Australian Shepherds, Bae Bae and Flash Gordon.

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