Bronwen Everill. Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance. William Collins Books, 2024. 978-0008581152

Abstract

No one reading Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance will come away uncertain about its argument. Ranging across centuries, Bronwen Everill confronts the intellectual habits that have shaped how Africa has been imagined, managed, and misunderstood. This is a history of misrecognition, charting the ways in which European and American thinkers, traders, and policymakers imposed economic assumptions that obscured the realities of African agency. The result is not only a challenge to orthodox development thinking, but a sweeping indictment of the epistemologies that continue to govern North-South engagement.