It is a challenge to write eloquently and to the point about a subject one has detailed knowledge of for a lay audience without getting bogged down in detail and caveats, but Bronwen Everill masters it in Africonomics. Readers are taken effortlessly through several centuries of African economic history via eight carefully chosen themes. The usual set-up is that we join a Westerner in a first-hand encounter with the continent. We witness the Westerner jumping just a bit too hastily to a prejudiced conclusion that is at odds with the facts on the ground and prescribing the wrong solution to the (often non-existent) problem. 

Many things bring a smile to my face, but few do so with greater certainty than an Oscar Wilde quote. Everill deploys one to great effect here, recalling that she used ‘when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me’ as an aide-memoire to spell ‘assume’ correctly in school. The line is brought up to introduce one of the most famous assumptions made by economists: ceteris paribus (‘all other things being equal’). The phrase is often deployed as a rhetorical device to encourage consumers of economic models to accept the model and believe that, if external conditions remain constant, one thing will inevitably lead to another. When it turns out that you can’t, in fact, assume that all other things are equal, the real world ends up making an ass out of both economists and consumers. 

The history of interactions between Western economists and administrators and the African continent provides a vast array of erroneous assumptions. It is here that Everill’s mastery of the primary sources and knowledge of how basic economic models have been applied and reapplied through history come to the fore. Letters,