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Party Politics and Economic Reform in...
Brief Summary
In Party Politics and Economic Reform in Africa's Democracies, M. Anne Pitcher offers an engaging new theory to explain the different trajectories of private sector development across contemporary Africa.
Pitcher argues that the outcomes of economic reforms depend not only on the kinds of institutional arrangements adopted by states in order to create or expand their private sectors, but also on the nature of party system competition and the quality of democracy in particular countries.
To illustrate her claim, Pitcher draws on several original data sets covering twenty-seven countries in Africa, and detailed case studies of the privatization process in Zambia, Mozambique, and South Africa. This study underscores the importance of formal institutions and political context to the design and outcome of economic policies in developing countries.
We Need to Talk About Africa: The Har...
Brief Summary
If you boil a kettle twice today, you will have used five times more electricity than a person in Mali uses in a whole year. How can that be possible?
Decades after the colonial powers withdrew Africa is still struggling to catch up with the rest of the world. When the same colonists withdrew from Asia there followed several decades of sustained and unprecedented growth throughout the continent. So what went wrong in Africa? And are we helping to fix it, or simply making matters worse?
In this provocative analysis, Tom Young argues that so much has been misplaced: our guilt, our policies, and our aid. Human rights have become a cover for imposing our values on others, our shiniest infrastructure projects have fuelled corruption and our interference in domestic politics has further entrenched conflict. Only by radically changing how we think about Africa can we escape this vicious cycle.
General History of Africa Complete Se...
This set brings together all 8 volumes of the groundbreaking Unesco General History of Africa, which are all now available again as paperbacks.
The series demonstrates the importance of African history from earliest pre-history, through the establishment of its ancient civilizations to the placing of Africa in the context of world history.
The growth and development of African historiography, once written records became more common, document the triumph of Islam, the extension of trading relations, cultural exchanges and human contacts, as well as the impact and consequences of the slave trade.
The European scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s is examined with a focus on the responses of Africans themselves to the economic and social aspects of colonial systems up to 1935, including the growth of anti-colonial movements and the strengthening of African political nationalism.
The contributions document how the continent moved from international conflict under foreign domination to struggles for political sovereignty and economic independence. The last (unabridged) volume 8 examines the challenges of nation-building and the socio-cultural changes affecting the newly independent nations.
The Economists Tale A Consultant Enco...
Brief Summary
What really happens when the World Bank imposes its policies on a country? This is an insider's view of one aid-made crisis. Peter Griffiths was at the interface between government and the Bank.
In this ruthlessly honest, day by day account of a mission he undertook in Sierra Leone, he uses his diary to tell the story of how the World Bank, obsessed with the free market, imposed a secret agreement on the government, banning all government food imports or subsidies. The collapsing economy meant that the private sector would not import. Famine loomed. No ministry, no state marketing organization, no aid organization could reverse the agreement. It had to be a top-level government decision, whether Sierra Leone could afford to annoy minor World Bank officials.
This is a rare and important portrait of the aid world which insiders will recognize, but of which the general public seldom get a glimpse.
Kenya A Country in the Making 1880-19...
This stunning collection of 720 photographs, many of them drawn from family archives and scrapbooks and all carefully restored, is one of the most important visual records of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ever to have been published.
The early photographers captured the beauty and dangerous allure of life on this spectacular frontier: the ceremonies and traditional attire of the native people, the fantastic machinery used in construction of the Uganda Railway, the gradual development of trade on the coast and in the country's interior, the hardships of the East African Campaign during World War I, and the pioneering spirit of early European settlers and farmers. Many of the most famous names and places connected with Africa appear in these pages, including Karen Blixen's farm and Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt on safari.
This is a book to delight anyone who has ever traveled to East Africa or been intrigued by its history. 720 photographs
Debt The First 5000 Years by David Gr...
Brief Summary
Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom.
He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections.
The Future of War A History by Lawren...
Brief Summary
In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story about a war fought from underwater submersibles that included the sinking of passenger ships. At the time, it was dismissed by the British generals and admirals of the day not because the idea of submarines was technically unfeasible, but because no one could imagine that any nation would be so depraved as to sink civilian merchant ships.
The future of war more often than not surprises us less because of some fantastic technical or engineering dimension but because of some human, political, or moral threshold that we had never imagined wanting to cross.
As Lawrence Freedman shows, the future of war has a past and a present. Ideas of war, strategies for warfare and its practice, and organizing principles of war all have rich and varied origins which have shaped the minds of those who conceive the next war. Freedman shows how war can be studied systematically and empirically to provide a firm foundation for enlightened policy.
The Future of War—which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn’t)—is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.
Edge of Chaos Why Democracy Is Failin...
From an internationally acclaimed economist, a provocative call to jump-start economic growth by aggressively overhauling liberal democracy.
Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It.
Around the world, people who are angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality have rebelled against established governments and turned to political extremes. Liberal democracy, history's greatest engine of growth, now struggles to overcome unprecedented economic headwinds--from aging populations to scarce resources to unsustainable debt burdens. Hobbled by short-term thinking and ideological dogma, democracies risk falling prey to nationalism and protectionism that will deliver declining living standards.
In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today. Rather than turning away from democracy, she argues, we must fundamentally reform it. Edge of Chaos presents a radical blueprint for change in order to galvanize growth and ensure the survival of democracy in the twenty-first century.
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsk...
Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes.
Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.
White Mischief by James Fox
Brief Summary
Just before 3am on January 24th, 1941, when Britain was preoccupied with surviving the Blitz, the body of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was discovered lying on the floor of his Buick, at a road intersection some miles outside Nairobi, with a bullet in his head.
A leading figure in Kenya's colonial community, he had recently been appointed Military Secretary, but he was primarily a seducer of other men's wives. Sir Henry Delves Broughton, whose wife was Erroll's current conquest, had an obvious motive for the murder, but no one was ever convicted and the question of who killed him became a classic mystery, a scandel and cause celebre.
Among those who became fascinated with the Erroll case was Cyril Connolly. He joined up with James Fox for a major investigation of the case in 1969 for the SUNDAY TIMES magazine. After his death James Fox inherited the obsession and a commitment to continue in pursuit of the story both in England and Kenya in the late 1970s.
One day, on a veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean, Fox came across a piece of evidence that seemed to bring all the fragments and pieces together and convinced him that he saw a complete picture.
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu an...
Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography?
Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities.
The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.
Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine.
Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity?
More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world."