John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of a Continent. Most of all it offers historical and geographic reasons why African development has proven so problematic. The author very frequently thinks in terms of mechanism, so it will be congenial to most economically-oriented readers. Have you wondered why slavery is so common in African history, or why African societies are so frequently conservative and obsessed with the veneration of elders? Why parasites can feast on humans so easily in Africa? Why Africa has been underpopulated?
This book, which came out in 1997, is old news to many of you. But I just discovered it, and it made for excellent airplane reading to the extremely livable, very beautiful, and tasty city of Denver. If you are interested in African development, or economic geography more generally, this book is a must.
But not all is bright. I now worry that, since I missed this book for ten years, there is something deeply deficient in my book-finding algorithms. I thank Karol Boudreaux, who pointed the book out to me while we were in Tanzania.
Pet peeve: A continent (Africa a biography, a planet (Earth a biography), a satellite (Moon a biography), a molecule (Water a biography), … I understand that biographies sell better than science titles, but please, publishers, don’t title histories of inanimate objects as “biographies”. Or has “history” become a dirty word?
The State of Africa, by Martin Meredith, is also excellent. Extremely easy to read – I would say enjoyable but the content is perhaps too terrible for that.
Yes, it’s excellent. I recommended it in VDARE.com in 2003:
“Indeed, much of the slow economic progress of Africa over the millennia can be attributed to the extraordinary disease burden Africans endured. John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent emphasizes how hard it was to get things done in pre-colonial Africa because so many workers were sick at any one time.”
I was *just* looking at that in the bookstore this weekend, wishing I didn’t know so little about Africa.
Tyler Cowen’s recommendation is such that I will read it, *despite* Steve Sailer’s recommendation. High praise, Prof. Cowen.
Didn’t most of the US also have an “extraordinary disease burden” until all the wetlands were drained and mass spraying?
Eradication of Malaria in the United States (1947-1951)
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/history/eradication_us.htm
The US has 350 cases of and 60 deaths from malaria per 100,000 population in 1920. I’ve seen data that shows 9% of the population of Mississippi had malaria in 1916. Other sources claims that nearly half the troops during the Civil War had malaria (although I’m not sure the vector was properly understood at that time).
Clinical and Public Health Aspects of Malaria in the United States from an Historical Perspective
http://www.ajtmh.org/cgi/content/abstract/s1-25/3/185
There was also a large number of people in the US south with Hookworm in the early 1900′s.
How did you read an 816 page book in one plane trip?
It takes me at least 2 months to read a book that long.
Three books with the same coverage, but from specialist historians of Africa: (1) John Iliffe, Africans: History of a Continent, CUP 1995 (2) Roland Oliver, The African Experience, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd ed 1999 (3) J D Fage & Wm Tordoff, A History of Africa, 4th ed Routledge 2001. — It would be interesting to see what difference their specialisation makes, relative to the other books mentioned here.
In reply to “ad”, above: Using mortality figures for armies probably isn’t a good way to estimate the disease load on the population. Before the 20th century armies always had staggeringly high losses to disease, because of crowding. I don’t know any better figures, but I did believe the book’s arguments about disease load in Africa: a species co-evolves with natural predators, so often does much better when it invades new territory without these.
I also heard about the book in E Africa. On several occasions I’ve wanted to buy a copy for friends here in the US, and have ended up buying it when back in the English-English-speaking world, as few bookshops in the US seem to have it. So I think it’s much less visible this side of the pond, for some reason.
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