A book on economic history. Gulp. Bound to be a remedy for insomnia, right?
Well, not this one. Prof Johan Fourie, an economic historian and lecturer at Stellenbosch University, hooks you from the get go with Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom — Lessons from 100,000 years of human history.
Fourie’s views will confound many, including those who believe the economy is all about winners and losers — like the board game Monopoly, where one player ends up amassing all the wealth and the rest do laps, passing Go and collecting R200, until they keel over.
No, Fourie says, it is more like a game of Catan, where everyone builds wealth and your own prosperity depends on how well your neighbours are doing. In that world there are winners, and bigger winners.
The only problem is, many of us don’t believe the modern world resembles Catan more than it does Monopoly, partly because there is so much negative news out there. That’s how Fourie starts the book, before he takes you on a stroll through 100,000 years of human history, “written unashamedly from an SA and African perspective”. On the way, he gradually reveals what the game really is.
All 200-odd pages are an entertaining journey in mythbusting, backed up by solid, authoritative research. You might have expected this, since Fourie is a lecturer, but he knows better than to lecture his readers. Instead, he elegantly unwraps complex themes, using clever vignettes.
The richest man in history ... Amazon founder Jeff Bezos? Nope. An African — King Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali empire.
Sure, quiz enthusiasts might have known that. But Fourie then pulls it through to the influence that the spread of Islam in North Africa had on European political institutions. He links the wars and migration of the Mfecane to the thundering eruption of a volcano in the Far East; he links Eskom to Einstein; and he takes a sober look at the long-term impact of colonialism and slavery.
If only this book were prescribed reading for all our tweeting politicians ...
Those policymakers with the nous to get a copy would do well to scribble down a few notes on their to-do list, and would do even better if they were to compile a never-ever-to-do list from some of the lessons China, Argentina and SA have had to learn the hard way.
You might argue that much of this is old hat, but refracted through a modern lens it becomes acutely relevant to today. After all, new methods of researching old data give us a clearer picture of what actually happened in the past. And part of the beauty of this book is that it gives a bloody nose to a few pieces of conventional wisdom. At the very least you will have some zingers for the next braai-side chat.
Fourie is erudite, but also creative and witty. And, above all, he is an optimist. Failures from the past are lessons for the future. Never underestimate the cumulative effect of incremental progress: for the individual, the community and society.
“We grow more prosperous, counter-intuitively, the more we rely on others,” he says. It’s one of the many pearls you’ll find, unexpectedly, within the pages.
Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom — Lessons from 100,000 years of human history by Johan Fourie (April 2021) is published by NB Publishers and retails at R310
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