Yuval Noah Harari’s fascinating Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is the latest big book on the thinking person’s bookshelf, garnering praise from Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Jared Diamond among others – but as far as I know it hasn’t made many waves in ‘development’ circles yet. It should do. This is an astonishing, provocative, worldview-changing book. Read it and give it to all your friends for Christmas.
Category: History
Susan Pedersen, ‘The Guardians’
The Guardia
ns is a fascinating account of the League of Nations’ ‘mandate system’, put in place to oversee administration of former German and Ottoman colonies between the wars. It provides a great insight into the early history of ‘development’ efforts and how colonial powers tried to justify and explain them to an international public. Perhaps even more important, the book reminds us how fragile ‘internationalism’ is once great powers lose interest in it – a tough lesson for our own times.
Development Book Review 