Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest

by William Easterly

A celebrated economist argues that economic development is not really development unless everyone has the right to consent to their own progress

For centuries, the developed Western world has exploited the less-developed “Rest” in the name of progress, conquering the Americas, driving the Atlantic slave trade, and colonizing Africa and Asia. Throughout, the West has justified this global conquest by the alleged material gains it brought to the conquered. But the colonial experiment unintentionally revealed how much of a demand there was for self-determination, and not just for relief from poverty.

In Violent Saviors, renowned economist William Easterly examines how the demand for agency has always been at the heart of debates on development. Spanning nearly four centuries of global history, Easterly argues that commerce, rather than conquest, could meet the need for equal rights as well as the need for prosperity. Looking to the liberal economic ideas of thinkers like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Amartya Sen, Easterly shows how the surge in global trade has given agency to billions of people for the first time.

Narrating the long debate between conquest and commerce, Easterly offers a new and urgent perspective on global the demands for agency, dignity, and respect must be at the center of the global fight against poverty.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 2025

About the author

William Easterly is Professor of
Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He is editor of Aid Watch blog, Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He is the author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), 3 other co-edited books, and 59 articles in refereed economics journals. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. He was born in West Virginia and is the 8th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio, where he grew up. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. He is on the board of the anti-malaria philanthropy, Nets for Life. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Foreign Policy magazine inexplicably named him one of the world’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008. His areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. William Easterly is an associate editor of the American Economic Journals: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth.

Taken from his website.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book with good ideas but it’s difficult to think that it is relevant in the current world political climate, by which I mean, while foreign assistance is being cut back across the board.

It is impossible to defend foreign aid as it has been practiced by the US and other powerful countries, which Easterly characterizes as “Development Right of Conquest” in this book.

Now we are in the midst of a kind of natural experiment to determine whether replacing imperfect foreign aid with no foreign aid at all will be better. Unfortunately, we will NOT be able to see it replaced with a better system as envisioned by Easterly.

Easterly states clearly what qualities he believes that effective foreign assistance should have.

The central point of this book is that these three ideas of consent, self-determination, and equality made possible positive-sum gains from commerce between groups and individuals. (Kindle location 226)

That’s stated with admirable clarity, and this book is filled with that kind of to-the-point writing. Nevertheless, I’m sure that this book (like Easterly’s other books) will be criticized as difficult to read, especially by readers who have happily never had to read the jargon-heavy blather that passes for writing in official reports by aid organizations.

A weakness of this book, I thought, was that Easterly never really outlines what a better system might look like. We all agree that we can’t go on like we have. We all agree that the past system of paternalistic, we-know-better foreign assistance has to go. But what replaces it? Nothing? That’s what we’re trying now. It would be great to have some alternatives ready to go if no foreign assistance at all also turns out to have unfortunate consequences.

I was given a free electronic advance review copy of this book by the publisher via Netgalley.

[nin. · Rating 2 out of 5]

deeply unserious.

[Samrudha Surana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is filled with reflection by the author over not only development economics, but also his own career. I would have liked to see some more engagement with the tension between self-determination for a nation and the people within it. But this is a great book in the tradition of Adam Smith, P.T. Bauer, and the Friedmans -- encouraging development economists to value dignity more.

[Carole Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest by William Easterly is a thought-provoking examination of history, economics, and human agency. Easterly argues that true development comes not from conquest or imposed aid, but from empowering people to shape their own futures, offering a compelling lens on centuries of Western influence and global trade.