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, World History

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.

[Bryan Schwartz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a slog. While I enjoyed Bill Easterly's Violent Saviors in the end, the first half is a rather dense history of economic theory that will undoubtedly cause some readers to set this aside. If you can get through that foundational bit, the second half is a disturbing portrait of "development" activities gone awry (to put it mildly) that underscores the importance of collaborative engagement with local populations.

[nin. · Rating 2 out of 5]

deeply unserious.

[David Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated and learned a great deal from William Easterly’s Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest. Easterly lays out the argument that for most people, the right of self-determination is much more important than an improved standard of living. He backs it up with “four centuries of commentators” (philosophers of several stripes, with heavy representation of economists) on both sides of the debate. This is a heavy read for two reasons. First, it is heavy to read over and over about how people have used the argument of improved standards of living (or improvement of land use, or some other improvement) to justify the suspension of self-determination—with slavery, with efforts to resettle black Americans in other lands after the end of slavery, with the removal of American Indians from their lands, with colonialism, and even with modern aid efforts. Second, it is heavy because we spend a lot of time reading arguments and counterarguments, which is a bit denser than The Da Vinci Code or The Housemaid. But I’m very glad I waded into this history and emerged from the other side, with questions and thoughts—but no definitive, prescriptive answers from Easterly (that’s not his style)—on how to more effectively incorporate self-determination and dignity into international aid and development efforts.

Beyond the central thesis, Easterly introduces phrases and adds nuggets from his reading of the history of economic philosophical thought. For example, development projects that have not succeeded often bring out the “gerund defense”: the project is leading to better outcomes (even though it can’t claim to have led to them yet). He shares an early translator of technical economic arguments: Harriet Martineau—a 19th-century social theorist—“never read more than one chapter of an economic book before writing a story to illustrate economic principles.” (I wish she had done this with my graduate microeconomics textbook by Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green.) Similar bits abound.

As I read the book, I remembered Kim Yi Dionne’s book Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, which demonstrated how misaligned many U.S. efforts to fight AIDS in Africa were from what local populations desired. (The title is overstated, but the findings of the book are thought provoking and insightful.) In a very different genre, I remembered Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada’s graphic novel No Rules Tonight, about the many manifestations of repressed freedom under a military dictatorship in South Korea in the 1980s, a time of rapid economic growth for the country. Korea is now a high-income country, but Easterly’s book reminds us to ask, At what cost?

Judging policies by improvements in well-being overall, not just income, is the way forward. (This is not a new insight, but being reminded of the history of the argument lends power.) Operationalizing that way forward systematically and consistently—as many have and continue to seek to do—is a great but worthy challenge.

Below, I round up passages from other reviews, almost all of which are positive.

Positive reviews:

Tunku Varadarajan at the Wall Street Journal: Easterly highlights “a truth that politicians, missionaries, philosophers and, above all, economists have grappled with (or evaded) since at least the start of the 17th century: that, to the poor, the ‘inequality of dignity’ matters as much, if not more so, as the inequality of incomes… Easterly is firm in his belief that the way forward lies in a marriage of market economics and attention to self-respect. You can’t eat dignity, of course. And yet you can’t bequeath to your children a crust of bread. What you can do is leave them with self-worth. And that, says Mr. Easterly, comes most readily when people consent to the way their lives are ordered.”

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution: “A full-throated examination and study of the classical liberal anti-imperialist tradition. We have been needing such a thing for a long time.”

Kirkus: “Easterly concludes that aid is one thing, but agency and dignity in the face of systemic paternalism are quite another. A nicely contrarian work of interest to aid organizations and policymakers everywhere.”

Richard Morrison at The Daily Economy: “While framed as a book about economic development theory and the history of colonialism, William Easterly’s latest tome is actually something grander and more ambitious: a deeply researched 300-year chronicle of political and moral theory in the Western world… Violent Saviors, with its inspiring narrative of mercantilist authoritarianism giving way to a world where equality and cooperation are the norm, reminds us why so many fought so hard for these ideals in the first place.”

Mixed reviews:

Tod Lindberg at Commentary: “With just a few grudging asides to the contrary, Easterly joins the mighty chorus of dismissal of the past and its people as morally and intellectually indefensible—because their views are so out of sync with the wiser opinions of today.”

Audiofile magazine: “Though interesting and enlightening, this audiobook is a lost opportunity for a more polished and nuanced presentation.” (This critique is of the audiobook narration, not the book itself. I found the narration perfectly serviceable, if not dazzling.)

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a work of genius in the defense of freedom. The lessons learned from a history of self-serving and arrogant conquests are vividly depicted. The outcome emphasizes the common patronizing thread that runs through so many attempts to impose assistance on underdeveloped regions. The obvious conclusion is that the imposition of expert judgments requires voluntary consent. This book is a valuable resource for developing a defense of free market capitalism because of its wealth of historical examples.

[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.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

v important topic, just did not enjoy the narrator for audiobook (should have read the book instead)

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easterly argues that Development isn’t a “new” post WWII project, but a continuation of the development right of conquest, an ongoing ethos that drove colonialism, slavery, etc. he doesn’t argue that it’s inherently/always evil, but focus should be on consent and agency. his big solution seems to be… commerce? which wasn’t particularly well-argued. still, it’s a good academic read, combining history and theory.