AA
Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East
Holds national and regional histories of China, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, Australasia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, many written for readers judging those economies.
147 books on Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, 3 of them tier 1, recommended by 13 people including Mohnish Pabrai and Patrick Collison.
147 books · 19 experts
Start here
- MITI and the Japanese MiracleChalmers A. Johnson, 1982
- The Economic History of Latin America since IndependenceVictor Bulmer-Thomas, 1994
- The AnarchyWilliam Dalrymple, 2019
- The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern GhanaPolly Hill, 1963
- Peru 1890-1977: Growth and Policy in an Open EconomyRosemary Thorp, Geoffrey Bertram, 1978
The best books on Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East 147
Chalmers A. Johnson · 1982
The founding text on the developmental state and industrial policy.
Victor Bulmer-Thomas · 1994
The standard economic history; export dependence and import substitution explained.
T1 The Anarchy
William Dalrymple · 2019
The East India Company as the first corporate conquest of a country.
Polly Hill · 1963
Classic fieldwork proving African farmers were rational capitalist investors.
Rosemary Thorp, Geoffrey Bertram · 1978
The classic export-led growth study; why commodity booms did not compound.
David Rock · 1987
The standard history of how a rich country made itself poor.
Jan Morris · 1988
The colony at its commercial peak, before the handover.
David Bushnell · 1993
The standard one-volume history; the institutional backdrop to everything else.
Erik J. Zurcher · 1993
The standard history; the state-business relationship runs through it.
W. G. Huff · 1994
The economic history: entrepot trade, forced saving and state-directed investment.
Sebastian Edwards · 1995
The World Bank chief economist on the debt crisis and the reforms after it.
Juan Gabriel Valdés · 1995
How an economics faculty exchange programme became a national policy regime.
Andres Oppenheimer · 1996
Salinas, the 1994 peso crisis and the tequila effect.
Adam Fforde, Stefan de Vylder · 1996
The canonical doi moi study; reform as bottom-up fence-breaking, not decree.
Stephen Haber · 1997
Comparative essays on why Brazil and Mexico diverged from the United States.
Enrique Krauze · 1997
The presidential system that shaped who gets concessions.
Adam Hochschild · 1998
The Congo Free State as a privately owned extraction business, and the campaign that ended it.
Lee Kuan Yew · 1998
The first volume of the memoirs, covering independence and the early state.
Gurcharan Das · 2000
A Procter & Gamble insider on the 1991 liberalisation and what preceded it.
Karl Maier · 2000
The standard account of why the Nigerian state underdelivers.
Gerardo della Paolera, Alan M. Taylor · 2003
The long-run data behind the country's century of relative decline.
Julia Preston, Samuel Dillon · 2004
The end of one-party rule and what it changed for business.
Martin Meredith · 2004
The land seizures and the destruction of commercial agriculture, in continental context.
Martin Meredith · 2007
How the mining houses and their financiers created the modern economy.
Michael Reid · 2007
The Economist's survey of why Latin America keeps underperforming.
Steve LeVine · 2007
How Tengiz and Kashagan were negotiated; the best account of dealmaking in the region.
C. M. Turnbull · 2009
The standard scholarly history of the entrepot.
T2 City of Gold
Jim Krane · 2009
Dubai's construction of a trading city, written as the 2009 debt crisis hit.
David Van Reybrouck · 2010
Union Minière, the concession economy and what happened after independence.
Anatol Lieven · 2011
Kinship networks, patronage and why the state is weaker and more durable than it looks.
Byung-Kook Kim, Ezra F. Vogel · 2011
The authoritative volume on how the developmental state was built.
Charles Hornsby · 2012
Exhaustive and unusually attentive to who owned what, and when.
George Megalogenis · 2012
How deregulation from 1983 produced three decades without recession.
Michael Axworthy · 2013
Political history that explains who controls which parts of the economy.
David Pilling · 2014
Japan as the working example of a shrinking, ageing economy.
Michael Reid · 2014
The clearest account of Brazil's political economy and its ceilings.
Ayesha Jalal · 2014
Why the security state crowded out the productive economy from the start.
David Coltart · 2016
Insider account by a cabinet minister through dollarisation and the unity government.
Brian Easton · 2020
The definitive economic history; the long context for the 1984 rupture.
Sebastian Edwards · 2023
Best single volume: the reforms, the 1982 crash, the pension system and the reaction against it.
Sulmaan Wasif Khan · 2024
Current account of the cross-strait risk that prices every Taiwanese asset.
E. W. Bovill · 1958
Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade; the medieval West African economy
“Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors”Paul Graham
Recommended byPaul Graham
Marco Palacios · 1980
Economic history of the crop, the growers' federation and the export institutions built around it.
Sterling Seagrave · 1988
Journalistic account of how the crony monopolies and offshore holdings were built.
Nicolas Shumway · 1991
The competing national ideas behind the recurring policy reversals.
Alfred W. McCoy · 1993
The provincial dynasties behind the listed conglomerates; still the reference on ownership.
William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper Kutschbach · 1995
Comparative coffee political economy; sets Colombia's growers' federation in context.
Sterling Seagrave · 1995
Overseas-Chinese business networks; the milieu in which Li's empire grew.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1995
The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.
Javier Martínez, Alvaro Díaz · 1996
How the productive structure and business class were remade after 1973.
Brian Easton · 1996
The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.
Eun Mee Kim · 1997
The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.
Murray A. Rubinstein · 1999
The standard history volume, including the land reform and SME base.
Stephen Kinzer · 2001
Written around the 2001 banking crisis, the last full reset of the system.
Jomo K. S. · 2001
The 1997-98 crisis and the heterodox capital-control response, analysed properly.
Frank Safford, Marco Palacios · 2002
Regional fragmentation as the structural fact behind Colombian markets.
Timothy Mitchell · 2002
Heavy going, but the sharpest account of how land, capital and expertise were arranged.
Denny Roy · 2003
Background on the party-state and land reform behind the industrial model.
Adrian Vickers · 2005
The political history behind the current institutional settlement.
Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit · 2005
The standard modern history, strong on business families and state capital.
Richard Lloyd Parry · 2005
Reporting from the 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto.
Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso · 2005
The standard history of a weak state captured by strong families.
Julio F. Carrión · 2006
Stabilisation, privatisation and the authoritarian bargain that delivered them.
Leo Goodstadt · 2007
How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.
Alfonso W. Quiroz · 2008
Two centuries of graft quantified; the cost of doing business, measured.
Shuja Nawaz · 2008
The army's internal history; essential for reading political risk here.
Jules Marchal · 2008
The Congo palm-oil concessions behind the soap business; archival and damning.
Robert Lacey · 2009
The sequel covering the religious backlash and reform attempts.
Miguel Tinker Salas · 2009
The foreign oil companies' company towns and the society they built.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Tarek Osman · 2010
Readable political economy of the Nasser-to-Mubarak arc and the crony privatisations.
Sebastian Edwards · 2010
Why growth kept disappointing despite reform; good on institutions and productivity.
Paul Rivlin · 2010
The wider economy: labour markets, defence spending, inflation and stabilisation.
Riordan Roett · 2010
Institutional history of the stabilisation that made the commodity boom possible.
Ian Scoones · 2010
Ten years of field data on what actually happened to seized farmland.
Daniel Branch · 2011
Ethnic coalition politics as the mechanism that allocates economic rents.
Allen J. Fromherz · 2011
How the ruling family consolidated gas revenue and the merchant elite.
Steven A. Cook · 2011
Nasser to Tahrir; the political frame around state capitalism and infitah.
Larry Rohter · 2012
The commodity-boom decade and the institutions underneath it.
David W. P. Elliott · 2012
How the Party argued itself into opening the economy and joining WTO.
Michael J. LaRosa, Germán R. Mejía · 2012
Short modern survey covering the reform and security-driven recovery years.
Daniel Tudor · 2012
The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.
Andrew MacGregor Marshall · 2014
Succession risk and the political instability that follows it.
Jeremy Seabrook · 2014
Dhaka's garment industry from Rana Plaza back through its supply chain.
Ricardo Hausmann, Francisco Rodríguez · 2014
Academic but decisive: the decline began decades before Chávez, and shows why.
George Megalogenis · 2015
Migration and openness as the long-run growth variable.
Lilia M. Schwarcz, Heloisa M. Starling · 2015
Long-run history explaining the inequality and clientelism investors meet.
Linda Lim · 2015
Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.
Daniel Gordis · 2016
The political history behind the state's economic choices.
Farah Al-Nakib · 2016
Oil urbanism and how land distribution created the domestic merchant fortune.
Ahmet T. Kuru · 2019
A structural argument about why Muslim-majority economies underperform.
Douglas Rogers · 2019
The 2017 coup reported from inside, including its business backers.
T3 City on Fire
Antony Dapiran · 2020
The 2019 protests and the political-risk repricing that followed.
Aaron Jakes · 2020
Colonial economism and the debt-and-cotton origins of the modern Egyptian economy.
David Rundell · 2020
A former diplomat on the durability of the system Vision 2030 must change.
Jorge Pontes, Marcio Anselmo · 2022
Insider: two federal police delegates on the Lava Jato investigation.
William Neuman · 2022
Reporting on the endgame: PDVSA's decay, default, sanctions and dollarisation.
Dan Senor, Saul Singer · 2023
The sequel, on the social factors the authors think sustain it.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
R. Albert Berry · 1983
Dated but the only serious English work on Colombian manufacturing.
Recommended byLarry Ellison
Li Lu · 1990
Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Ricardo Manapat · 1991
Hard-to-find catalogue of Marcos-era crony deals; the source everyone else cites.
Sebastian Mallaby · 1992
Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Jill Crystal · 1992
Includes the Souk al-Manakh episode and the Kuwait Investment Office.
Recommended byBill Gates
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byPatrick Collison
C. R. Pennell · 2000
Background rather than business, but the makhzen and the palace's commercial role are here.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Marco Palacios · 2006
Property rights, land and violence as a continuous economic story.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byBalaji S. Srinivasan
Angela Vergara · 2008
The copper enclave before nationalisation: labour, Anaconda and Kennecott.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Tai-chun Kuo, Ramon H. Myers · 2011
The policy record of the transition from agriculture to electronics.
T4 The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East
Andrew Scott Cooper · 2011
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Richard Saunders, Tinashe Nyamunda · 2016
The Marange diamond fields; how an extractive rent was captured militarily.
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byPatrick Collison
Recommended byTim Ferriss
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byMohnish Pabrai
Recommended byPatrick Collison
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Recommended byPatrick Collison
Experts 19
The people who wrote this page's books, and the people who recommend them.
Authors 6
CB
Chris Bakerwrote 2 books herePP
Pasuk Phongpaichitwrote 2 books hereSM
Sebastian Mallabywrote 1 book hereLL
Li Luwrote 1 book here
Henry Kissingerwrote 1 book here
Lee Kuan Yewwrote 1 book hereRecommenders 13
MP
Mohnish Pabrairecommends 15 books here
Patrick Collisonrecommends 14 books here
Bill Gatesrecommends 4 books hereBS
Balaji S. Srinivasanrecommends 2 books here
Richard Bransonrecommends 2 books here
Ben Horowitzrecommends 1 book here
Paul Grahamrecommends 1 book here
Simon Sinekrecommends 1 book here
Bob Igerrecommends 1 book here
Larry Ellisonrecommends 1 book hereNC
Nick Crockerrecommends 1 book hereSS
Steph Smithrecommends 1 book hereShow all 13
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