The origin of Botswana’s widely acclaimed successful resource model is hotly contested. For some, such as Fred Harrison (The Silver Bullet. London: The International Union for Land Value Taxation, 2008), the founders of modern Botswana must have been inspired by the economics of Henry George. Others, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Business, 2012), point, instead, to Botswana’s institutions such as the kgotla (the social practice of collective decision making), as the inspiration for its success.

In Botswana – A Modern Economic History: An African Diamond in the Rough, Ellen Hillbom and Jutta Bolt seek to advance these debates. Not only do they contend that the country is trapped by natural resources, they also dismiss the “indigenous origins of good institutions” hypothesis by showing the profound colonial influences on the country’s institutions. Indeed, for these historians, Botswana copied its developmentalist model from colonial Britain itself.

This model, developed in the context of inherited inequality from colonial times, institutionalizes inequality in the country. Coupled with the inequalities of opportunity between ethnic minorities and majorities, minimal investment in social protection, the lack of economic diversification, and the tendency of the government to increase the salaries of elite government officers, while increasing other salaries only slowly, inequality in Botswana could be described as structural and, hence, likely to continue in the future.

The book is systematic in developing these arguments. The authors first clear the decks by rejecting results from the compression history approach, the staple of both neoclassical development economics and new institutional economics. Characterized as prioritizing statistical, over comprehensive, historical analysis, compression history is buried quite early in the book for its many failings which have obfuscated our understanding of this Diamond Country.

The book introduces, and tries to defend, an alternative decompressing history approach. Unlike the usual approach of dividing history according to political breakpoints (such as pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial), the book’s decompression history introduces further subcategories based on thematic economic breakpoints. So, under the colonial regime, for example, there are two subperiods—a cattle-based and a diamond-based economy. These two sub-economies are closely intertwined in ways shaped by political-economic themes (see, e.g., p. 13), but they are also quite distinct. In addition to decompressing history, the authors simultaneously investigate the interactions between institutions and factor endowments, as well as probe the place of the state in economic governance (pp. 11–16).

The application of this methodological toolkit to a range of archival and other primary material is at the heart of the seven chapters that constitute this book. The case for the book is put in Chapter 1, followed by an analysis of the 1850–1930 precolonial history of the country in Chapter 2. Colonial policies, especially those pertaining to the cattle economy, are discussed in Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 provides a detailed commentary on growth, incomes, and development from 1940 to the present. Chapter 5 develops the thesis that Botswana is trapped by diamonds, a discussion that leads to an even more serious critique in Chapter 6, centered on multiple inequalities from the 1920s to date. Chapter 7 concludes the book by highlighting “the most fundamental challenges for the future—restructuring the economy towards diversification and sectorial change while freeing it from natural resource-driven growth in order to ensure continued economic progress, and initiating inclusive strategies for sustainable development” (p. 201), a vision that the present system does not, and cannot, deliver.

This book’s narrative arc is crystal clear, but its analytical frame is sometimes incoherent. Heavily reliant on the conclusions of key advocates of the compression approach such as Douglas North, Paul Collier, and Daren Acemoglu, it is difficult to accept that the book is consistent in the application of its alternative analytical fork. Indeed, its reliance on the concept of “natural resource trap” which, according to Morten Jerven (Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. London: Zed. 2015), is a product of the compression history approach, strongly suggests continuity.

The ahistorical, or partially historical, interpretation of the experience of Nigeria as a basket case of resource curse, when Jimi Adésínà’s historical analysis (2012, “Social Policy in a Mineral-rich economy: The case of Nigeria”, in Hujo K (ed.) Mineral Rents and the Financing of Social Policy: Opportunities and Challenges. Basingstoke: UNRISD/Palgrave, pp. 285–317) has successfully questioned this “conventional wisdom”, is further testament that this book is itself trapped within the strictures of compression history. The insistence that Botswana is a gate-keeping state when, by the book’s own account (pp. 52–59, 147–149), a gate-keeping state is not developmentalist, is another element of analytical incoherence.

Yet, Botswana – A Modern Economic History is strongly recommended. Its thesis, while politically controversial and, in many respects problematic, is original. This book contains new data, which it successfully utilizes to update the research on Botswana, and to highlight avenues for new policy directions.