A book so full of learned digressions could feel disjointed. But Easterly’s stories unfailingly reinforce a select number of crucial themes, the boldest being that the people of the so-called underdeveloped world have been systematically betrayed by the technocrats in charge of the global development agenda. “The technocratic approach ignores what this book will establish as the real cause of poverty — the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights,” he writes.

“The Tyranny of Experts” opens with an account of an outrage supposed to have taken place in rural Ohio in 2010, when 20,000 local farmers were dispossessed of their land at gunpoint, their homes and crops burned to make way for a commercial forestry. For the space of a page, the reader wonders if the story is true, and if so, why she’s never heard of it. It’s because the author changed the location for effect. The dispossession occurred in Uganda, which is ruled by Yoweri Museveni, an autocrat long promoted by the West. The forestry’s funding came partly from the World Bank, which had recently published a major document on the role of government in development that, Easterly reports, characteristically offered little or no role to “liberty, freedom, equality, rights or democracy.” He explains the West’s fondness for autocrats saying it comes from the misguided belief that they are best equipped to achieve results in the rough and chaotic conditions in poorer countries.

Easterly’s other major claim is that technocratic advisers attach little importance to the historical background of the countries they work on. He offers the example of the World Bank, in 1949, whipping up a 950-page development plan for Colombia in less than a year, in which recommendations weren’t specific to that country. These advisers also ignore evidence saying the greatest benefits to a society come from the spontaneous, uncoordinated actions of mostly small actors whose talents are allowed to flourish, as opposed to top-down initiatives involving the state or outside donors.

The author’s persistent emphasis on liberty, and his touting of the “Invisible Hand” might tempt some readers to write him off as a doctrinaire conservative, an inclination that might be encouraged by Easterly’s frequent citation of intellectual favorites of the right like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. It’s the odd conservative, however, who would read history like Easterly, who blames much of the failure of development as a Western movement, and a great deal of misery in Africa specifically on the twin legacies of imperialism and racism. He brandishes this claim of racism liberally but not gratuitously; his point being that paternalism and a belief in the incapacity of others is an unexamined foundation of development ideology. “Locating the formative years of development between 1919 and 1949 highlights a critical point,” Easterly writes: “Development ideas took shape before there was even the most minimal respect in the West for the rights of individuals in the Rest.” Western racism, he asserts, spared no one, but in Africa it was at the very heart of the concept of development.

He introduces us to “Lord Lugard, the longtime governor general of Nigeria, whose 1922 book ‘The Dual Mandate’ was the bible for British colonial officials in Africa” and who “offered a tidy if disturbing view into colonial attitudes: ‘In character and temperament the typical African of this race-type is a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline and foresight.’ ” “In short,” Lugard concluded, “we are dealing with the child races of the world.”