"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa is a significant book: lucid and meticulous, yet ambitious and imaginative. From the viewpoint of African studies, this work stretches significantly the time span of studies on African poverty. . . . Historians of economic thought without a scholarly interest in sub-Saharan Africa would also significantly benefit from reading this book. . . . Poverty and Wealth in East Africa should not be received just as a solid work of Africanist conceptual and linguistic history but also as a catalyst of important questions about our discipline, its 'canon,' and its methodological conventions."

Gerardo Serra, Journal of the History of Economic Thought