Conclusion
The quest for economic development, itself a historically complex notion, emerges from this overview as the core of the intellectual endeavours of West African economic thinkers in the long run.
While this is to some extent true for most parts of the world, in the West African context the search for economic development was pursued in a distinctive fashion: as part of a struggle to define the identity of Africa vis-a-vis the West (affirming, denying or at least delimiting difference), as the expression of a will to expand the political boundaries imposed by circumstances under the ever-changing label of Pan-Africanism, and as an attempt to come to terms with the legacies of history. The past seems simultaneously to offer valid explanations for today's underdevelopment and recipes for the future: part of the differences among West African visions of the economic future are grounded in contrasting interpretations of pre-colonial history.On the other hand the evolution of West African economic thought should be understood also as part of a global history: specifically, as another encounter in the intellectual and political battle over the proper roles of the state and the market. In West Africa, as elsewhere, economic analysis detached itself (or rather, some economists sought to detach it) from the surrounding moral and political issues, developing into a ‘science' increasingly dominated by the practices of formal modelling and statistical testing. Yet, much further research is required in order to write a genuinely global history of economic thought, in which West Africa is more than a laboratory, no matter how ‘living' (Tilley, 2011), for the West.
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