Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (26 page)

The accumulation of power at the center made the property rights of common Romans less secure. State lands also expanded with the empire as a consequence of confiscation, and grew to as much as half of the land in many parts of the empire. Property rights became particularly unstable because of the concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and his entourage. In a pattern not too different from what happened in the Maya city-states, infighting to take control of this powerful position increased. Civil wars became a regular occurrence, even before the chaotic fifth century, when the barbarians ruled supreme. For example, Septimius Severus seized power from Didius Julianus, who had made himself emperor after the murder of Pertinax in
AD
193. Severus, the third emperor in the so-called Year of the Five Emperors, then waged war against his rival claimants, the generals Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, who were finally defeated
in
AD
194 and 197, respectively. Severus confiscated all the property of his losing opponents in the ensuing civil war. Though able rulers, such as Trajan (
AD
98 to 117), Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius in the next century, could stanch decline, they could not, or did not want to, address the fundamental institutional problems. None of these men proposed abandoning the empire or re-creating effective political institutions along the lines of the Roman Republic. Marcus Aurelius, for all his successes, was followed by his son Commodus, who was more like Caligula or Nero than his father.

The rising instability was evident from the layout and location of towns and cities in the empire. By the third century
AD
every sizeable city in the empire had a defensive wall. In many cases monuments were plundered for stone, which was used in fortifications. In Gaul before the Romans had arrived in 125
BC
, it was usual to build settlements on hilltops, since these were more easily defended. With the initial arrival of Rome, settlements moved down to the plains. In the third century, this trend was reversed.

Along with mounting political instability came changes in society that moved economic institutions toward greater extraction. Though citizenship was expanded to the extent that by
AD
212 nearly all the inhabitants of the empire were citizens, this change went along with changes in status between citizens. Any sense that there might have been of equality before the law deteriorated. For example, by the reign of Hadrian (
AD
117 to 138), there were clear differences in the types of laws applied to different categories of Roman citizen. Just as important, the role of citizens was completely different from how it had been in the days of the Roman Republic, when they were able to exercise some power over political and economic decisions through the assemblies in Rome.

Slavery remained a constant throughout Rome, though there is some controversy over whether the fraction of slaves in the population actually declined over the centuries. Equally important, as the empire developed, more and more agricultural workers were reduced to semi-servile status and tied to the land. The status of these servile
“coloni”
is extensively discussed in legal documents such as the
Codex Theodosianus
and
Codex Justinianus
, and probably originated during
the reign of Diocletian (
AD
284 to 305). The rights of landlords over the
coloni
were progressively increased. The emperor Constantine in 332 allowed landlords to chain a
colonus
whom they suspected was trying to escape, and from
AD
365,
coloni
were not allowed to sell their own property without their landlord’s permission.

Just as we can use shipwrecks and the Greenland ice cores to track the economic expansion of Rome during earlier periods, we can use them also to trace its decline. By
AD
500 the peak of 180 ships was reduced to 20. As Rome declined, Mediterranean trade collapsed, and some scholars have even argued that it did not return to its Roman height until the nineteenth century. The Greenland ice tells a similar story. The Romans used silver for coins, and lead had many uses, including for pipes and tableware. After peaking in the first century
AD
, the deposits of lead, silver, and copper in the ice cores declined.

The experience of economic growth during the Roman Republic was impressive, as were other examples of growth under extractive institutions, such as the Soviet Union. But that growth was limited and was not sustained, even when it is taken into account that it occurred under partially inclusive institutions. Growth was based on relatively high agricultural productivity, significant tribute from the provinces, and long-distance trade, but it was not underpinned by technological progress or creative destruction. The Romans inherited some basic technologies, iron tools and weapons, literacy, plow agriculture, and building techniques. Early on in the Republic, they created others: cement masonry, pumps, and the water wheel. But thereafter, technology was stagnant throughout the period of the Roman Empire. In shipping, for instance, there was little change in ship design or rigging, and the Romans never developed the stern rudder, instead steering ships with oars. Water wheels spread very slowly, so that water power never revolutionized the Roman economy. Even such great achievements as aqueducts and city sewers used existing technology, though the Romans perfected it. There could be some economic growth without innovation, relying on existing technology, but it was growth without creative destruction. And it did not last. As property rights became more insecure and the economic rights of citizens followed
the decline of their political rights, economic growth likewise declined.

A remarkable thing about new technologies in the Roman period is that their creation and spread seem to have been driven by the state. This is good news, until the government decides that it is not interested in technological development—an all-too-common occurrence due to the fear of creative destruction. The great Roman writer Pliny the Elder relates the following story. During the reign of the emperor Tiberius, a man invented unbreakable glass and went to the emperor anticipating that he would get a great reward. He demonstrated his invention, and Tiberius asked him if he had told anyone else about it. When the man replied no, Tiberius had the man dragged away and killed, “lest gold be reduced to the value of mud.” There are two interesting things about this story. First, the man went to Tiberius in the first place for a reward, rather than setting himself up in business and making a profit by selling the glass. This shows the role of the Roman government in controlling technology. Second, Tiberius was happy to destroy the innovation because of the adverse economic effects it would have had. This is the fear of the economic effects of creative destruction.

There is also direct evidence from the period of the Empire of the fear of the political consequences of creative destruction. Suetonius tells how the emperor Vespasian, who ruled between
AD
69 and 79, was approached by a man who had invented a device for transporting columns to the Capitol, the citadel of Rome, at a relatively small cost. Columns were large, heavy, and very difficult to transport. Moving them to Rome from the mines where they were made involved the labor of thousands of people, at great expense to the government. Vespasian did not kill the man, but he also refused to use the innovation, declaring, “How will it be possible for me to feed the populace?” Again an inventor came to the government. Perhaps this was more natural than with the unbreakable glass, as the Roman government was most heavily involved with column mining and transportation. Again the innovation was turned down because of the threat of creative destruction, not so much because of its economic impact, but because of fear of political creative destruction. Vespasian was
concerned that unless he kept the people happy and under control it would be politically destabilizing. The Roman plebeians had to be kept busy and pliant, so it was good to have jobs to give them, such as moving columns about. This complemented the bread and circuses, which were also dispensed for free to keep the population content. It is perhaps telling that both of these examples came soon after the collapse of the Republic. The Roman emperors had far more power to block change than the Roman rulers during the Republic.

Another important reason for the lack of technological innovation was the prevalence of slavery. As the territories Romans controlled expanded, vast numbers were enslaved, often being brought back to Italy to work on large estates. Many citizens in Rome did not need to work: they lived off the handouts from the government. Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile
coloni
with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society.

By
AD
43 the Roman emperor Claudius had conquered England, but not Scotland. A last, futile attempt was made by the Roman governor Agricola, who gave up and, in
AD
85, built a series of forts to protect England’s northern border. One of the biggest of these was at Vindolanda, thirty-five miles west of Newcastle and depicted on
Map 11
at the far northwest of the Roman Empire. Later, Vindolanda was incorporated into the eighty-five-mile defensive wall that
the emperor Hadrian constructed, but in
AD
103, when a Roman centurion, Candidus, was stationed there, it was an isolated fort. Candidus was engaged with his friend Octavius in supplying the Roman garrison and received a reply from Octavius to a letter he had sent:

The correspondence between Candidus and Octavius illustrates some significant facets of the economic prosperity of Roman England: It reveals an advanced monetary economy with financial services. It reveals the presence of constructed roads, even if sometimes in bad condition. It reveals the presence of a fiscal system that raised taxes to pay Candidus’s wages. Most obviously it reveals that both men were literate and were able to take advantage of a postal service of sorts. Roman England also benefited from the mass manufacture of high-quality pottery, particularly in Oxfordshire; urban centers with baths and public buildings; and house construction techniques using mortar and tiles for roofs.

By the fourth century, all were in decline, and after
AD
411 the Roman Empire gave up on England. Troops were withdrawn; those
left were not paid, and as the Roman state crumbled, administrators were expelled by the local population. By
AD
450 all these trappings of economic prosperity were gone. Money vanished from circulation. Urban areas were abandoned, and buildings stripped of stone. The roads were overgrown with weeds. The only type of pottery fabricated was crude and handmade, not manufactured. People forgot how to use mortar, and literacy declined substantially. Roofs were made of branches, not tiles. Nobody wrote from Vindolanda anymore.

After
AD
411, England experienced an economic collapse and became a poor backwater—and not for the first time. In the previous chapter we saw how the Neolithic Revolution started in the Middle East around 9500
BC
. While the inhabitants of Jericho and Abu Hureyra were living in small towns and farming, the inhabitants of England were still hunting and gathering, and would do so for at least another 5,500 years. Even then the English didn’t invent farming or herding; these were brought from the outside by migrants who had been spreading across Europe from the Middle East for thousands of years. As the inhabitants of England caught up with these major innovations, those in the Middle East were inventing cities, writing, and pottery. By 3500
BC
, large cities such as Uruk and Ur emerged in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. Uruk may have had a population of fourteen thousand in 3500
BC
, and forty thousand soon afterward. The potter’s wheel was invented in Mesopotamia at about the same time as was wheeled transportation. The Egyptian capital of Memphis emerged as a large city soon thereafter. Writing appeared independently in both regions. While the Egyptians were building the great pyramids of Giza around 2500
BC
, the English constructed their most famous ancient monument, the stone circle at Stonehenge. Not bad by English standards, but not even large enough to have housed one of the ceremonial boats buried at the foot of King Khufu’s pyramid. England continued to lag behind and to borrow from the Middle East and the rest of Europe up to and including the Roman period.