Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (35 page)

Map 13 (opposite) shows the consequences of this logic. While Britain and most of northwest Europe was crisscrossed with railways in 1870, very few penetrated the vast territory of Russia. The policy against railways was only reversed after Russia’s conclusive defeat by British, French, and Ottoman forces in the Crimean War, 1853–1856, when the backwardness of its transportation network was understood to be a serious liability for Russian security. There was also little railway development in Austria-Hungary outside of Austria and the western parts of the empire, though the 1848 Revolutions had brought change to these territories, particularly the abolition of serfdom.

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern. Under the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, China led the world in many technological innovations. The Chinese invented clocks, the compass, gunpowder, paper and paper money, porcelain, and blast furnaces to make cast iron before Europe did. They independently developed spinning wheels and waterpower at more or less the same time that these emerged at the other end of Eurasia. In consequence, in 1500 standards of living were probably at least as high in China as they were in Europe. For centuries China also had a centralized state with a meritocratically recruited civil service.

Yet China was absolutist, and the growth under the Song dynasty was under extractive institutions. There was no political representation for groups other than the monarchy in society, nothing resembling a Parliament or a Cortes. Merchants always had a precarious status in China, and the great inventions of the Song were not spurred by market incentives but were brought into existence under the auspices, or even the orders, of the government. Little of this was commercialized. The grip of the state tightened during the Ming and Qing dynasties that followed the Song. At the root of all this was the usual logic of extractive institutions. As most rulers presiding over extractive
institutions, the absolutist emperors of China opposed change, sought stability, and in essence feared creative destruction.

This is best illustrated by the history of international trade. As we have seen, the discovery of the Americas and the way international trade was organized played a key role in the political conflicts and institutional changes of early modern Europe. In China, while private merchants were commonly involved in trade within the country, the state monopolized overseas trade. When the Ming dynasty came to power in 1368, it was Emperor Hongwu who first ruled, for thirty years. Hongwu was concerned that overseas trade would be politically and socially destabilizing and he allowed international trade to take place only if it were organized by the government and only if it involved tribute giving, and not commercial activity. Hongwu even executed hundreds of people accused of trying to turn tribute missions into commercial ventures. Between 1377 and 1397, no oceangoing tribute missions were allowed. He banned private individuals from trading with foreigners and would not allow Chinese to sail overseas.

In 1402 Emperor Yongle came to the throne and initiated one of the most famous periods of Chinese history by restarting government-sponsored foreign trade on a big scale. Yongle sponsored Admiral Zheng He to undertake six huge missions to Southeast and South Asia, Arabia, and Africa. The Chinese knew about these places from a long history of trading relations, but nothing had ever happened on this scale before. The first fleet included 27,800 men and 62 large treasure ships, accompanied by 190 smaller ships, including ones specifically for carrying freshwater, others for supplies, and others for troops. Yet Emperor Yongle put a temporary stop on the missions after the sixth one in 1422. This was made permanent by his successor, Hongxi, who ruled from 1424 to 1425. Hongxi’s premature death brought to the throne Emperor Xuande, who at first allowed Zheng He a final mission, in 1433. But after this, all overseas trade was banned. By 1436 the construction of seagoing ships was even made illegal. The ban on overseas trade was not lifted until 1567.

These events, though only the tip of the extractive iceberg that prevented many economic activities deemed to be potentially destabilizing, were to have a fundamental impact on Chinese economic
development. Just at the time when international trade and the discovery of the Americas were fundamentally transforming the institutions of England, China was cutting itself off from this critical juncture and turning inward. This inward turn did not end in 1567. The Ming dynasty was overrun in 1644 by the Jurchen people, the Manchus of inner Asia, who created the Qing dynasty. A period of intense political instability then ensued. The Qings engaged in mass expropriation of property and assets. In the 1690s, T’ang Chen, a retired Chinese scholar and failed merchant, wrote:

In 1661 the emperor Kangxi ordered that all people living along the coast from Vietnam to Chekiang—essentially the entire southern coast, once the most commercially active part of China—should move seventeen miles inland. The coast was patrolled by troops to enforce the measure, and until 1693 there was a ban on shipping everywhere on the coast. This ban was periodically reimposed in the eighteenth century, effectively stunting the emergence of Chinese overseas trade. Though some did develop, few were willing to invest when the emperor could suddenly change his mind and ban trade, making investments in ships, equipment, and trading relations worthless or even worse.

The reasoning of the Ming and Qing states for opposing international trade is by now familiar: the fear of creative destruction. The leaders’ primary aim was political stability. International trade was
potentially destabilizing as merchants were enriched and emboldened, as they were in England during the era of Atlantic expansion. This was not just what the rulers believed during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also the attitude of the rulers of the Song dynasty, even if they were willing to sponsor technological innovations and permit greater commercial freedom, provided that this was under their control. Things got worse under the Ming and Qing dynasties as the control of the state on economic activity tightened and overseas trade was banned. There were certainly markets and trade in Ming and Qing China, and the government taxed the domestic economy quite lightly. However, it did little to support innovation, and it exchanged the development of mercantile or industrial prosperity for political stability. The consequence of all this absolutist control of the economy was predictable: the Chinese economy was stagnant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while other economies were industrializing. By the time Mao set up his communist regime in 1949, China had become one of the poorest countries in the world.

Absolutism as a set of political institutions and the economic consequences that flowed from it were not restricted to Europe and Asia. It was present in Africa, for example, with the Kingdom of Kongo, as we saw in
chapter 2
. An even more durable example of African absolutism is Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, whose roots we came across in
chapter 6
, when we discussed the emergence of feudalism after the decline of Aksum. Abyssinian absolutism was even more long-lived than its European counterparts, because it was faced with very different challenges and critical junctures.

After the conversion of the Aksumite king Ezana to Christianity, the Ethiopians remained Christian, and by the fourteenth century they had become the focus of the myth of King Prester John. Prester John was a Christian king who had been cut off from Europe by the rise of Islam in the Middle East. Initially his kingdom was thought to be located in India. However, as European knowledge of India increased,
people realized that this was not true. The king of Ethiopia, since he was a Christian, then became a natural target for the myth. Ethiopian kings in fact tried hard to forge alliances with European monarchs against Arab invasions, sending diplomatic missions to Europe from at least 1300 onward, even persuading the Portuguese king to send soldiers.

These soldiers, along with diplomats, Jesuits, and travelers wishing to meet Prester John, left many accounts of Ethiopia. Some of the most interesting from an economic point of view are by Francisco Álvares, a chaplain accompanying a Portuguese diplomatic mission, who was in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1527. In addition, there are accounts by Jesuit Manoel de Almeida, who lived in Ethiopia from 1624, and by John Bruce, a traveler who was in the country between 1768 and 1773. The writings of these people give a rich account of political and economic institutions at the time in Ethiopia and leave no doubt that Ethiopia was a perfect specimen of absolutism. There were no pluralistic institutions of any kind, nor any checks and constraints on the power of the emperor, who claimed the right to rule on the basis of supposed descent from the legendary King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The consequence of absolutism was great insecurity of property rights driven by the political strategy of the emperor. Bruce, for example, noted that

Álvares claimed there would be much more “fruit and tillage if the great men did not ill-treat the people.” Alameida’s account of how the society worked is very consistent. He observed:

These descriptions suggest major similarities between the political and economic structures of Ethiopia and those of European absolutism, though they also make it clear that absolutism was more intense in Ethiopia, and economic institutions even more extractive. Moreover, as we emphasized in
chapter 6
, Ethiopia was not subject to the same critical junctures that helped undermine the absolutist regime in England. It was cut off from many of the processes that shaped the modern world. Even if this had not been the case, the intensity of its absolutism would probably have led the absolutism to strengthen even more. For example, as in Spain, international trade in Ethiopia, including the lucrative slave trade, was controlled by the monarch. Ethiopia was not completely isolated: Europeans did search for Prester John, and it did have to fight wars against surrounding Islamic polities. Nevertheless, the historian Edward Gibbon noted with some accuracy that “encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.”

As the European colonization of Africa began in the nineteenth century, Ethiopia was an independent kingdom under Ras (Duke) Kassa, who was crowned Emperor Tewodros II in 1855. Tewodros embarked on a modernization of the state, creating a more centralized bureaucracy and judiciary, and a military capable of controlling the country and possibly fighting the Europeans. He placed military governors, responsible for collecting taxes and remitting them to him,
in charge of all the provinces. His negotiations with European powers were difficult, and in exasperation he imprisoned the English consul. In 1868 the English sent an expeditionary force, which sacked his capital. Tewodros committed suicide.

All the same, Tewodros’s reconstructed government did manage to pull off one of the great anticolonial triumphs of the nineteenth century, against the Italians. In 1889 the throne went to Menelik II, who was immediately faced with the interest of Italy in establishing a colony there. In 1885 the German chancellor Bismarck had convened a conference in Berlin where the European powers hatched the “Scramble for Africa”—that is, they decided how to divide up Africa into different spheres of interest. At the conference, Italy secured its rights to colonies in Eritrea, along the coast of Ethiopia, and Somalia. Ethiopia, though not represented at the conference, somehow managed to survive intact. But the Italians still kept designs, and in 1896 they marched an army south from Eritrea. Menelik’s response was similar to that of a European medieval king; he formed an army by getting the nobility to call up their armed men. This approach could not put an army in the field for long, but it could put a huge one together for a short time. This short time was just enough to defeat the Italians, whose fifteen thousand men were overwhelmed by Menelik’s one hundred thousand in the Battle of Adowa in 1896. It was the most serious military defeat a precolonial African country was able to inflict on a European power, and secured Ethiopia’s independence for another forty years.

The last emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari, was crowned Haile Selassie in 1930. Haile Selassie ruled until he was overthrown by a second Italian invasion, which began in 1935, but he returned from exile with the help of the English in 1941. He then ruled until he was overthrown in a 1974 coup by the Derg, “the Committee,” a group of Marxist army officers, who then proceeded to further impoverish and ravage the country. The basic extractive economic institutions of the absolutist Ethiopian empire, such as
gult
(
this page
), and the feudalism created after the decline of Aksum, lasted until they were abolished after the 1974 revolution.