Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

by Daron Acemoğlu

Second, he opposed the construction of railways,

So it continued with horse power until the 1860s.

Francis’s concern about the creative destruction that accompanied the development of a modern economy.

Francis also recognized the threat that major economic changes would pose to his

political power.

Russia’s economic institutions were highly extractive, based on serfdom, keeping at least half of the population tied to the land.

The radical philosopher Peter Kropotkin, one of the founders of modern anarchism,

Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from 1825 until 1855.

Count Egor Kankrin, who served as finance minister between 1823 and 1844 and played a key role in opposing the changes in society necessary for promoting economic prosperity.

reopened the State Loan Bank,

to lend to large landowners at subsidized rates,

required the applicants to put up serfs as “security,” or collateral, so that only feudal land...

transferred assets from the Commercial Bank, killing two birds with one stone: there would now be li...

attempted coup by military officers, the so-called Decembrists, who had a radical program of social change.

banned several industrial exhibitions,

In 1848 Europe was rocked by a series of revolutionary outbursts. In response, A. A. Zakrevskii, the military governor of Moscow, who was in charge of maintaining public order, wrote to Nicholas:

1849 a new law was enacted that put severe limits on the number of factories that could be opened in any part of Moscow.

cotton spinning was explicitly banned.

Before 1842 there was only one railway in Russia.

only in 1851 that a line was built linking Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

After 1849 he even used his power to censor discussion in the newspapers of railway development.

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.

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.

The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, China led the world in many technological innovations.

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.

The grip of the state tightened during the Ming and Qing dynasties that followed the Song.

while private merchants were commonly involved in trade within the country, the state monopolized overseas trade.

it was Emperor Hongwu who first ruled,

international trade to take place only if it were organized by the government and only if it involved tribute giving, and not commercial activity.

Between 1377 and 1397, no oceangoing tribute missions were allowed.

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.

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.

Xuande, who at first allowed Zheng He a final mission, in 1433.

But after this, all overseas trade was banned. By 1436 t...

seagoing ships was even made illegal. The ban on overseas trade was n...

A period of intense political instability then ensued. The Qings engaged in mass expropriation of property and assets.

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.

until 1693 there was a ban on shipping everywhere on the coast.

This ban was periodically reimposed in the eighteenth century, effectively stunting the emergenc...

the Chinese economy was stagnant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

By the time Mao set up his communist regime in 1949, China had become one of the poorest countries in the world.

Abyssinian absolutism was even more long-lived than its European counterparts, because it was faced with very different challenges and critical junctures.

by the fourteenth century they had become the focus of the myth of King Prester John.

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,

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.

insecurity of property rights

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.

international trade in Ethiopia, including the lucrative slave trade, was controlled by the monarch.