Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
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The next conflict in New South Wales would be between the elite and the rest of the society, made up of convicts, ex-convicts, and their families.
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The British government dispatched John Bigge to the colony in 1819 to head a commission of inquiry into the
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developments there.
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that to consolidate their economic and political rights fully they needed political institutions that would include them in the process of decision making.
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They demanded elections in which they could participate as equals and representative institutions and assemblies in which they could hold office.
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The ex-convicts and their sons and daughters were led by the colorful writer, explorer, and j...
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In that year his powers were limited by the creation of a council appointed by the British government.
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In 1831 the governor Richard Bourke bowed to pressure and for the first time allowed ex-convicts to sit on juries.
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1842 a legislative council was created with two-thirds of its members being elected
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By the 1850s, Australia had introduced adult white male suffrage.
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In 1856 the
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state of Victoria, which had been carved out of New South Wales in 1851, and the state of Tasmania would become the first places in the world to introduce an effective secret ballot in elections,
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Australian ballot.
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Neither colony had dense populations of indigenous peoples to exploit, ready access to precious metals such as gold or silver, or soil and crops that would make slave plantations economically viable.
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The inclusive institutions established in the United States and Australia meant that the Industrial Revolution spread quickly to these lands and they began to get rich.
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Large parts of Western Europe took yet a third path to inclusive institutions under the impetus of the French Revolution, which overthrew absolutism in France and then generated a series of interstate conflicts that spread institutional reform across much of Western Europe.
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For the three centuries prior to 1789, France was ruled by an absolutist monarchy.
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Different estates were subject to different laws, and the first two estates had rights that the rest of the population did not.
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the Church exempt from taxes, but it also owned large swaths of land and could impose its own taxes on peasants.
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Manufacturing was regulated by powerful guilds,
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ancien régime
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restrictions on mobility and a plethora of feudal dues
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the French Revolution was a radical affair. On August 4, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly entirely changed French laws by proposing a new constitution.
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abolished the feudal system
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removed the tax exemptions
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So there was now equality before the law for all, not only in daily life and business, but also in politics.
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critical barriers against economic activities were stamped out.
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Several decades of instability and war followed the declarations of August 4.
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Third Republic in 1870,
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intimately related to the fact that Britain was industrializing rapidly.
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And of course the path was, as usual, contingent, as many attempts to stabilize the regime by the monarchy failed and the revolution turned out to be more successful in changing institutions in France and elsewhere in Europe than many could have imagined in 1789.
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Louis XIV, the Sun King,
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He consolidated the power of the monarchy, furthering the process toward greater absolutism that had started centuries earlier.
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Assembly of Notables,
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ruled without convening the Assembly.
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participation in Atlantic and colonial trade.
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development of government-sponsored and government-co...
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the Seven Years’ War with the British between 1756 and 1763, in which France lost Canada, had been particularly costly.
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The Assembly took an unexpected step and decreed that only a representative body, the Estates-General, could endorse such reforms.
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included representatives from all three estates. It had last been convened in 1614.
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the Third Estate saw this as its chance to increase its political power and wanted to have more votes in the Estates-General, which the nobility and the clergy steadfastly opposed.
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convene a more powerful body, the National Assembly, deepening the political crisis.
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they therefore demanded even more say in the proceedings and greater rights in general.
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reconstitution of the Assembly as the National Constituent Assembly on July 9.
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storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.
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dynamics of the National Constituent Assembly, which on August 4, 1789, with its newfound confidence, passed the new constitution, abolishing feudalism and the special privileges of the First and Second Estates.
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formation of local clubs, most notably the radical Jacobin Club, which would later take control of the revolution.
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The National Constituent Assembly passed the final version of the constitution on September 29, 1791, turning France into a constitutional monarchy,
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But the dynamics of the revolution were then irreversibly altered by the war that broke out in 1792 between France and the “first coalition,” led by Austria.
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period known as the Terror, under the command of the Jacobin faction led by Robespierre and Saint-Just,