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“by the grace of God and of bayonets.”
Before 1492 it was the civilizations in the central valley of Mexico, Central America, and the Andes that had superior technology and living standards to North America or places such as Argentina and Chile.
Mobutu and the elite surrounding him, known as Les Grosses Legumes (the Big Vegetables),
Urbanization and the emergence of a socially conscious middle and working class also challenged the political monopoly of landed aristocracies.
Economic growth is not just a process of more and better machines, and more and better educated people, but also a transformative and destabilizing process associated with widespread creative destruction.
Though in 1346 there were few differences between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were worlds apart. In the West, workers were free of feudal dues, fines, and regulations and were becoming a key part of a booming market economy. In the East, they were also involved in such an economy, but as coerced serfs growing the food and agricultural goods demanded in the West.
History is full of examples of revolutions and radical movements replacing one tyranny with another, in a pattern that the German sociologist Robert Michels dubbed the iron law of oligarchy, a particularly pernicious form of the vicious circle.
Not coincidentally, the poorest part of Argentina is the northwest, the only section of the country integrated into the Spanish colonial economy.
Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997.
Venice went from economic powerhouse to museum.
Though, compared with Spain and Portugal, England was a latecomer to Atlantic trade, she allowed for relatively broad-based participation in trading and colonial opportunities. What filled the Crown’s coffers in Spain enriched the newly emerging merchant class in England. It was this merchant class that would form the basis of early England economic dynamism and become the bulwark of the anti-absolutist political coalition.
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.
Sounds like 300 years of successful extractive institutions
World inequality today exists because during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and methods of organization that it brought while others were unable to do so. Technological change is only one of the engines of prosperity, but it is perhaps the most critical one.
The Squatters were the elite of Australia, or, more appropriately, the Squattocracy.
The leaders of the French Revolution and, subsequently, Napoleon exported the revolution to these lands, destroying absolutism, ending feudal land relations, abolishing guilds, and imposing equality before the law—the all-important notion of rule of law, which we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. The French Revolution thus prepared not only France but much of the rest of Europe for inclusive institutions and the economic growth that these would spur.
the French were ahead of other countries in a major innovation: mass conscription. Introduced in August 1793,
By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.
By 1890 Japan was the first Asian country to adopt a written constitution, and it created a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Diet, and an independent judiciary. These changes were decisive factors in enabling Japan to be the primary beneficiary from the Industrial Revolution in Asia.
Instead of reforming institutions, the Chinese tried to match the British militarily by importing modern weapons. The Japanese built their own armaments industry.
Pluralism also creates a more open system and allows independent media to flourish, making it easier for groups that have an interest in the continuation of inclusive institutions to become aware and organize against threats to these institutions. It is highly significant that the English state stopped censoring the media after 1688.
One might have imagined that this colonial institution would also have been abolished or at least reformed after independence.
History of post-colonial africa in one sentence
The Guatemalan sociologist Marta Casaús Arzú identified a core group of twenty-two families in Guatemala that had ties through marriage to another twenty-six families just outside the core. Her genealogical and political study suggested that these families have controlled economic and political power in Guatemala since 1531.
The southern planters lost the war, but would win the peace.
To illustrate how difficult it was to understand Argentina, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets once famously remarked that there were four sorts of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.
around the time of the First World War, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. It then began a steady decline relative to the other rich countries in Western Europe and North America, which turned, in the 1970s and ’80s, into an absolute decline.
The intensity of extraction in these different countries obviously varies and has important consequences for prosperity. In Argentina, for example, the constitution and democratic elections do not work well to promote pluralism, but they do function much better than in Colombia. At least the state can claim the monopoly of violence in Argentina. Partly as a consequence, income per capita in Argentina is double that of Colombia.
During the colonial period, the Tswana chiefs had attempted to block prospecting for minerals in Bechuanaland because they knew that if Europeans discovered precious metals or stones, their autonomy would be over.
In 1940 southern states had only about 50 percent of the level of per capita income of the United States. This started to change in the late 1940s and ’50s. By 1990 the gap had basically vanished.
