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

so usual for the emperor to exchange, alter and take away the lands each man holds every two or three years, sometimes every year and even many times in the course of a year, that it causes no surprise. Often one man plows the soil, another sows it and another reaps. Hence it arises that there is no one who takes care of the land he enjoys; there is not even anyone to plant a tree because he knows that he who plants it very rarely gathers the fruit. For the king, however, it is useful that they should be so dependent upon him.
    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.
    Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Theincome of an average Ethiopian