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

is about one-fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture. They lack clean water, electricity, and access to proper schools or health care. Life expectancy is about fifty-five years and only one-third of adults are literate. A comparison between England and Ethiopia spans world inequality. The reason Ethiopia is where it is today is that, unlike in England, in Ethiopia absolutism persisted until the recent past. With absolutism came extractive economic institutions and poverty for the mass of Ethiopians, though of course the emperors and nobility benefited hugely. But the most enduring implication of the absolutism was that Ethiopian society failed to take advantage of industrialization opportunities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underpinning the abject poverty of its citizens today.
T HE C HILDREN OF S AMAALE
    Absolutist political institutions around the world impeded industrialization either indirectly, in the way they organized the economy, or directly, as we have seen in Austria-Hungary and Russia. But absolutism was not the only barrier to the emergence of inclusive economic institutions. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, many parts of the world, especially in Africa, lacked a state that could provide even a minimal degree of law and order, which is a prerequisite for having a modern economy. There was not the equivalent of Peter the Great in Russia starting the process of political centralization and then forging Russian absolutism, let alone that of the Tudors in England centralizing the state without fully destroying—or, more appropriately, without fully being able to destroy—the Parliament and other constraints on their power. Without some degree of political centralization, even if the elites of these African polities had wished to greet industrialization with open arms, there wouldn’t have been much they could have done.
    Somalia, situated in the Horn of Africa, illustrates the devastating effects of lack of political centralization. Somalia has been dominated historically by people organized into six clan families. The four largestof these, the Dir, Darod, Isaq, and Hawiye, all trace their ancestry back to a mythical ancestor, Samaale. These clan families originated in the north of Somalia and gradually spread south and east, and are even today primarily pastoral people who migrate with their flocks of goats, sheep, and camels. In the south, the Digil and the Rahanweyn, sedentary agriculturalists, make up the last two of the clan families. The territories of these clans are depicted on Map 12 .
    Somalis identify first with their clan family, but these are very large and contain many subgroups. First among these are clans that trace their descent back to one of the larger clan families. More significant are the groupings within clans called
diya-
paying groups, which consist of closely related kinspeople who pay and collect
diya
, or “blood wealth,” compensation against the murder of one of their members. Somali clans and
diya
-paying groups were historically locked in to almost continual conflict over the scarce resources at their disposal, particularly water sources and good grazing land for their animals. They also constantly raided the herds of neighboring clans and
diya-
paying groups. Though clans had leaders called sultans, and also elders, these people had no real power. Political power was very widely dispersed, with every Somali adult man being able to have his say on decisions that might affect the clan or group. This was achieved through an informal council made up of all adult males. There was no written law, no police, and no legal system to speak of, except that Sharia law was used as a framework within which informal laws were embedded. These informal laws for a
diya
-paying group would be encoded in what was called a
heer
, a body of explicitly formulated obligations, rights, and duties the group demanded others obey in their interactions with the group. With the advent of colonial rule, these
heers
began to be written down. For example, the Hassan Ugaas lineage formed a
diya-
paying group of about fifteen hundred men and was a subclan of the Dir clan family in British Somaliland. On March 8, 1950, their
heer
was recorded by the British district commissioner, the first three clauses of which read
    1. When a man of the Hassan Ugaas is murdered by an external group twenty camels of