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

economically but has also tipped between completedisorder and some sort of order. Still, the long-run effect is the same: the state all but remains absent, and institutions are extractive.
    In all these cases there has been a long history of extractive institutions since at least the nineteenth century. Each country is trapped in a vicious circle. In Colombia and Argentina, they are rooted in the institutions of Spanish colonial rule ( this page – this page ). Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone originated in British colonial regimes set up in the late nineteenth century. In Sierra Leone, in the absence of white settlers, these regimes built extensively on precolonial extractive structures of political power and intensified them. These structures themselves were the outcome of a long vicious circle that featured lack of political centralization and the disastrous effects of the slave trade. In Zimbabwe, there was much more of a construction of a new form of extractive institutions, because the British South Africa Company created a dual economy. Uzbekistan could take over the extractive institutions of the Soviet Union and, like Egypt, modify them into crony capitalism. The Soviet Union’s extractive institutions themselves were in many ways a continuation of those of the tsarist regime, again in a pattern predicated on the iron law of oligarchy. As these various vicious circles played out in different parts of the world over the past 250 years, world inequality emerged, and persists.
    The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is to transform their extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. The vicious circle means that this is not easy. But it is not impossible, and the iron law of oligarchy is not inevitable. Either some preexisting inclusive elements in institutions, or the presence of broad coalitions leading the fight against the existing regime, or just the contingent nature of history, can break vicious circles. Just like the civil war in Sierra Leone, the Glorious Revolution in 1688 was a struggle for power. But it was a struggle of a very different nature than the civil war in Sierra Leone. Conceivably some in Parliament fighting to remove James II in the wake of the Glorious Revolution imagined themselves playing the role of the new absolutist, as Oliver Cromwell did after the English Civil War. But the fact that Parliament was already powerful and made up of a broad coalition consisting of different economic interests and different points of view made the iron law ofoligarchy less likely to apply in 1688. And it was helped by the fact that luck was on the side of Parliament against James II. In the next chapter, we will see other examples of countries that have managed to break the mold and transform their institutions for the better, even after a long history of extractive institutions.

14.

B REAKING THE M OLD
T HREE A FRICAN C HIEFS
    O N S EPTEMBER 6, 1895, the ocean liner
Tantallon Castle
docked at Plymouth on the southern coast of England. Three African chiefs, Khama of the Ngwato, Bathoen of the Ngwaketse, and Sebele of the Kwena, disembarked and took the 8:10 express train to Paddington Station, London. The three chiefs had come to Britain on a mission: to save their and five other Tswana states from Cecil Rhodes. The Ngwato, Ngwaketse, and Kwena were three of the eight Tswana states comprising what was then known as Bechuanaland, which would become Botswana after independence in 1966.
    The tribes had been trading with Europeans for most of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the famous Scottish missionary David Livingstone had traveled extensively in Bechuanaland and converted King Sechele of the Kwena to Christianity. The first translation of the Bible into an African language was in Setswana, the language of the Tswana. In 1885 Britain had declared Bechuanaland a protectorate. The Tswana were content with the arrangement, as they thought this would bring them protection from further European invasions, particularly from the Boers, with whom they had been clashing since the Great Trek in 1835, a migration of thousands of Boers into the interior to escape from British colonialism. The British, on the other hand, wanted control of the area to block both further expansions by the Boers ( this page – this page ) and possible expansions by Germans, who had annexed the area of southwest Africa corresponding to today’s Namibia. The British did not think that a full-scale