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

his support and enthusiasm for the project made the last year and a half much more pleasant and less taxing than it might have been.

B IBLIOGRAPHICAL E SSAY AND S OURCES
P REFACE
    Mohamed ElBaradei’s views can be found at twitter.com/#!/ElBaradei .
    Mosaab El Shami and Noha Hamed quotes are from Yahoo! news 2/6/2011, at news.yahoo.com/s/
yblog_exclusive/20110206/ts_yblog_exclusive/
egyptian-voices-from-tahrir-square .
    On the twelve immediate demands posted on Wael Khalil’s blog, see alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/egypt-reviewing-the-demands/ .
    Reda Metwaly is quoted on Al Jazeera, 2/1/2011, at english.aljazeera.net/news/
middleeast/2011/02/2011212597913527.html .
C HAPTER 1 : So C LOSE AND Y ET S O D IFFERENT
    A good discussion of the Spanish exploration of the Rio de La Plata is Rock (1992), chap. 1. On the discovery and colonization of the Guaraní, see Ganson (2003). The quotations from de Sahagún are from de Sahagún (1975), pp. 47–49. Gibson (1963) is fundamental on the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the institutions they structured. The quotations from de las Casas come from de las Casas (1992), pp. 39, 117–18, and 107, respectively.
    On Pizarro in Peru, see Hemming (1983). Chaps. 1–6 cover the meeting at Cajamarca and the march south and the capture of the Inca capital, Cuzco. See Hemming (1983), chap. 20, on de Toledo. Bakewell (1984) gives an overview of the functioning of the Potosí
mita
, and Dell (2010) provides statistical evidence that shows how it has had persistent effects over time.
    The quote from Arthur Young is reproduced from Sheridan (1973), p. 8. There are many good books that describe the early history of Jamestown: forexample, Price (2003), and Kupperman (2007). Our treatment is heavily influenced by Morgan (1975) and Galenson (1996). The quote from Anas Todkill comes from p. 38 of Todkill (1885). The quotes from John Smith are from Price (2003), p. 77 (“Victuals …”), p. 93 (“If your king …”), and p. 96 (“When you send …”). The Charter of Maryland, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and other colonial constitutions have been put on the Internet by Yale University’s Avalon Project, at avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century .
    Bakewell (2009), chap. 14, discusses the independence of Mexico and the constitution. See Stevens (1991) and Knight (2011) on postindependence political instability and presidents. Coatsworth (1978) is the seminal paper on the evidence on economic decline in Mexico after independence. Haber (2010) presents the comparison of the development of banking in Mexico and the United States. Sokoloff (1988) and Sokoloff and Khan (1990) provide evidence on the social background of innovators in the United States who filed patents. See Israel (2000) for a biography of Thomas Edison. Haber, Maurer, and Razo (2003) proposes an interpretation of the political economy of the regime of Porfirio Díaz very much in the spirit of our discussion. Haber, Klein, Maurer, and Middlebrook (2008) extend this treatment of Mexico’s political economy into the twentieth century. On the differential allocation of frontier lands in North and Latin America, see Nugent and Robinson (2010) and García-Jimeno and Robinson (2011). Hu-DeHart (1984) discusses the deportation of the Yaqui people in chap. 6. On the fortune of Carlos Slim and how it was made, see Relea (2007) and Martinez (2002).
    Our interpretation of comparative economic development of the Americas builds on our own previous research with Simon Johnson, particularly Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002), and has also been heavily influenced by Coatsworth (1978, 2008) and Engerman and Sokoloff (1997).
C HAPTER 2 : T HEORIES T HAT D ON’T W ORK
    Jared Diamond’s views on world inequality are laid out in his book
Guns, Germs and Steel
(1997). Sachs (2006) sets out his own version of geographical determinism. Views about culture are widely spread throughout the academic literature but have never been brought together in one work. Weber (2002) argued that it was the Protestant Reformation that explained why it was Europe that had the Industrial Revolution. Landes (1999) proposed thatNorthern Europeans developed a unique set of cultural attitudes that led them to work hard, save, and be innovative. Harrison and Huntington, eds. (2000), is a forceful statement of the importance of culture for comparative economic development. The notion that there is some sort of superior British culture or