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

extraction they enabled. For every elite benefiting from extraction there is a non-elite who would love to replace him. Sometimes infighting simply replaces one elite with another. Sometimes it destroys the whole extractive society, unleashing a process of state and societal collapse, as the spectacular civilization that Maya city-states built more than one thousand years ago experienced.
T HE U NSTABLE E XTRACTION
    Farming emerged independently in several places around the world. In what is now modern Mexico, societies formed that established states and settlements, and transitioned to agriculture. As with the Natufians in the Middle East, they also achieved some degree of economic growth. The Maya city-states in the area of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Western Honduras in fact built a fairly sophisticated civilization under their own brand of extractive institutions. The Maya experience illustrates not only the possibility of growth under extractive institutions but also another fundamental limit to this type of growth: the political instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of both society and state as different groups and people fight to become the extractors.
    Maya cities first began to develop around 500 BC . These early cities eventually failed, sometime in the first century AD . A new political model then emerged, creating the foundation for the Classic Era, between AD 250 and 900. This period marked the full flowering of Maya culture and civilization. But this more sophisticated civilization would also collapse in the course of the next six hundred years. By the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century, the great temples and palaces of such Maya sites as Tikal, Palenque, andCalakmul had receded into the forest, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century.
    The Maya cities never unified into an empire, though some cities were subservient to others, and they often appear to have cooperated, particularly in warfare. The main connection between the region’s city-states, fifty of which we can recognize by their own glyphs, is that their people spoke around thirty-one different but closely related Mayan languages. The Mayas developed a writing system, and there are at least fifteen thousand remaining inscriptions describing many aspects of elite life, culture, and religion. They also had a sophisticated calendar for recording dates known as the Long Count. It was very much like our own calendar in that it counted the unfolding of years from a fixed date and was used by all Maya cities. The Long Count began in 3114 BC , though we do not know what significance the Mayas attached to this date, which long precedes the emergence of anything resembling Maya society.
    The Mayas were skilled builders who independently invented cement. Their buildings and their inscriptions provide vital information on the trajectories of the Maya cities, as they often recorded events dated according to the Long Count. Looking across all the Maya cities, archaeologists can thus count how many buildings were finished in particular years. Around AD 500 there are few dated monuments. For example, the Long Count date corresponding to AD 514 recorded just ten. There was then a steady increase, reaching twenty by AD 672 and forty by the middle of the eighth century. After this the number of dated monuments collapses. By the ninth century, it is down to ten per year, and by the tenth century, to zero. These dated inscriptions give us a clear picture of the expansion of Maya cities and their subsequent contraction from the late eighth century.
    This analysis of dates can be complemented by examining the lists of kings the Mayas recorded. At the Maya city of Copán, now in western Honduras, there is a famous monument known as Altar Q. Altar Q records the names of all the kings, starting from the founder of the dynasty K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, or “King Green-Sun First Quetzal Macaw,” named after not just the sun but also two of the exotic birds of the Central American forest whose feathers were greatly valued bythe Mayas. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ came to power in Copán in AD 426, which we know from the Long Count date on Altar Q. He founded a dynasty that would reign for four hundred years. Some of K’inich Yax’s successors had equally graphic names. The thirteenth ruler’s glyph translates as “18 Rabbit,” who was followed by “Smoke Monkey” and then