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

in internal power struggles. For example, the Vandals, under their king, Geiseric, ravaged large parts of the Iberian Peninsula and then conquered the Roman bread baskets in North Africa from 429 onward. The Roman response to this was to offer Geiseric the emperor Valentinian III’s child daughter as a bride. Geiseric was at the time married to the daughter of one of the leaders of the Goths, but this does not seem to have stopped him. He annulled his marriage under the pretext that his wife was trying to murder him and sent her back to her family after mutilating her by cutting off both her ears and her nose. Fortunately for the bride-to-be, because of her young age she was kept in Italy and never consummated her marriage to Geiseric. Later she would marry another powerful general, Petronius Maximus, the mastermind of the murder of Aetius by the emperor Valentinian III, who would himself shortly be murdered in a plot hatched by Maximus. Maximus later declared himself emperor, but his reign would be very short, ended by his death during the major offensive by the Vandals under Geiseric against Italy, which saw Rome fall and savagely plundered.
    B Y THE EARLY fifth century, the barbarians were literally at the gate. Some historians argue that it was a consequence of the more formidable opponents the Romans faced during the late Empire. But the success of the Goths, Huns, and Vandals against Rome was a symptom, not the cause, of Rome’s decline. During the Republic, Rome had dealt with much more organized and threatening opponents, such as the Carthaginians. The decline of Rome had causesvery similar to those of the Maya city-states. Rome’s increasingly extractive political and economic institutions generated its demise because they caused infighting and civil war.
    The origins of the decline go back at least to Augustus’s seizure of power, which set in motion changes that made political institutions much more extractive. These included changes in the structure of the army, which made secession impossible, thus removing a crucial element that ensured political representation for common Romans. The emperor Tiberius, who followed Augustus in AD 14, abolished the Plebeian Assembly and transferred its powers to the Senate. Instead of a political voice, Roman citizens now had free handouts of wheat and, subsequently, olive oil, wine, and pork, and were kept entertained by circuses and gladiatorial contests. With Augustus’s reforms, emperors began to rely not so much on the army made up of citizen-soldiers, but on the Praetorian Guard, the elite group of professional soldiers created by Augustus. The Guard itself would soon become an important independent broker of who would become emperor, often through not peaceful means but civil wars and intrigue. Augustus also strengthened the aristocracy against common Roman citizens, and the growing inequality that had underpinned the conflict between Tiberius Gracchus and the aristocrats continued, perhaps even strengthened.
    The accumulation of power at the center made the property rights of common Romans less secure. State lands also expanded with the empire as a consequence of confiscation, and grew to as much as half of the land in many parts of the empire. Property rights became particularly unstable because of the concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and his entourage. In a pattern not too different from what happened in the Maya city-states, infighting to take control of this powerful position increased. Civil wars became a regular occurrence, even before the chaotic fifth century, when the barbarians ruled supreme. For example, Septimius Severus seized power from Didius Julianus, who had made himself emperor after the murder of Pertinax in AD 193. Severus, the third emperor in the so-called Year of the Five Emperors, then waged war against his rival claimants, the generals Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, who were finally defeatedin AD 194 and 197, respectively. Severus confiscated all the property of his losing opponents in the ensuing civil war. Though able rulers, such as Trajan ( AD 98 to 117), Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius in the next century, could stanch decline, they could not, or did not want to, address the fundamental institutional problems. None of these men proposed abandoning the empire or re-creating effective political institutions along the lines of the Roman Republic. Marcus Aurelius, for all his successes, was followed by his son