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

By AD 450, at the start of what historians used to call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty and political chaos. There would be no effective centralized state in England for hundreds of years.
D IVERGING P ATHS
    The rise of inclusive institutions and the subsequent industrial growth in England did not follow as a direct legacy of Roman (or earlier) institutions. This does not mean that nothing significant happened with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a major event affecting most of Europe. Since different parts of Europe shared the same critical junctures, their institutions would drift in a similar fashion, perhaps in a distinctively European way. The fall of the Roman Empire was a crucial part of these common critical junctures. This European path contrasts with paths in other parts of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas, which developed differently partly because they did not face the same critical junctures.
    Roman England collapsed with a bang. This was less true in Italy, or Roman Gaul (modern France), or even North Africa, where many of the old institutions lived on in some form. Yet there is no doubt that the change from the dominance of a single Roman state to a plethora of states run by Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Burgundians was significant. The power of these states was far weaker, and they were buffeted by a long series of incursions from their peripheries. From the north came the Vikings and Danes in their longboats. From the east came the Hunnic horsemen. Finally, the emergence of Islam as a religion and political force in the century after the death of Mohammed in AD 632 led to the creation of new Islamic states in most of the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, andSpain. These common processes rocked Europe, and in their wake a particular type of society, commonly referred to as feudal, emerged. Feudal society was decentralized because strong central states had atrophied, even if some rulers such as Charlemagne attempted to reconstruct them.
    Feudal institutions, which relied on unfree, coerced labor (the serfs), were obviously extractive, and they formed the basis for a long period of extractive and slow growth in Europe during the Middle Ages. But they also were consequential for later developments. For instance, during the reduction of the rural population to the status of serfs, slavery disappeared from Europe. At a time when it was possible for elites to reduce the entire rural population to serfdom, it did not seem necessary to have a separate class of slaves as every previous society had had. Feudalism also created a power vacuum in which independent cities specializing in production and trade could flourish. But when the balance of power changed after the Black Death, and serfdom began to crumble in Western Europe, the stage was set for a much more pluralistic society without the presence of any slaves.
    The critical junctures that gave rise to feudal society were distinct, but they were not completely restricted to Europe. A relevant comparison is with the modern African country of Ethiopia, which developed from the Kingdom of Aksum, founded in the north of the country around 400 BC . Aksum was a relatively developed kingdom for its time and engaged in international trade with India, Arabia, Greece, and the Roman Empire. It was in many ways comparable to the Eastern Roman Empire in this period. It used money, built monumental public buildings and roads, and had very similar technology, for example, in agriculture and shipping. There are also interesting ideological parallels between Aksum and Rome. In AD 312, the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, as did King Ezana of Aksum about the same time. Map 12 shows the location of the historical state of Aksum in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, with outposts across the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
    Just as Rome declined, so did Aksum, and its historical decline followed a pattern close to that of the Western Roman Empire. The roleplayed by the Huns and Vandals in the decline of Rome was taken by the Arabs, who, in the seventh century, expanded into the Red Sea and down the Arabian Peninsula. Aksum lost its colonies in Arabia and its trade routes. This precipitated economic decline: money stopped being coined, the urban population fell, and there was a refocusing of the state into the interior of the country and up into the highlands of modern Ethiopia.

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