The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Map 4. The Arabian Peninsula: The Origins of Islam and the Saudi State, and the Historic City of Uruk

Life was more complicated around the Kaaba, and not just because of more frequent and varied conflicts that arose when people from different clans settled in the town. The new economic opportunities arising from the pilgrimage and the subsequent spread of trade fostered individualism and generated novel conflicts at the same time as they started to slightly relax the cage of norms and erode previous solidarities and bonds of community that had dominated life in the desert.

It was in this social context that a prophet emerged. At around the age of forty, Muhammad began to have visions and received revelations that he eventually identified as coming from the Angel Gabriel. These revelations, which formed the beginning of what would come to be the Quran, the holy book of Muslims, were in the form of aphorisms exhorting people to recognize a new monotheistic religion with Allah as the one true God. They proposed not just a new religion, but a new community and new norms that would transcend the clans, such as the Hashim. They also criticized many of the new individualistic behaviors and the focus on making money.

Muhammad began to preach this new religion and exhort others to swear fealty to this new God. His first converts were his wife Khadija and his close relatives and friends. By 613 he was preaching more broadly in the town. But this wasn’t welcomed by everybody. Other trading clans resented the attacks on their behavior and religious beliefs, and they worried that Muhammad was making a bid for political power in Mecca, which at the time did not have a centralized government. Muhammad’s following gradually grew and the situation became more and more tense. In 622 he fled, along with a group of his followers, to Medina; this was the famous Hegira (“emigration”).

This emigration was precipitated not just by the mounting hostility to Muhammad in Mecca, but by a petition from citizens of Medina to come and help them solve their problems. Like Mecca, Medina was suffering the birth pangs of settled life. Unlike Mecca, however, it was not a trading hub but an oasis specializing in highly productive agriculture. Different parts of the oasis had been settled by different clans from two tribes, the Aws and the Khazraj. There were also three Jewish clans. The clans had built small forts as their strongholds, and engaged in incessant conflict that had culminated in 618 in the battle of Bu’ath. Life was starting to resemble Warre.

Some of the Medinans came up with the idea that Muhammad, as a neutral outsider and with the authority of his new religion, could be the arbiter for disputes and would bring peace and order to the town. In June 622, seventy-five of them went to Mecca to request that he move to Medina; they pledged themselves to protect him and the new religion. Muhammad agreed. The agreement between him and the Medinans is recorded in a document known as the Constitution of Medina. This declares that “wherever there is anything about which you differ, it is to be referred to God and to Muhammad.” In effect Muhammad was to take on the role of judge in disputes between individuals and clans. But how could he do that if he did not have the power to enforce his laws and make others do what he commanded? Yet the reference to God in the Constitution of Medina made it clear that Muhammad didn’t come just as an individual; he came as a prophet, and part of the package was that the Medinans had to accept his teachings and revelations. Indeed, the Constitution of Medina started thus:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

This is a writing of Muhammad the prophet between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib and those who follow them and are attached to them and who crusade along with them. They are a single community distinct from other people.

This ought to have signaled to the Medinans (the people from Yathrib) that they were perhaps getting more than they bargained for with the new constitution. The constitution didn’t just make Muhammad a judge. It recognized a new sort of society, based not on kin and clan, but on religion and the nascent centralized authority of a prophet. This was the end of statelessness.

Muhammad didn’t at first have any official position or executive power, but from this modest platform he soon got moving. His approach ought to have been evident from the opening paragraph above, which says “who crusade along with them.” Crusade? By 623, the year after the Hegira, Muhammad started to organize raids on Meccan trade caravans with the people he had brought with him from Mecca, known as the Emigrants. Engaging in such raids was not unusual among the tribes of Arabia, but they began to take on a new connotation. Instead of just being raids of one tribe on another, they were raids by Muslims against unbelievers. By 624 the raids began to include not just the Emigrants, but also the Helpers, the name for Medinans who had converted to Islam. By March of that year the Emigrants and Helpers together defeated a large Meccan force sent out against them at the battle of Badr.

Badr and the subsequent battle of Uhud increased Muhammad’s prestige and control over Medina. He proceeded to remove clans that had proved disloyal, particularly the Jews, and he started to use his religious authority to reform local society, changing both marriage and inheritance practices.

Muhammad might have been brought in with a limited mandate to resolve disputes, but he was building a new state over which the preexisting clans would have little control. Over time his power grew. One reason for this was that nomadic tribes in the desert heard of his success and came to Medina to swear their loyalty to him. Another reason stemmed from the fact that part of the benefit of the raids which the Emigrants carried out was booty. Muhammad himself received one-fifth of this. He also stipulated that they make contributions (actually taxes), which had to be paid to the “community of God,” and in addition imposed taxes for protection on Jews and Christians. Growing power and wealth are evident in the number of horses that Muhammad was able to field as cavalry in different raids. At the battle of Badr in 624 he had two horses. By the year 630 he could put 10,000 horses into the field.

Muhammad capitalized on his growing authority in 628 when he led a large mission of Emigrants and Helpers to Mecca purportedly to engage in pilgrimage. Understandably anxious, the Meccans forced them to stop short of the town and negotiated a deal whereby the Meccans would vacate the town the following year so that Muhammad and his followers could come on pilgrimage. While they waited for the deal to be struck, Muhammad gathered all his people under a tree and made them pledge themselves to him. This pledge, known as the Pledge of Good Pleasure, was one more step in the establishment of the state in Medina. As Hobbes imagined, the Leviathan needs people to submit to its will. This is what the people of Medina did, agreeing to do whatever Muhammad commanded. Though he still had no formal legislative or executive office, he was in effect the ruler of a new state.

His great authority is illustrated by an event that occurred in 630, just two years before he died. Muhammad was set on expanding the scope of his state and converting more people to the new religion. To achieve this objective, he decided to send a military force against the town of Tabuk in the north, and he insisted that all Muslims from Medina take part in this raid as a religious duty. He was now commander in chief.

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The story of Muhammad’s creation of the new Islamic state encapsulates some of the key ideas of this chapter. Prior to his emergence as a prophet, there were no real states in Arabia, just tribes. Even more urbanized areas, like Mecca and Medina, didn’t really have centralized government. This created a lot of problems, not least violence and insecurity. When they lived in the vast wilderness of the Arabian Desert, there was plenty of room for all the tribes, but in the cramped oasis of Medina or around the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, they had to figure out how to live with one another. The creation of more centralized authority was one obvious way out. But how to do that without ceding control to another clan or tribe?

Then came Muhammad and his revelations from the Angel Gabriel, and the Medinans saw in his teachings a solution to their predicament. They brought him in to resolve conflicts between the clans and tribes. He succeeded in bringing peace, clearly a great service to the people living in Medina. But it didn’t stop there. Though Muhammad and the Emigrants might have been a small minority to start with, they grew in number and became more powerful and wealthier as people joined them and agreed to contribute to their finances. This was the birth of political hierarchy in Arabia. By 628, with the Pledge of Good Pleasure, Muhammad’s authority in Medina was unassailable. Two years later in the attack on Tabuk, he ordered the entire oasis to march north.

The Medinans had come a long way in eight years. They had acceded to a more centralized authority to help resolve their conflicts, but in doing so they had started the process of state formation and got onto the slippery slope. They never got off it. Muhammad was engaged in a state-building project; part of his objective was to centralize authority in his and his followers’ hands, and in the process transform not just conflict resolution but the overall organization of society, its norms, its customs. He succeeded brilliantly. In less than a decade, he created the seeds of a powerful Islamic state, a giant pan–Middle Eastern empire and a new impressive civilization.

What’s Your Edge?

The birth of Islam is an example of what anthropologists call “pristine state formation”—the building of political hierarchy and some type of centralized authority where none existed before. It also illustrates the critical issues and difficulties associated with this.

The most important one, which we already highlighted in the previous chapter, is the slippery slope. The reason why centralized authority doesn’t arise easily in many stateless societies is because these societies have developed norms and practices not just to control conflict, but also to prevent anybody from getting too strong. Once an individual or group manages to increase their power sufficiently to be able to adjudicate conflicts and provide security against major threats, it is difficult to stop them from getting even more power and start telling others what to do in every sphere of their lives. This is exactly what happened in Medina. The Medinans thought they could set up a system to redress some of the defects of not having a state, without submitting wholesale to the authority of a state or a charismatic, powerful leader. They failed. Several other societies starting off without centralized authority have similarly failed, sliding down the slippery slope toward a dominating Leviathan.

So why do the norms and the other controls that such societies have developed sometimes fail to rein in state builders? To start with, there is what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed the “will to power”—the desire of men (and sometimes women) and groups to increase their power and authority over others, even if the norms are against it. For this reason, even in the most harmonious-looking stateless societies, there will be upstart individuals wishing to acquire more power, more wealth, and greater ability to dominate others. There will also be individuals and groups wishing to obtain more power because they have a vision of reorganizing society in a different manner. Many of these upstarts will be prevented from achieving their objectives by the prevailing norms and the actions of others in their societies, and yet some will succeed.

Would-be state builders are more likely to succeed and emasculate the norms meant to restrain them if they have an “edge”—something special, making it possible for them to overcome the barriers in their way. For Muhammad, the edge came from religion. He had a religious ideology that gave him a legitimate authority in his conflict resolution role and also afforded him great influence over his followers, which he used to found a new community. Once unleashed, this religious ideology created an unstoppable drive toward more centralized authority.

Another powerful edge is organizational, emanating from the ability of a leader to forge new coalitions or more effective organizations to exercise greater command or military force, a possibility illustrated by the formation of the Zulu state in Southern Africa, which we turn to next. Yet another possibility, which we discuss a little later in this chapter, is a technological edge, exemplified by the successful state-building project of King Kamehameha of Hawaii, which heavily relied on his use of guns, a military technology his enemies did not have access to. In all of these cases, personal charisma and other sources of legitimacy, for example, resulting from lineage, past exemplary or heroic behavior, or simply a force of personality, help as well.

A final important feature of many examples of pristine state formation illustrated by Muhammad’s rise is the reorganization of society following the emergence of political hierarchy. As we saw in the previous chapter, societies without centralized authority are typically organized by a complex of norms that regulate and control conflict—and in fact every aspect of people’s lives. Once the process of state formation is under way, state builders have an incentive to destroy these norms or at the very least transform them to serve their own objectives. This is not necessarily because they want to relax the cage of norms and unleash liberty, but because the norms that restrain and limit political hierarchy are standing in their way to greater power. In Muhammad’s case, an important target was to supplant the kin-based relations prevailing in Medina and Mecca, which he could successfully do because his religious teachings elevated a new community over kin. For Shaka, as we’ll next see, the target was the authority of witch doctors.

The Horns of the Buffalo

In his memoirs, British officer Horace Smith-Dorrien recalled the events of January 22, 1879:

At about 12 a.m. the Zulus … again showed in large numbers, coming down into the plain over the hills with great boldness, and our guns and rifles were pretty busy for some time … It was difficult to see exactly what was going on, but firing was heavy. It was evident now that the Zulus were in great force, for they could be seen extending (i.e. throwing out their horns) away across the plain to the southeast, apparently working towards the right rear of the camp.

Smith-Dorrien was a member of an expeditionary force under Frederic Thesiger, Lord Chelmsford, that was sent into Zululand, now part of the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa (which is shown in Map 5). Chelmsford’s force was the vanguard of an expanding colonial empire whose aim was to eliminate the independent Zulu state, then ruled by King Cetshwayo. The king’s response to the British invasion was simple. He told his army:

March slowly, attack at dawn and eat up the red soldiers.

That’s what they did on January 22. Chelmsford made the mistake of dividing his force, leaving about 1,300 soldiers, mostly members of the 24th Regiment of Foot, and two artillery pieces camped at the feet of the rock of Isandlwana. Overconfident and underprepared, the red soldiers faced an army of 20,000 Zulu warriors who in the previous sixty years had cut out and consolidated a huge state in Southern Africa. So large was the Zulu state that it had already sent shock waves through the region, into modern-day Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (see Map 5).

Smith-Dorrien recorded:

The advancing Zulus’ line … was a marvellous sight, line upon line of men in slightly extended order, one behind the other, firing as they came along, for a few of them had firearms, bearing all before them. The rocket battery, apparently then only a mile to our front, was firing, and suddenly it ceased, and presently we saw the remnants of Durnford’s force, mostly mounted Basutos, galloping back to the right of our position. What had actually happened I don’t think we ever shall know accurately. The ground was intersected with “dongas,” and in them Russell with his rocket battery was caught, and none escaped to tell the tale. I heard later that Durnford, who was a gallant leader, actually reached the camp and fell there fighting.

By the end of the day the British force had been wiped out. Smith-Dorrien escaped because of his dark blue officer’s uniform. The Zulu soldiers had been told not to kill people in black because they were civilians, possibly priests. Just a few others lived to tell the tale and witness the greatest military defeat suffered by the British in their colonization of Africa.

Map 5. Southern Africa: The Lands of the Zulu and the Tonga, and the Four South African Colonies

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In watching, apparently quite calmly, the advance of the Zulu army, Smith-Dorrien witnessed one of the great tactical innovations that had helped empower the Zulu state, the “horns of the buffalo.” This was a military formation created by Shaka Zulu, the founder of the state, where the army formed into four main components: the chest of the buffalo at the center, the loins behind it, and two horns on either side that encircled the enemy. Smith-Dorrien also saw some of Shaka’s other innovations in action—the disciplined regiments that were formed when Shaka took traditional ritual associations and militarized them, and the iklwa, a short stabbing spear with which Shaka had replaced the previous weapon of choice, the assegai, a javelin.

The Wrong Doer Who Knows No Law

Shaka was born around 1787, the illegitimate son of the then Zulu chief. At that time the Zulu formed a small chieftaincy among many others spread out over southern South Africa. Something of an outcast because of her illegitimate child, Shaka’s mother took refuge with a neighboring people, the Mthethwa. In 1800 the Mthethwa had a new chief, named Dingiswayo. Dingiswayo anticipated some of Shaka’s subsequent reforms and began a highly successful military and territorial expansion, conquering about thirty surrounding groups, including the Zulu. The young Shaka, called into the Mthethwa army, became one of its most effective warriors, soon known for his bravery and unscrupulousness. Dingiswayo tried to behave magnanimously toward defeated enemies; not so Shaka, who was typically in favor of massacring them all. His behavior won him the moniker “the wrong doer who knows no law.” Shaka made his way up through the ranks until eventually he was promoted to be head of the army. In 1816, when Shaka’s father died, Dingiswayo made sure that Shaka became the new chief of the Zulu.

Shaka immediately set about reorganizing Zulu society and those that he conquered into a new type of social system. He first called up all of the adult males and separated them into four regiments, which would form his first buffalo’s chest, loins, and horns. Probably only about 400 men appeared at this juncture. He started to train them in the use of the iklwa, the spear that he had blacksmiths forge, and a new type of battle shield. He made them throw away their sandals and walk barefoot, which allowed them to move faster. Then with his first serious military force ready for action, he began to conquer surrounding areas. First were the eLangeni, who quickly succumbed and were incorporated into his rule. Next came the Butelezi, who put up a fight and were massacred. Within one year Shaka’s army grew to 2,000 men. By the next year Dingiswayo was killed and Shaka made himself king of the Mthethwa. His ruthless tactics subdued one tribe after another, incorporating many into the expanding Zulu state. As one oral history records:

The Butelezi, amaQungebe, Imbuyeni, amaCunu, Majola, Xulu, Sikakane, are all tribes which were quite close … Tshaka attacked and killed off these tribes; he crept up on them in the night. Tribes further off were the amaMbata, Gasa, Kumalo, Hlubi, Qwabe, Dube, Langeni, Tembu, Zungu, Makoba.

The phrase “killed off” had different meanings in different contexts. In some cases, like the Butelezi, it seems to literally describe what happened. But in others the tribe was simply incorporated into the expanding Zulu state. Still others stayed more distant but declared themselves tributaries to the Zulus and paid “taxes” in cattle and young women. By 1819 Shaka had expanded the Zulu territory from about 100 square miles to 11,500, and his army stood at 20,000.

Shaka built a new capital at Bulawayo (marked on Map 5), and we have a firsthand description of it from 1824, when a party of English traders from Port Natal, now Durban, visited it. One of them, Henry Flynn, left a written record:

On entering the great cattle kraal we found drawn up within about 80,000 natives in their war attire … Shaka then raised the stick in his hand and after striking with it right and left and springing out from amidst the chiefs, the whole mass broke from their position and formed up into regiments. Portions of these rushed to the river and the surrounding hills, whilst the remainder, forming themselves into a circle, commenced dancing with Shaka in their midst. It was an exciting scene, surprising to us, who could not have imagined that a nation termed “savages” could be so well disciplined. Regiments of girls, headed by officers of their own sex then entered the center of the arena to the number of 8,000 to 10,000 each holding a slight staff in her hand. They joined in the dance, which continued for about two hours.

Shaka also started the process of transforming existing norms. Instead of being based on kinship and clan, Shaka’s state was based on two new axes. One was age. In many parts of Africa and elsewhere, when boys and girls come of age, they are initiated into the secret lore of the society, a process that typically goes along with circumcision and scarification. It involves staying for long periods in the wilderness and various types of ordeals. In some African societies these initiations became so institutionalized that when a cohort of boys, and sometimes even girls, was initiated, they became inducted into a group known as an “age set” (or “age grade”) to which they would belong for their entire life.

In many parts of East Africa, whole peoples became organized not around kinship or a state, but around a sequence of these age grades. The grades undertook different functions as their members grew older, for example young men would be warriors, protecting the people or cattle. As they got older and a new cohort came along, they would transition into marriage and economic activities such as farming. Among the Zulu and other related peoples in Southern Africa these social structures were already present, even if in a rudimentary form. Shaka took them and militarized them. He turned age grades into military regiments and got them to live together in separate barracks. He also started recruiting the youth of the peoples he conquered. These regiments provided a way of breaking down the ties of family and integrating people into the new state. The role of the age sets in creating a new Zulu identity is revealed by an interchange at the annual harvest festival of Umkosi. At this time it was permissible for anyone to ask any question of the chief, and one impertinent soldier asked Shaka, “Why are outsiders promoted over the heads of Zulus?” To which Shaka supposedly retorted, “Any man who joins the Zulu army becomes a Zulu. Thereafter his promotion is purely a question of merit, irrespective of the road he came by.”

The other new axis was geographic. Shaka divided the territory into counties and either left existing chiefs in place, though making it clear they now served at his pleasure, or appointed loyal soldiers of his army as governors.

In the process, Shaka centralized many functions into his own hands. Previously the harvest festival of Umkosi had been celebrated widely in the region, with individual chiefs conducting the ceremony. Now only Shaka presided over the annual rites. He also created a centralized court. Although chiefs could adjudicate disputes and solve local problems, ultimate appeal could be made to Shaka in Bulawayo.

A primary way in which Shaka maintained his system was tribute and its distribution among his supporters. As he conquered or subdued surrounding peoples, he forcibly demanded huge numbers of cows and women. He endowed his regiments with cattle in reward for their services and organized women into age regiments as well, and segregated them, forbidding the men to marry or have sexual relations with them until he allowed it.

Of course this was a state that was not bureaucratized in the way modern states are. Though Shaka had advisers, the state was run by the army and his appointed chiefs, and in the absence of writing, laws and rules were oral. Bureaucratized or unbureaucratized, Shaka’s state-building project had to break parts of the cage of norms that were inhibiting the emergence of political hierarchy and Shaka’s authority. A pillar of these norms, just as with the Tiv’s norms we saw in Chapter 2, was the complex of supernatural beliefs often used for grinding down anyone getting too big for their boots.

In a famous incident, not long after he became chief of the Zulus, Shaka had to deal with some evil omens. A hammerhead crane flew over Shaka’s kraal; then a porcupine wandered into it; then a crow perched on a fence and began to utter human words. These omens necessitated summoning a team of witch doctors, headed by a woman called Nobela, who indicated the identity of witches by hitting them with the gnu tails the team carried. Not so different from the fly whisk of the Tiv. The parallels with the Tiv didn’t stop there. The Zulus were lined up and Nobela and her associates began “smelling out” the witches who had brought on the evil omens. They picked on prosperous people. One had grown rich through frugality. Another had put cattle manure on his lands as fertilizer, producing a bountiful harvest much greater than his neighbors’. Yet another was a fine stock breeder who had picked the best bulls and taken great care of his stock and as a result had seen a prodigious expansion of his herds. But taking down the rich was not enough. Nobela was after the politically powerful too. She started by “smelling” two of Shaka’s trusted lieutenants, Mdlaka and Mgobozi. Anticipating this move, Shaka told them to stand next to him and claim sanctuary if they were accused of being witches. According to eyewitness accounts:

With a hideous cackle, imitating the hyena’s demoniacal laugh all five jumped up simultaneously. With lightening speed Nobela struck right and left with her gnu-tail and jumped over Mdlaka’s and Mgobozi’s shoulders, while each of her immediate assistants also struck the man in front of her and vaulted high over his head.

But Shaka wasn’t putting up with this. After all, he was the most powerful person in Zululand, intent on exercising his naked will to power; he might be the next one to be smelled out. He granted Mdlaka and Mgobozi sanctuary and charged Nobela with falsely accusing them of being witches, decreeing that two of the witch doctors must die in compensation. He made them throw divining bones to identify which two should be chosen. This led to panic between the witch doctors, who appealed to Shaka to protect them. He agreed on the stipulation that they “cheat me no more, for on that day you will fail to find sanctuary anywhere.” From that day on, any “smelling out” had to be confirmed by Shaka. He broke the witch doctors’ power. He also banished every rainmaker. It was all part of creating a state. Any part of the cage of norms that stood in his way had to be taken apart.

The longevity of the institutions that Shaka built is best illustrated by the current population of the Zulus. Starting from a clan of possibly 2,000 people in 1816, there are now between 10 and 11 million people who identify themselves as Zulu in South Africa (out of a population of 57 million) and they dominate the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The “Zulu” had originally been the descendants of a single man, but are now a massive society including millions of people who are completely unrelated genetically to the original Zulu.

The Red-Mouthed Gun

For thousands of years, people spread out from Asia onto the great swath of Polynesian islands. Among the last to be colonized was the Hawaiian archipelago, probably in about 800 CE. Though all the Polynesian islands started with the same culture, religion, language, technology, and political and economic institutions, they gradually diverged as different innovations arose and stuck. Ancestral Polynesian societies, as reconstructed by archaeologists and historical ethnographers, were not that different from the types of kinship-based societies that we saw in pre-Shaka Zululand; they were small-scale chieftaincies organized around kinship, and as usual their suite of norms had evolved to manage conflict and stop would-be strongmen.

By the time the first outsider, Captain James Cook, stumbled on the Hawaiian Islands in January 1778, this traditional system had already started to break down. The islands were by now organized around three competing proto-states, already beyond the stage of pristine state formation. Even though land was not held as private property and its use and control rights were vested in kin groups and lineages, chiefs had already laid claim to all the land. The people who grew the staple crops of taro and sago had access to the land only because the chiefs gave it to them in exchange for tribute and labor services. The historian David Malo, one of the first Hawaiians to receive a Western education and become literate early in the nineteenth century, recorded:

The condition of the common people was that of subjection to the chiefs, compelled to do their heavy tasks, burdened and oppressed, some even to death. The life of the people was one of patient endurance, of yielding to the chiefs to purchase their favor … It was from the common people, however, that the chiefs received their food and their apparel for men and women, also their houses and many other things. When the chiefs went forth to war some of the commoners also went out to fight on the same side with them … It was the makaainanas also who did all the work on the land; yet all they produced from the soil belonged to the chiefs; and the power to expel a man from the land and rob him of his possessions lay with the chief.

The makaainanas were the ordinary people, the vast mass of society.

The three proto-states in Hawaii at this time were in O‘ahu, Maui, and the “big island” of Hawaii itself ruled by chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u (see Map 6). Cook first visited the island of Kaua‘i, part of O‘ahu. He returned later in the year for more exploration and mapping with his two ships, the Discovery and the Resolution. He landed on Maui, then moved farther east and met Kalani‘ōpu‘u, who was then engaged in a battle to take control of Maui. Kalani‘ōpu‘u came aboard Cook’s ship with his nephew Kamehameha, one of the leaders of his army. Cook then set sail for Hawaii and anchored on the western side of the island. There he was again visited by Kalani‘ōpu‘u and Kamehameha, who saw for the first time something marvelous—the power of firearms. In the photography section we reproduce a painting by John Webber, an artist who accompanied Captain Cook, showing the arrival of Kalani‘ōpu‘u in his war boats. These were on display on February 14, when Cook was killed after leading a shore party trying to recover a cutter, a small boat, which had been stolen from his flagship the previous night.

Map 6. The Hawaiian Islands and the Puna Coast

After the departure of the Discovery and the Resolution, the aging Kalani‘ōpu‘u decided to bequeath his kingdom to one of his sons, but he put Kamehameha in charge of the God of War, which was a significant honor. The two young men quickly fell out. They met in battle in 1782 and Kamehameha won. In the succession struggle that ensued, one of Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s brothers declared an independent polity on the eastern side of Hawaii, while another one of Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s sons declared independence for the south. It was now a three-way fight for who would control the big island.

The outcome would be determined by an edge that Kamehameha acquired. He’d seen the power of gunpowder weapons. From this point onward, all Hawaiian chiefs tried to acquire such weapons via trade. But having them was one thing, knowing how to use them was another. Help arrived for Kamehameha first in the shape of Isaac Davis. Davis was a sailor on the schooner Fair American, which visited Hawaii in early 1790. It became becalmed off the western coast and was attacked by a local chief who harbored resentments against a previous ship. Only Davis survived the attack, and he was taken under Kamehameha’s protection. Meanwhile another ship, the Eleanor, was dropping anchor in the same place where Cook had died. The boatswain was an Englishman called John Young. He came ashore and was detained by Kamehameha’s men. Both Davis and Young were treated royally and became trusted advisers. Even better, they knew how to maintain and use firearms. Kamehameha now had his edge.

With Davis and Young in charge of his firearms, Kamehameha invaded Maui, and then successfully defended Hawaii against several attacks, in the process scoring a famous victory called “the red-mouthed gun,” a name used by the locals to express their awe at the fire and smoke that issued from the new gunpowder weapons. Kamehameha quickly established uncontested control over Hawaii. He then spent the next several years consolidating his rule and developing the institutions of his new state. In 1795 he sailed with Davis and Young and a giant war fleet, overwhelming Maui and finally capturing O‘ahu. The westernmost island of Kaua‘i, which had escaped capture thanks to rough seas and diseases stopping Kamehameha’s army, was at last subdued in 1810, completing the unification of all of Hawaii for the first time. Kamehameha proceeded to create a new set of political institutions to govern this massive state of far-flung islands. He appointed governors to each island, and Young was made governor of the big island itself.

Breaking Taboos

Muhammad and Shaka had to break parts of the cage of norms in their societies since many of these norms limited the emergence and exercise of political authority. Muhammad, for example, fought against kin-based relations while Shaka transformed both kin relations and supernatural beliefs in order to weaken sources of competing power. Kamehameha and his followers would similarly have to break down the norms that stood in their way.

Central to Polynesian society’s norms were regulations of tapu, or taboos, as they came to be known in English after their first documentation by Captain Cook. Tapu was a common institution throughout Polynesia, and in Hawaii it had evolved into kapu. In English, “taboo” means something forbidden, off limits. In Polynesia, in the words of Edward Handy, the first great modern ethnographer of Hawaii,

in its fundamental meaning tapu [kapu] as a word was used primarily as an adjective and as such signified that which was physically dangerous, hence restricted, forbidden, set apart, to be avoided, because: (a) divine, therefore requiring isolation for its own sake from both the common and the corrupt; (b) corrupt, hence dangerous to the common and the divine, therefore requiring isolation from both for their sakes.

In essence, tapu meant a prohibition or restriction. These were everywhere in Polynesian society. Tapu was so important because it was supposed to protect mana. Mana was the manifestation of supernatural power in the human world. Handy says:

Mana was exhibited in persons, in power, strength, prestige, reputation, skill, dynamic personality, intelligence; in things, in efficacy, in “luck”; that is, in accomplishment.

But how did you protect mana, exactly? Notable among the many restrictions was the “eating taboo,” which dictated that men and women could not eat together; their foods had to be cooked in separate ovens and some foods were prohibited to women (such as pork and certain kinds of fish, and bananas). It wasn’t just eating that was controlled. So were clothing and many other aspects of life. Most famous was the “prostrating taboo,” which required that ordinary people immediately strip off their upper body garments and lie prostrate on the ground in the presence of a chief. The nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Kepelino recorded:

As to the prostrating tapu of the chief, when the chief wished to go forth the announcer went ahead proclaiming the tapu of the chief, thus: “Tapu! Lie down!” Then everyone prostrated himself on the way by which the chief was passing and the tapu chiefs who followed him, all dressed with great splendor in feather cloaks and helmets.

Just as our earlier discussion of the cage of norms suggested, the prevailing norms did not necessarily treat everyone equally because they were shaped in part by existing power relations in Polynesian society. Chiefs had a lot more mana than ordinary people—hence all the prostration. In Hawaii it was this power of chiefs that also transformed tapu into kapu. Chiefs were not just protecting the gods and their mana; they came to be regarded as direct descendants of the gods, and kapu was about enshrining this dominance. At its root, mana is not so different from the tsav of the Tiv. Remember that tsav, like mana, helped explain different outcomes in life—why it was that some people were more successful than others or behaved in a different way. But with tsav, someone who was very successful could be so because they were intrinsically talented or simply because they were a witch. With mana, instead, success came from being chosen by the gods. Despite this enormous difference, the whole kapu system was still hedged about by myriad regulations and restrictions limiting what the elites could do. Although political hierarchy had already started to form in Hawaii, it was still far from what it would become under Kamehameha.

The erosion of norms limiting political hierarchy started under Kamehameha. He had named his son Liholiho as his successor, and upon taking over the newly created kingship of Hawaii following his father’s death in 1819, Liholiho, crowned as King Kamehameha II, decided to abolish the kapu system. He felt confident of his power to do something no previous chief had done. So he dissolved the prohibition against eating altogether. Soon after being crowned king, he organized a feast. As a contemporary recalled it:

After the guests were seated, and had begun to eat, the king took two or three turns round each table, as if to see what passed at each; and then suddenly, and without any previous warning to any but those in the secret, seated himself in a vacant chair at the women’s table, and began to eat voraciously, but was evidently much perturbed. The guests, astonished at this act, clapped their hands, and cried out “Ai Noa,—the eating tabu is broken.”

A Time of Troubles

We have so far focused on the emergence of political hierarchy where none, or very little of it, existed before. How the will to power breaks down the resistance against it and may move a society along the slippery slope is not confined to the distant past. The will to power and its consequences can also be seen in contemporary cases where state institutions are present but unable to exercise control over society, such as in Georgia in the early 1990s.

In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was collapsing. Moves were afoot to establish independence in many Soviet republics, including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as Georgia. Georgia’s first genuine free multiparty elections took place in 1990. A coalition called “Round Table—Free Georgia” got two-thirds of the vote against the Georgian Communists. In May 1991 the country declared itself independent of the Soviet Union, and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the leader of the Round Table, was elected president with 85 percent of the vote. He took over a country riven by fractures and contesting visions, and without any real consensus about how it should be run. Many minority groups were concerned about being dominated by ethnic Georgians and started to talk about secession. By January 1992, Gamsakhurdia had fled the country, and the capital, Tbilisi, was mostly in the hands of two warlords, Dzhaba Ioseliani, head of a paramilitary group called the Mkhedrioni, and Tengiz Kitovani, head of the National Guard. At one point in just Tbilisi there were as many as twelve other militias and armed groups (with colorful names like the White Eagles and Forest Brotherhood). Georgia had a state at this point (well, sort of), but things weren’t so far from the condition of Warre.

Tengiz Segura, a former prime minister dismissed by Gamsakhurdia, managed to have himself reinstated in the job. Gamsakhurdia formed another armed group, the Zviadists. Without an effective state, the capital experienced a wave of violence, looting, crime, and rape. The state lost control of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which declared themselves independent, and other places, like Adjara and Samtskhe-Javaketi, remained completely autonomous. A civil war began. Georgians call it the Time of Troubles.

By the spring of 1993 the warlords were trying to find a way out of the chaos. Ioseliani and Kitovani had taken over what was left of the Georgian state, but conflict was rife and they weren’t making any progress in bringing order. Just as important, they needed a respectable face to show to the international community to gain legitimacy and access to foreign aid and resources. They hit on the plan to make Eduard Shevardnadze president. Shevardnadze, a native of Georgia, had been Mikhail Gorbachev’s minister of foreign affairs for six years until resigning in December 1990. By 1992 Shevardnadze had become speaker of the Georgian parliament. It was obvious that with his many contacts and immense international experience, he’d be the ideal face for the new nation. The idea of the warlords was simple. Shevardnadze would be the head of state and they would be behind the scenes pulling the strings. They made him Interim Chairman of the State Council, initially a four-person body including Ioseliani and Kitovani that acted only on consensus. They thus had a veto over Shevardnadze’s actions. He made Kitovani minister of defense and Ioseliani head of the Emergency Reaction Corps, an autonomous part of the armed forces. One of Ioseliani’s cronies became minister of the interior, and Shevardnadze appeared regularly in public with all of them. But then the slippery slope kicked in.

The statute that created the State Council allowed new members to be admitted if two-thirds of the existing members supported it. Shevardnadze started advocating the expansion of the council, which looked innocuous enough. Soon it evolved into a much larger body of warlords and political elites, which Shevardnadze found easier to manage. He then started to promote individuals from the militia to positions within the state apparatus in an attempt to shift their loyalty from Kitovani and Ioseliani to himself. He created a web of new military units with overlapping powers and jurisdictions: the Border Guards, the Special Emergency Response Corps, the Tbilisi Rescue Corps, the Government Guard, the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Special Alpha Unit, and the CIA-trained Presidential Guard. By 1995 the Ministry of the Interior had 30,000 people working for it, many appointed from the former militias. This went along with a huge amount of corruption and impunity as the former militia members were given carte blanche to engage in unofficial taxation and bribe extraction.

Shevardnadze’s hand was strengthened by exactly the thing he’d been put in power to do—make the regime respectable internationally so that aid and assistance would come. It did, and it came via Shevardnadze. To be really respectable you had to have a market economy, which meant privatization and regulation, all of which could be manipulated by Shevardnadze to reward his growing cadre of loyalists. In effect, Shevardnadze engaged in an immensely sophisticated high-stakes version of “divide and rule.” By September 1994 he was powerful enough to use the Mkhedrioni to arrest Kitovani, and the following year, he turned them against their own leader, Ioseliani. Shevardnadze was finally able to use a failed assassination attempt against himself as the pretext to pass a new constitution to solidify his previously mostly informal powers. The Georgian state had reemerged, and the warlords who had counted on controlling the process were swept down the slippery slope.

Why You Cannot Shackle the Will to Power

We have seen several examples of the will to power obliterating the norms meant to keep the Leviathan down. Muhammad and Shevardnadze were brought in as outsiders to resolve inherent conflicts. They played this role brilliantly, bringing better order, peace, and a firmer hand to resolve disputes. But they also turned out to be much harder to control than their initial allies had bargained for. Shaka successfully exploited his accession to the chiefdom of the Zulu to jump-start the creation of a much more powerful army and expand the power of the state and his own authority, in the process emasculating the norms meant to restrain such state-building efforts. Kamehameha managed to use gunpowder technology to subdue his rivals and build a unified and powerful state in Hawaii, unlike anything the island had experienced before.

In none of these cases, and in few of the countless others where societies previously living under the Absent Leviathan have seen the emergence of political hierarchy, do we observe a transition to a Shackled Leviathan. Nor was the point of breaking the cage of norms to create liberty; it was to eliminate barriers to greater political hierarchy. An exception is of course Dark Age Athens, which as we saw in Chapter 2 managed to build the capacity of its state to resolve conflict, control feuds, and provide public services while at the same time increasing society’s control over it and transforming the prevailing norms. So why couldn’t these other societies achieve the same thing? The answer relates to the nature of the norms and institutions in place when a society starts its process of state building. In many cases, stateless societies succumb to the will to power of a charismatic leader with an edge. What motivates many of these leaders is not a desire to create a Shackled Leviathan, to promote liberty, or to redress the imbalance between the powers of the elite and citizens, but to increase their own power and domination over society. Solon in Athens, looked at from this vantage point, was an exception because he came to power to rein in the excessive influence of rich families and elites, so building shackles on the Leviathan was part of his mandate. Not so with our other state builders.

But perhaps even more fundamentally, what set apart Athenian society at the time of Solon was that it had already developed some formal institutions that regulated the distribution of political power and the resolution of conflict. Though imperfect, these institutions provided a foundation on which Solon and then Cleisthenes and others could build to introduce greater popular participation in politics and strengthen existing norms curbing social and political hierarchy. This is how they managed to enact the hubris and ostracism laws, meant to prevent powerful individuals getting too big for their britches (and at the same time they were also able to weaken aspects of existing norms that prevented the development of the Shackled Leviathan). No such institutions existed for the Tiv, in Medina and Mecca, among the Zulu, or in Hawaii at the time of Kamehameha. Instead, stacking the cards against the Shackled Leviathan, their methods of preventing would-be strongmen from ascending to power were complex sets of norms, such as witchcraft, kin-based relations, or the kapu system, that regulated conflict and held back political hierarchy. But once the will to power pierced through these norms, not much of them was left to act as an effective counterweight to the power of the newly emerging state. State builders were also quick to reconfigure norms for their own agenda, as we have seen. Going back to Figure 1 in Chapter 2, summarizing our conceptual framework, we can see this situation as corresponding to the bottom left where both state and society are weak to start with. Without the norms and institutions of society capable of restraining the process of state building once it’s in motion, there is no corridor. Hence, in the face of the will to power, there is nowhere else for society to go but toward the Despotic Leviathan.

But this wasn’t all bad. The aspiring Leviathan in some of the cases we discussed improved conflict resolution, brought order, and sometimes even destroyed the most pernicious aspects of the cage of norms—even if it also created more hierarchy and replaced the potential for fear and violence in a stateless society with the dominance of its newly forming Despotic Leviathan. Its economic consequences weren’t bad either, because they improved the allocation of resources and made a primitive type of economic growth possible, as we’ll see in the next chapter, by studying the nature of the economy under the Absent Leviathan and its cage of norms and contrasting it to the emerging economy under the Despotic Leviathan.

Chapter 4

ECONOMICS OUTSIDE THE CORRIDOR

The Ghost in the Granary

In 1972, the anthropologist Elizabeth Colson was in the midst of her fieldwork among the Gwembe Tonga, a people of southern Zambia who had been stateless prior to the conquest of the region by the British (see Map 5 in the previous chapter). She was at a homestead collecting information when a woman entered and asked the resident housewife for grain. Both women were members of the same clan, but they lived quite far apart and only knew each other vaguely. In response to the request the housewife went to her granary and filled the visitor’s basket until it was overflowing and the visitor departed satisfied.

This type of generous sharing of food within clans, kin, or other types of groups is common among many stateless societies. It is interpreted by most anthropologists and many economists as a sign of deep-rooted customs and norms of cooperation and reciprocity. It also has a clear economic logic: today you help somebody from your clan, and tomorrow when you need it, they will help you. This is exactly how Colson initially interpreted this ostentatious generosity.

It was only later, when she observed a young man in the village receiving a disturbing letter from home, that Colson came to understand that the reality was rather different. She recorded in her field notes, “One evening, lights had been seen about his granary and his wives and brother had later found evidence that ghosts had urinated over the grain, an act which Tonga believe ghosts carry out only if sent by a sorcerer.” The likely aim of the sorcerer was to kill the man and his family. He lamented that “his ambition of the previous year—which had led him to work early and late in the large field he had planted—was now bringing him only a harvest of hate.” The same housewife, who was present, immediately grasped what was going on. Colson went on: “She thought someone must have visited his homestead and seen all the granaries, and she asked if he could remember anyone having stood to gaze at them or asking for food or making any comment about all that food.” The housewife concluded:

It is not safe to deny them. You saw me give grain to that woman who came the other day. How could I refuse when she asked me for grain? Perhaps she would do nothing, but I could not tell. The only thing to do is to give.

Not giving risked sorcery and violence. It was fear, fear from retribution and violence that would follow if she broke the norm, not some abstract notion of generosity, that made her give.

This type of threat was endemic in Tonga society and was even embodied in the structure of its clans. The neighboring Plateau Tonga, for example, have fourteen clans, each of which has associated “totems”—animals that shouldn’t be eaten. The totems of the Bayamba clan are the hyena, rhinoceros, pig, ant, and fish. Members of this clan cannot eat any of these animals. The Batenda clan has the elephant, sheep, and hippopotamus as its totems. Other forbidden animals include leopard (the Bansaka clan), frog (Bafumu clan), and even the white vulture (Bantanga clan). The origins of these food prohibitions, according to Tonga legend, is that long ago some groups of people were eating leopard, and other people became envious of the plentiful food they had and cursed them, making them subsequently allergic to the specific food. The descendants of the cursed people became the clan.

So the norms of hospitality and generosity among the Tonga had emerged and were obeyed not so much because of some moral imperative or because people saw economic benefits stemming from them, but because they feared violence and sorcery, not to mention the social ostracism and other less violent retributions that would be exacted on those deviating from the norms. They lived in a society without a state, so there were no police or government officials who could protect them or resolve disputes. Nevertheless, because of the norms preventing and containing conflict, they didn’t suffer endemic violence. The visitor came, the housewife was generous, and any potential conflict was avoided.

No Place for Industry

Hobbes thought that without centralized authority societies would find themselves in a condition of Warre. He also anticipated, as we saw in Chapter 1, that Warre would destroy economic incentives, writing “in such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain.” Or put in the language of modern economics, conflict and uncertainty mean that individuals do not have secure property rights on the fruits of their investments and on what they produce, gather, or hunt, and this discourages economic activity.

To get a sense of the economic consequences of Warre, let’s return briefly to the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the start of Chapter 1 we mentioned that the east of the country, particularly the Kivus, is plagued by militias and armed groups. Indeed, in the Kivus, Warre isn’t just between individuals, as Hobbes often seems to suggest, but between groups. One of these in eastern Congo is the RCD-Goma, based in the city of Goma. This group was a splinter faction of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (in French, Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, hence the abbreviation RCD), and had its roots in the First and Second Congo Wars, sometimes called the Great War of Africa, between 1996 and 2003. When a peace agreement was finally signed, the RCD-Goma, along with many others, kept fighting and terrorizing local residents. In December 2004, RCD-Goma units approached the town of Nyabiondo in North Kivu. The town was protected by members of another militia, the Mai-Mai. The RCD attacked on December 19. Mai-Mai fighters who were caught were tied up and burned alive. Initially civilian casualties were low, as under the cover of early-morning mist people managed to flee to the fields and forest. But the RCD hunted them down. Within a few days 191 people had been murdered in cold blood. Willy, aged just fifteen, told a researcher from Amnesty International:

The soldiers came in vehicles and on foot, killing and pillaging. Some were in uniform but others wore civilian clothes … The population fled straight to the forest. I was in a group of fifteen, with my mother, neighbours and other relatives. The soldiers found us and made us lie on the ground, where we were beaten with rifle butts. Baroki, the [local chief] was with us. The soldiers came and took him away, I saw that. Then I saw his body afterwards, a week later, on 25 December. He had taken a bullet in the head. He had been tied up and whipped. The body lay on the ground.

Girls as young as eight were raped and 25,000 people were ultimately displaced. Their belongings were destroyed and their houses burned to the ground. Nyabiondo was systematically looted with even the tiles being stolen from rooftops.

This is Warre with obvious and wrenching human consequences. The economic consequences are just as evident. The economy of the Kivus is devastated and the same is true for much of the rest of the Congo. The result is abject poverty. Income per capita in the Congo is about 40 percent of the level it was in 1960 when the country became independent. At about $400, less than 1 percent of the U.S. level, it’s as poor as any country in the world. Life expectancy is twenty years less than it is in the United States. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hobbes was right. The life of men is indeed “poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is even worse for women.

Yet the Tonga don’t look anything like the Kivus or like the type of stateless, warring peoples Hobbes portrayed. They resemble the kind of society that would support claims that we are a “cooperative species,” with norms that support cooperation, hospitality, and generosity. But as we have already seen in Chapter 1, the price that people pay for this is often being locked into the cage of norms. Yet now we come to understand that the cage constrains not only their social choices, but also their economic lives.

This is clear for the young man who had worked hard only to see his granaries attacked by ghosts and sorcerers, because people were jealous of his success. The adverse effects of these norms for economic incentives are not confined to such attacks. They also impede property rights, even if this takes a less obvious form than that which Hobbes anticipated would plague the economy of stateless societies. Suppose, for example, you invest and increase your production. With secure property rights, you would get to enjoy the greater output you produce, and you may do what you please with it. If you really enjoy being generous, that’s part of the reward. But in Tonga society, as in many other economies shaped by the cage of norms, you give that output away not because you enjoy it, but because you are afraid of the social retribution, and even the violence, you may suffer if you fall afoul of the norms. That effectively means you again do not have secure property rights, since the additional income you generate will be taken away from you, even if the taking looks voluntary, couched in customs of generosity. The consequence would be little different from what Hobbes observed; there would be “no place for industry.”

The obvious way that this manifested itself in Tonga society was in the constant presence of hunger. Hunger and begging. Colson noted how close people lived to the edge:

When a household has exhausted its own food supplies or is near to doing so, it attempts first to obtain food from kinsmen or friends who live nearby. Children and disabled people are sent to kinsmen in areas which still have food. Men go out to work to leave more food for those who must stay at home, but they take little comfort in the thought that they will be fed while at home there will be hunger. When local supplies are exhausted, people walk many miles to tap kinsmen living at a distance. Often they go to the Plateau where their appearance is looked upon with much the same enthusiasm as the settling of a swarm of locusts.

The founding father of economics, Adam Smith, emphasized the propensity of humans to “truck, barter and exchange.” In Tongaland, begging was more prevalent than trucking, bartering, or exchanging. Colson pointed out how “the Valley had no middlemen or markets to organize internal trade. It also had no universally accepted medium of exchange.” There was trade of sorts, but

much of the exchange is obligatory, consequent upon institutionalized relationships existing between the parties to the transaction: one has the right to receive and the other the obligation to give.

The result was a society trapped into subsistence agriculture, vulnerable to every sort of economic setback and adversity. Technology was stagnant and backward. Precolonial Tonga society did not use the wheel, either for pottery or transport. Farming, the economic mainstay in the area, was unproductive, not because the land was infertile, but because it was worked using digging sticks rather than plows.

As we have already seen, the origins of the Tonga cage of norms is not unrelated to Hobbes’s observations. Part of the reason why such norms have developed in many places is that egalitarianism has a clear political logic. Norms of egalitarianism maintain the status quo. When such norms are weak or nonexistent, hierarchy emerges, the slippery slope kicks in, and statelessness ends. The surviving stateless societies thus tend to be those where norms of egalitarianism are strong and ingrained. These norms also help control conflict. If conflict risks erupting into violence and feuds, it’s better to follow a closely scripted economic playbook. With new economic activities, new opportunities, and new inequalities, there will be new conflicts, which are much harder for existing norms to handle. Better not to risk tipping into Warre. Better to stay with the status quo.

The Caged Economy

This is of course very familiar from the Tiv. As you’ll recall from Chapter 2, the Tiv developed a set of norms to make sure they never got onto the slippery slope. Anyone who tried to accumulate power to start exerting authority over others was put back in his place by witchcraft accusations. It turns out that their norms and the cage they created also did the same economically, effectively forging a “caged” economy.

The Tiv were a society based on kin and descent. As we have seen, the Tiv word for a territory occupied by the descendants of a single ancestor is tar, and within a tar it was the elders who exercised what little authority there was in traditional Tiv society. They allocated sufficient land to people within the tar to provide a livelihood for their family. Sufficient, but not much more than that. As anthropologists Paul and Laura Bohannan noted, if a man “wants to plant many more yams than his wives and children need, so that he can sell them to get more money and goods than others in the compound, he is likely to be refused.”

There was also no market in Tivland where labor could be bought and sold, and no land or capital markets either. The labor of the family or the tar was the only thing available for agricultural production. Both men and women farmed, but they each farmed specific crops and only women grew the main staple, yams. Husbands were required to provide land for their wives to farm, but had no automatic claim on what they produced. There were markets for some of these produced goods, but the Bohannans remarked:

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Tiv market is that it is extraordinarily constrained and shows little tendency to invade the other institutions of society.

Indeed, the Tiv didn’t have free markets, they had markets that were caged—structured not to facilitate trade but to avoid the slippery slope.

Perhaps the most obvious instance of this is with respect to notions of the exchange of goods, which was strictly limited. The economy was separated into different spheres. One could trade within a sphere but not across spheres. The most flexible sphere was the market for foodstuffs and subsistence goods that included chickens, goats, sheep, household utensils, and other craft products (mortars, grindstones, calabashes, pots, and baskets). Raw materials used to produce any of these items would also be included here. These were traded on local markets that opened periodically, and prices were flexible and subject to haggling. Trading in such markets had already adapted to the availability of money. Nevertheless, this sphere remained completely separate from prestige goods, which could not be exchanged in a market. Prestige goods included cattle, horses, a special type of white cloth known as tugundu, medicines, magical items, and brass rods. Formerly slaves were also included in this category of goods. Money was not used in this sphere, but there were equivalences between different goods. For example, historically the price of slaves was quoted in cows and brass rods, the price of cattle in terms of brass rods and tugundu cloth.

Akiga, the Tiv elder we encountered in Chapter 2, mentions some specific ways in which various prestige items could be traded: “You could buy one iron bar for a tugundu cloth. In those days five tugundu cloths were equivalent to a bull. A cow was worth ten tugundu. One brass rod was worth about the same as one tugundu cloth; thus five brass rods were worth a bull.”

To the extent that something like modern-looking exchange happened, the terms of trade were strictly fixed and unchanging. Although these prestige items might be exchanged in this way, this did not mean they were bought or sold, or as the Bohannans put it, “Tiv will not buy cows or horses in a market.”

How do you acquire prestige goods then? Moving from subsistence goods to prestige goods was a process that the Bohannans dubbed “conversion.” The Tiv recognized that acquiring subsistence goods could be the fruit of hard work, but not so for prestige goods. It took “more than hard work—it takes a ‘strong heart.’” Conversion upward may be possible when someone who has to get rid of his existing prestige goods is therefore willing to convert down. But “they try to keep a man from making conversions,” because such a man “is both feared and respected. If he is strong enough to resist excessive demands of his kinsmen … he is feared as a man of special, potentially evil, talents (tsav).”

There we have it, back to tsav! The Tiv norms caged the economy, eradicated factor markets, and made the lineage the main agent of production. In return, they achieved a balance between the different kin groups, avoided the slippery slope, and made their status quo much more enduring.

Like the enforced generosity of the Tonga, the caged economy of the Tiv had obvious adverse consequences. Markets are critical for an efficient organization of the economy and for prosperity. But they weren’t permitted to function among the Tiv. To the extent that trade happened, relative prices were often fixed. The result in Tivland, just as for the Tonga, was dire poverty. The institutions of Tiv society created little incentive for capital accumulation, other than in the form of simple instruments such as digging sticks and devices for processing food. Indeed, even saving could lead one to be accused of having the wrong sort of tsav, so the fear of retribution made accumulation too dangerous. As a result, at the time of the conquest of Tivland by the British, people were living at close to subsistence levels of income with life expectancy of around thirty years.

Ibn Khaldun and the Cycle of Despotism

Our discussion of the Tonga and the Tiv suggests that Hobbes’s analysis of the economic consequences of statelessness wasn’t exactly right. These societies weren’t mired in continual violence and conflict destroying all economic incentives, even if the Kivus in the Congo remind us that there are plenty of examples of societies without centralized authority locked into such conflicts. All the same, Hobbes’s conclusion turned out to be not completely off the mark, because the norms that these societies fashioned to control conflict ended up creating highly distorted incentives.

Was Hobbes also right that the Despotic Leviathan would be better for economic incentives because it would create security, predictability, and order? Hobbes was partly—and only partly—right, here too, and there is no better place to start understanding the double-edged nature of the economy that the Despotic Leviathan creates than the work of the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. Born in Tunis in 1332 CE, Khaldun traced his ancestry back to Muhammad via Yemen. Khaldun had a remarkable life which included meeting the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane. His most renowned scholarly work was the Kitab al-Ibar, or “Book of Lessons,” whose first volume, known as the Muqaddimah, or “Introduction,” is particularly useful for understanding the economic consequences of a despotic state.

Khaldun’s “Introduction” is rich in ideas. In addition to tracing the economic consequences of the emergence of a state in the Arabian Peninsula, it presents a theory of the dynamics of political institutions based on what he viewed as two fundamental conflicts in society. The first is between the desert, with its nomadic life, and sedentary urbanized society. The second is between the rulers and the ruled. Khaldun argued that the odds are stacked in favor of the desert people in the first conflict due to the type of society that the harshness and marginal nature of desert life creates. Their society was characterized by what he called asabiyyah, which translates as social solidarity or group feeling. Asabiyyah should be a familiar concept by now. It was part of the cage of norms of a stateless society, but Khaldun brings in a new angle on these norms. From our perspective so far, asabiyyah was something that helped regulate conflicts and preserve the political equality in nomadic societies. Khaldun pointed out that it also makes such a society very good at subjugating neighboring sedentary peoples.

We saw in the previous chapter how Islam provided an edge to Muhammad in his state-building efforts. The Bedouin tribes that Muhammad relied on in this process had a lot of asabiyyah, and this gave him and his followers a second edge to expand the Islamic Empire into a massive empire. In Khaldun’s account, this edge was created not only by the economic hardship of the desert, but also by the dense networks of kinship that had evolved to provide mutual help in the tough desert landscape. The desert was always destined to overcome the sedentary world and form new states and dynasties.

Khaldun, however, argued that though asabiyyah helped the desert people to conquer “civilized lands” and set themselves up in power, the intrinsic dynamics of such authority inevitably led to the decay of asabiyyah and the ultimate collapse of a state that groups like the Bedouin founded. Then the whole cycle started over again with a new group from the desert replacing the collapsing state. In Khaldun’s words:

The duration of the life of a dynasty does not as a rule extend beyond three generations. The first generation retains the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert savagery … the strength of group feeling continues to be preserved among them … the second generation changes from the desert attitude to sedentary culture … from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself … People become used to lowliness and obedience … The third generation … has completely forgotten the period of desert life … They have lost … group feeling, because they are dominated by force … When someone comes and demands something from them, they cannot repel him.

Khaldun’s analysis also insightfully illustrates the role of conflict between the ruler and the ruled. After coming in from the desert, “one man claims all the glory for himself,” while the majority of people “become used to lowliness and obedience.” Khaldun gave a new dynasty about 120 years.

*

—

Before delving into these political dynamics and their economic consequences in more detail, it’s worth picking up the history where we left off in the previous chapter and following what happened after the death of Muhammad. The Arab conquests set in motion by Muhammad were initially sustained by four leaders, known as the Caliphs, who derived their authority from their close personal relationships with him. These were Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, who was assassinated in 661. Ali’s murder came at the end of a period of contention over how the newly emerging state was to be governed. Uthman had tried aggressively to increase central control over the nascent state and had been murdered by rebellious soldiers. Ali’s succession was contested by Muawiya, Uthman’s cousin and the governor of Syria. This led to a protracted civil war, which ended with Ali’s death and Muawiya’s being declared caliph. He founded the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled for almost one hundred years until it was replaced in 750 by the Abbasid dynasty, named after Abbas, an uncle of Muhammad. By the time Umayyad rule emerged, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt had been conquered, and the annexation of North Africa, which was finally completed by 711, was well under way. By the middle of the eighth century, much of Spain was conquered and large swaths of inner Asia were added to the empire.

In the conquered lands, the Umayyads initially superimposed the rule of the Arab warrior class on top of the preexisting institutions of the Byzantine (in Syria, Palestine, Israel, Egypt) and Sassanid (in Iraq and Iran) Empires that they had replaced. It was only when Caliph Abd al-Malik assumed power in 685 that the Umayyads began to build a more distinct state structure based in their new capital in Damascus. But the Umayyads were never able to construct a truly effective centralized state, and neither were their successors, the Abbasids. Though their armies had proved to be hugely effective and occupied a large area, transforming this occupation into a real system of government and gaining the loyalty of the occupied people turned out to be a lot harder. The Umayyads and Abbasids then ended up relying more and more on local elites to govern the provinces of their empire, raise taxes, and keep order. To buy the support of these elites, they engaged in “tax farming,” wherein they sold the right to raise taxes for a fixed sum of money. Once you had the right to tax granted to you by Damascus, and subsequently Baghdad when the Abbasids came to power, you had carte blanche to levy whatever taxes you wanted on local communities. This seems to have been a recipe for punitively high rates of taxation and the accumulation of land by elites since they took over the lands of people who could not afford to pay the taxes they levied. This political structure of empire was ultimately self-defeating. Local elites demanded to be named as hereditary governors and recruited their own armies to provide order. Soon Baghdad had no control over them. The empire came apart at the seams and finally collapsed in 945.

None of this was surprising to Khaldun. He was a firm believer in the will to power, noting that

human beings need someone to act as a restraining influence and mediator in every social organization, in order to keep the members from fighting with each other. That person must, by necessity, have superiority over the others in the matter of group feeling. If not, his power to exercise a restraining influence could not materialize.

Once such a person was recognized, as Muhammad had been in Medina, he became a leader, and “leadership means being a chieftain, and the leader is obeyed, but he has no power to force others to accept his rulings.” But Khaldun understood that the mere existence of such a leader was likely to move society swiftly along the slippery slope. Indeed, “When a person sharing in the group feeling had reached the rank of chieftain and commands obedience, and when he then finds the way open toward superiority and the use of force, he follows that way.” Thus, because group feeling was not endowed equally on all people, it tended to inexorably lead to royal authority, which “means superiority and power by rule of force.”

However, once in power the rulers of the new dynasty “will not need much group feeling to maintain their power. It is as if obedience to the government were a divinely revealed book that cannot be changed or opposed.” So, in line with his generational theory, Khaldun argued that the rulers of a dynasty started to distance themselves from those who had helped them into power and to forge relationships with new groups within their empire. This was an intrinsic part of creating an empire once you had conquered new lands. These lands were already occupied and often controlled by local elites and notables, so new dynasties had to come to some sort of agreement with them and obtain their loyalty or face constant rebellion. As the dynasty changed its nature and asabiyyah eroded, despotism emerged, or in Khaldun’s words, “With the disappearance of Arab group feeling and the annihilation of the Arab race and complete destruction of Arabism the Caliphate lost its identity. The form of government remained royal authority pure and simple.” The consequences of this were simple too:

The restraining influence of religion had weakened. The restraining influence of government and group was needed… .

Royal authority requires superiority and force … The decisions of the ruler will therefore, as a rule, deviate from what is right. They will be ruinous to the worldly affairs of the people under his control, since, as a rule, he forces them to execute his intentions and desires, which it may be beyond their ability to do… . Disobedience makes itself noticeable and leads to trouble and bloodshed.

Here Khaldun hints at some of the economic implications of the creation of a new dynasty. Early on with the power of group feeling and the “restraining influence of religion,” prosperity was a potential. But later, when “royal authority” consolidated itself, economic policies would be “ruinous to the worldly affairs of the people.” Nowhere were the economic implications of Khaldun’s generational theory more evident than in his discussion of taxation, which we turn to next.

Ibn Khaldun Discovers the Laffer Curve

It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

With this statement Khaldun anticipated Reaganomics, the economic doctrines that were promulgated by the American president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. One of the plinths of Reaganomics was first sketched out on a napkin in the Two Continents Restaurant in Washington, D.C., by the economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer was trying to explain to Republican rising stars Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and the journalist Jude Wanniski what he regarded as a basic principle of fiscal policy: the hump-shaped relationship between the tax rate levied by the government and the amount of tax revenues. When tax rates are low, an increase in the rate tends to increase tax revenues for the simple reason that the government takes a greater share of everyone’s incomes. However, as the tax rate starts to get too high, it chokes off incentives to work hard, exert effort, and invest because the gains created by all these activities are being taken away by the government. As a result, when tax rates get punitively high, not only economic activity but even tax revenues start falling. This is clear to see in the extreme cases where the tax rate approaches 100 percent, so that the government takes everything and very little incentive is left to generate income; despite the very high tax rates, there won’t be any tax revenues. Wanniski named this hump-shaped relationship the Laffer curve in honor of the man who had sketched it out. The exciting implication for Rumsfeld and Cheney was the prospect that you could reduce tax rates while increasing tax revenues as people responded to the more powerful incentives created by lower taxes—the biggest win-win situation of all time, which quickly came to be incorporated into President Reagan’s economic policy.

Needless to say, in a world where real tax rates are quite a bit lower than 100 percent, such as in the United States when Reagan became president, whether or not tax cuts actually increase tax revenues is open to doubt.

Khaldun’s analysis of the economic dynamics created in the Middle East was on firmer empirical grounds, and his idea of the Laffer curve was somewhat different from the one that Laffer explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney. It was based on his generational theory. To start with, a new dynasty, since it still has asabiyyah, “imposes only the taxes as are stipulated by religious law, such as charity taxes, the land tax, and the poll tax.” This had beneficial effects on the economy because “when tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase … When cultural enterprises grow … the tax revenue, which is the sum total of the individual assessments increases.”

Here Khaldun points out that low taxes stimulate economic activity, what he calls “cultural enterprises,” and this leads, as in the Laffer curve, to buoyant tax returns. The evidence suggests that this is exactly what happened in the wake of the Arab conquests. The Umayyads brought together a large area under one language, one religion, and one system of government, with a common legal system that flowed from Muhammad’s teachings. The first and most obvious economic impact of this megastate was an expansion of trade and mercantile activities. Muhammad, after all, had started life as a trader. The geographer al-Muqaddasi compiled a tenth-century list of the items exchanged between Baghdad and Khorasan-Transoxania, in what is now northeastern Iran. The list starts with “11 different items of clothing and garments, including veils and turbans, all made of expensive cloth, sometime silk, sometime plain cloth as well as bracelets, clothing of hair of superior yarn, iron” from Naysabur, and “cloth, silk brocade of inferior quality, taffeta, raisins, syrup, steel, pistachios and confections” from Harat, and goes on for pages until “silver-coloured fabrics [simgun], and Samarqandi stuffs, large copper vessels, artistic goblets, tents, stirrups, bridle-heads and straps” from Samarqand. This trade was accompanied by a vast amount of travel, the most powerful image of which was perhaps the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the hadj, which brought hundreds of thousands of believers together from all across the empire, and provided a huge opportunity not just for piety, but also for trading.

Another piece of evidence for the economic benefits of the rise of the Caliphate was an agricultural revolution. This was to some extent a consequence of the rise in trade, which created a much larger market than had existed before. The Arab conquests were followed by the diffusion throughout the region of a variety of crops that had previously not been grown there. These included rice, sorghum, hard wheat, sugar cane, cotton, watermelons, eggplants, spinach, artichokes, sour oranges, lemons, limes, bananas, plantains, mangos, and coconut palms. Many of these plants, indigenous to the tropics, were not easy to grow in the cooler and drier regions into which they were now sown, and necessitated a major reorganization of agriculture. Previously, the growing season had been in the winter, with crops harvested in the spring. During the hot summer months, the land lay fallow. But the new crops came from tropical areas and thrived in the summers, so production was restructured and intensified. Before the Arab conquests of the Middle East, Byzantine practice was to crop the ground once every two years. Now two crops a year were grown, for example, winter wheat followed by summer sorghum, cotton, or rice. All of these innovations were documented in Arab farming manuals that helped to spread best practices throughout the empire.

This intensification of production required fertilizer and irrigation too. Various types of irrigation were already in place in the areas that the Arabs conquered, but those of the Byzantine and Persian Sassanid Empires were often in advanced states of decay. The Arabs repaired these and built a profusion of new public infrastructure, including new kinds of dams, underground canals that tapped groundwater and brought it over long distances, and a variety of wheels for lifting water out of rivers, canals, wells, and storage basins. This infrastructural investment was not based on new technology but involved the adoption and deployment of existing technological know-how. Nevertheless, it greatly increased the productive capacity of the economy.

The state that emerged from Muhammad’s political leadership played a decisive role in building and sustaining these renovated irrigation systems. It also encouraged private individuals to make complementary investments. This was not just because of the relative political stability that emerged with the Caliphate. It was also because Medina was an oasis and Muhammad, in his role as the resolver of disputes, had had to deal with conflicts over water and irrigation and had outlined a series of precedents that formed the basis of a legal system that facilitated investments. Particularly significant was the fact that instead of vesting them collectively in tribes or clans, these rulings individualized water rights. This improved incentives and eased disputes between individuals. Other laws directly encouraged production, including one that gave outright private ownership of a piece of land brought into cultivation for the first time and restricted taxation on such land to one-tenth of its output.

But these early benefits soon evaporated along with the buoyant tax revenues that they generated. Khaldun is indeed clear that these early economic advances could not be sustained.

When the dynasty continues in power and their rulers follow each other in succession … the Bedouin qualities of moderation and restraint disappear. Royal authority with its tyranny, and sedentary culture … make their appearance … individual imposts and assessments upon the subjects, agricultural laborers, farmers, and all the other taxpayers, increase … Customs duties are placed upon articles of commerce and levied at the city gates… . Eventually, the taxes weigh heavily upon the subjects and overburden them … The result is that the interest of the subjects in cultural enterprises disappears, since when they compare expenditures and taxes with their income and gain and see the little profit they make, they lose all hope. Therefore, many of them refrain from all cultural activity. The result is that the total tax revenue goes down.

With tax revenues falling, “the ruler must invent new kinds of taxes. He levies them on commerce. He imposes taxes of a certain amount on prices realized in the markets and on the various imported goods at the city gates … Business falls off … This situation becomes more and more aggravated, until the dynasty disintegrates. Much of this sort happened in the Eastern cities during the later days of the Abbasid and Ubaydid-Fatimid dynasties.” (The Fatimid dynasty is a third caliphate—taking its name from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima—which ruled North Africa from the early tenth to late twelfth centuries.)

Existing evidence supports Khaldun’s account. While the tax rate on land seems to have risen inexorably after the Arab conquests, revenues fell. Revenues from Iraq, for example, decreased from 12.8 million dinars after the conquest to 8.3 million dinars at the end of the Umayyad dynasty, to 5 million by 819 and just over 3 million by 870. The data from Egypt and Mesopotamia tell the same story.

One common response was that the ruler “himself may engage in commerce and agriculture, from desire to increase [his] revenues.” But Khaldun saw that this could be very harmful to the people in the society because “when the ruler, who has so much more money than they, competes with them, scarcely a single one of them will any longer be able to obtain the things he wants, and everybody will be worried and unhappy. Furthermore, the ruler can appropriate much of the agricultural products and the available merchandise … He can do it by force, or by buying things up at the cheapest possible price. Further, there may be no one who would dare bid against him. Thus, he will be able to force the seller to lower his price.” On the other hand, when the ruler is selling, he forces everyone to pay high prices. Competition from the ruler thus generates a situation where “the farmer gives up agriculture and the merchant goes out of business.”

As the Umayyad and Abbasid states disintegrated, the impact of tax farming and their inability to construct effective bureaucratic management also led to a deterioration of infrastructure, and a fall in investment since farmers were at the mercy of local elites. Indeed, land seems to have been abandoned by ordinary farmers who saw no way to make ends meet and instead moved to towns and cities. The entry of elites into the economy had exactly the impact Khaldun identified.

Khaldun explicitly noted how his theory explained the collapse of the Abbasids:

The group feeling of the Arabs had been destroyed by the time of the reign of al-Mutasim and his son al-Wathiq. They tried to maintain their hold over the government thereafter with the help of Persian, Turkish, Daylam, Saljuq, and other clients. Then the Persians (non-Arabs) and clients gained power over the provinces of the realm. The influence of the dynasty grew smaller, and no longer extended beyond the environs of Baghdad.

Janus-Faced Despotic Growth

Khaldun’s theory is a brilliant illustration of the impact of despotic state formation on the economy—not because the type of cycle that Khaldun hypothesized with the bad following the good is some “historical law,” but because it highlights both the good and the bad that an economy under despotism will always embody.

A state can provide many benefits in terms of increased order, security, and peace. It can enforce laws, bringing clarity and predictability to conflicts that inevitably emerge in the process of economic transactions. It helps markets and trade expand. The state, and the state builders controlling it, may also find it in their interest to enforce property rights for the same reasons as the Laffer curve: without property rights and predictability of the state’s policies, it’s as if everyone is facing close to 100 percent tax rates and will lack incentives to produce, work, trade, and invest—and the result would be little tax revenue for the state. Not a desirable outcome. So it’s better to keep taxes low. When that happens, economic activity can potentially flourish, with all the benefits that this brings to society as well as to the Despotic Leviathan. The same logic underlies the reason why state builders might find it in their interest to provide public services, infrastructure, and even education to increase productivity and economic activity.

All of this implies that the Despotic Leviathan may create better economic opportunities and incentives than Warre or the cage of norms. It may even organize society, structure laws, and make investments so as to directly stimulate economic growth. This is the essence of what we call “despotic growth.”

The history of the Islamic state illustrates this type of growth clearly. Compared to the warring clans that had previously dominated Medina, Muhammad’s ability to resolve disputes and enforce his laws spurred economic activity. Property rights became more secure for the Medinans as Muhammad’s state prevented disputes from escalating and after his unification of the Arabian tribes put a stop to raids. The same factors also facilitated trade. As we have just seen, this proto-state organized new public infrastructure investments, including dams, underground canals, and other irrigation facilities. Agricultural productivity increased greatly as a result. All in all a far cry from where Medina was heading before Muhammad’s arrival.

Yet in the same way that the Leviathan is Janus-faced, so is despotic growth, and Khaldun understood this very perceptively as well. He recognized that the despotic state, lacking any popular control or mechanisms of accountability, is bound to concentrate more and more political power in its hands. With more power comes greater monopolization of economic benefits, greater temptation to violate the property rights that it was meant to protect, and a creeping slide along the Laffer curve toward the place where the tax rates and the risks of expropriation are so high that not only citizens’ livelihoods but even the state’s tax revenues start to suffer. Khaldun in fact saw this stage, where the state turns against society, as inevitable. This not only meant that the fruits of despotic growth would ultimately dry out, but also that the anticipation of the fearsome face of the Leviathan would undercut the benefits it generates even sooner than that. In Khaldun’s poetic language, this meant:

Like the silkworm that spins and then, in turn

Finds its end amidst the threads itself has spun.

A second reason why despotic growth will be limited is equally fundamental. As we emphasized in our previous book, Why Nations Fail, sustained economic growth necessitates not just secure property rights, trade, and investment, but more critically, innovation and continual productivity improvements. These are much harder to usher in under the stern gaze of the Despotic Leviathan. Innovation needs creativity and creativity needs liberty—individuals to act fearlessly, experiment, and chart their own paths with their own ideas, even if this is not what others would like to see. This is hard to sustain under despotism. Opportunities aren’t open to everybody when one group dominates the rest of society, nor is there much tolerance for different paths and experiments in a society without liberty.

Indeed, these are the reasons why we argued in our earlier book that “extractive growth,” a close cousin of what we are calling despotic growth here, is limited and is highly unlikely to become the basis of sustained, long-term prosperity. We illustrated this limited nature of extractive growth with several examples, the simplest being the rise and fall of the Soviet growth miracle. The Soviets could organize the economy to pour resources and huge investments into manufacturing and subsequently into the space race and military technologies. Yet they could not generate sufficient innovation and productivity improvements to keep their economy from stagnating and then collapsing. This example underscores the fact that extractive growth results when a ruler who is constrained neither by institutions nor society finds it in his interest to support growth. But even when this is the case, the ruler will not be able to organize or command innovation. Nor will he be able to secure a broad-based distribution of opportunities to make best use of the creativity of the people. It’s the same with despotic growth called into existence by the Despotic Leviathan, without any popular control, active participation by society, or true liberty.

The Law of the Splintered Paddle

The benefits of despotic growth for state builders were well understood by Kamehameha as he was unifying the Hawaiian islands. The first law he passed after his final conquest was the Law of the Splintered Paddle. This read:

Oh my people, honor thy gods;

respect alike [the rights of] men great and humble;

see to it that our aged, our women and our children

lie down to sleep by the roadside without fear of harm.

Disobey and die.

This law has been seen to be so significant in the history of Hawaii that it was incorporated into the 1978 State Constitution, Article IX, Section 10, of which reads:

Public safety. The law of the splintered paddle, mamala-hoe kanawai, decreed by Kamehameha I—Let every elderly person, woman and child lie by the roadside in safety—shall be a unique and living symbol of the State’s concern for public safety.

The State shall have the power to provide for the safety of the people from crimes against persons and property.

The law’s original intention was to indicate that the new state would not tolerate unprovoked attacks on people or property. The name of the law referred to an incident in which Kamehameha, as a young warrior, was engaged in a raid on the Puna Coast, on the southeastern side of Hawaii Island (see Map 6 in the previous chapter), and decided to attack some fishermen to take their catch. Jumping out of his canoe onto the shore, Kamehameha got his foot caught in a crevice of lava, and seeing this, one of the fishermen had the courage to come up and hit him with a paddle that splintered on impact. The title of the law indicates that Kamehameha later realized that the attack had been wrong, and he signaled his intention to eliminate such behavior.

He was worried about unprovoked attacks not just against the persons and property of indigenous Hawaiians, but also against foreigners. He realized that the prosperity of his new island kingdom rested on increased commercial relations with the outside world. During the unification of the islands an active trade in the provisioning of foreign ships had developed, yet this was continually threatened by hostile acts. Hawaiians were particularly fond of stealing the anchors of foreign vessels. In the previous chapter we saw that the chain of events that led to the death of Captain Cook had been initiated by the theft of a cutter from Cook’s flagship. As early as 1793, Kamehameha had declared to a Mr. Bell, a member of the explorer George Vancouver’s expedition to the islands,

his most solemn determination never to molest or disturb the weakest vessel that comes to Kealakekua, or where he himself is, on the contrary to do everything he can to make their stay among them comfortable.

Kamehameha was serious about this and about galvanizing despotic growth. Soon he managed to overcome the reticence of foreign traders to come to the islands. The potential economic benefits were substantial, and Kamehameha aptly took advantage of them. He monopolized foreign trade by introducing new kapu regulations to stop common people from engaging in trade with foreigners. He cornered the market so successfully that he was able to choose the terms of trade with foreigners, setting high prices for the supplies they needed to provision their ships. Such provisioning was lucrative, but Kamehameha soon realized that there were even better profits in the export of sandalwood. In 1812 he signed a contract with Boston ship captains the Winship brothers and W. H. Davis, under which he had the monopoly of sandalwood exports from Hawaii. The agreement was to last ten years and Kamehameha personally took one quarter of all profits. Ibn Khaldun would have noted that this arrangement wouldn’t bring prosperity for long. It didn’t, and in exactly the way Khaldun would have anticipated.

A Shark Going Inland

One of the great scholars of historical Hawaii was a Swede, Abraham Fornander, who arrived in the islands in 1838, learned the language, married a Hawaiian woman, and developed a passion for the society. He died in 1887, and his manuscripts were eventually published by the Bishop Museum in the 1920s. Fornander wrote down a chant:

A shark going inland is my chief,

A very strong shark able to devour all land;

A shark of very red gills is the chief,

He has a throat to swallow the island without choking.

The chant compares the chiefs of Hawaii (before Kamehameha’s time) to “sharks going inland.” It was an apt, and predatory, analogy.

Just like other instances of despotic growth, the creation of a Hawaiian state under Kamehameha soon followed in the ways of the previous chiefs—the shark went inland. This process was summarized by Samuel Kamakau, another one of the first generations of Hawaiians to emerge as historians of their society. Like David Malo, whose evidence we discussed in the previous chapter, Kamakau witnessed firsthand many of the events he recorded, or interviewed people who had. His description mentions the beneficial aspects of Kamehameha’s state building but is also blunt on the huge downside:

The country as a whole benefitted by the uniting of the government under one head, but most of the chiefs and landlords under Kamehameha oppressed the commoners and took away their lands, thus forcing the people who had owned the land to become slaves … Taxes were laid upon all holdings whether large or small and were constantly being added to, for there were many landlords and under landlords who demanded tribute … The uniting of the land had brought about excessive taxation … “Even the smallest patches are taxed” … was a familiar saying.

The progress of the shark—or sharks, since the chiefs below Kamehameha and his successors quickly got into the action—is vividly described in a surviving set of documents written in 1846, in the context of King Kamehameha III’s attempt to rationalize and redistribute land rights. A board of three people, one Hawaiian and two foreigners, established a set of “principles” by which property rights were to be formalized. These principles noted that “the King, representing the government, having formerly been the sole owner of the soil … must be considered to be so still.” Of course, as we already saw, it wasn’t the case that kings “owned” the land in the Western sense of the word. Nevertheless, the document went on to note:

When the islands were conquered by Kamehameha I, he followed the example of his predecessors, and divided out the lands among his principal warrior chiefs, retaining, however, a portion in his hands, to be cultivated or managed by his own immediate servants or attendants. Each principal chief divided his lands, anew, and gave them out to an inferior order of chiefs, or persons of rank, by whom they were subdivided again and again; after passing through the hands of four, five or six persons, from the King down to the lowest class of tenants. All these persons were considered to have rights in the lands, or the productions of them.

All persons … owed and paid to the King not only a land tax, which he assessed at pleasure, but also, service which he called for at discretion, on all the grades from the highest down. They also owed and paid some portion of the productions of the land, in addition to the yearly taxes. They owed obedience at all times.

This wording is significant. Not just the makaainanas, the ordinary people, owed tribute and labor now, everyone did—“all the grades from the highest down.” Also notable is the reference to “service which he called for at discretion.” Forced labor was extensively used on the king’s lands. F. I. Shemelin of the Russian-American Company, which had frequent interaction with the islands, recorded that “not only does he pay them nothing for their labor, he even declines to feed them.” Kamakau recorded that the sandalwood cutters were reduced to eating “herbs and fern trunks.”

Forced labor became especially important as the demand for sandalwood expanded in the 1820s after Kamehameha’s death. The wood was usually far from people’s farms, growing on the slopes of more mountainous areas, and the king and chiefs began to organize massive missions of hundreds and even thousands of coerced men who would have to find, cut, and transport the wood to the coasts, a process which could take weeks. The English missionaries Tyerman and Bennet saw 2,000 men carrying sandalwood to the royal storehouse in Kailua, Hawaii, in 1822. They were neither paid nor fed, instead having to live off the land. Coerced labor and the dislocation that it entailed soon led to a precipitous fall in agricultural output and to persistent near-famine conditions. One contemporary visitor recorded that

the reasons why provisions are so scarce on this island is, that the people, for some months past, have been engaged in cutting sandalwood, and have of course neglected the cultivation of the land.

The behavior of one chief in the north of O‘ahu, known as Cox, is particularly well documented. In the early 1820s he organized long campaigns to wrest sandalwood from the upland forest surrounding the Anahulu River valley in the north of the island. A trader, Gilbert Mathison, witnessed the scale of this undertaking and the intensity of the coercion involved. He wrote:

Cox had given orders to some hundreds of his people to repair to the woods by an appointed day to cut sandalwood. The whole obeyed, except one man, who had the folly and hardihood to refuse. Upon this his house was set fire to, and burnt to the ground on the very day; still he refused to go. The next process was to seize his possessions and turn his wife and family off the estate.

Mathison’s observations about the way Cox ran his territory show how extractive Kamehameha’s state became after he died. For example, an American sailor, who had been granted land by Cox, reported that he was afraid of making any sort of improvement on his land because it might attract Cox’s attention, who would then appropriate everything for himself. A local reported to the preacher James Ely in 1824 that

we are sunk in discouragement. We have no inducement to labor, but many things to deter us from it. If we are enterprising, we are marked by the chiefs, and the property we obtain is taken by them. If we feed the heads of swine, or flocks of sheep, goats or fowl they are borne from us at the pleasure of the chiefs. If we sell produce, the money or property received in return is taken from us. The more enterprising, the more we are oppressed.

By the late 1820s the required work for the king increased from one day to three per week as coerced labor services for harvesting sandalwood were intensified. By the 1830s the sandalwood forests were exhausted, but now the king and chiefs started using coerced labor in agriculture. In the 1840s, the missionary William Roberts estimated that, in addition to all the required labor services, the average farmer was passing on a massive two-thirds of all of the output he produced to the king and the different chiefs.

This extractive system culminated in the Great Mahele of 1848, when King Kamehameha III decided on the radical distribution of lands we mentioned above. The outcome of this was that 24 percent of the islands’ lands were taken as private property by the king. A further 36 percent went to the government—again, in effect, to the king. A further 39 percent went to 252 chiefs, leaving less than 1 percent for the rest of the population.

The sharks were well inland at this point, devouring the land.

The Bird That Devours Others

The economic implications of the Zulu state were similar. In the 1820s, the many small chieftaincies of the area that later became KwaZulu-Natal relied on maize, millet, and ranching. There was not a great deal of trade, and the international slave traders had never penetrated into this part of Africa. As in most precolonial African societies, families and sub-lineages had user rights to farm or graze their herds in certain areas. Both cows and crops were privately owned by families. Although the Zulu economy differed in many ways from that of Tivland, where cows were very scarce because of the presence of the tsetse fly, the evidence suggests that it was similarly caged. Cows, for instance, were a prestige good and could only be sold under very specific and unusual circumstances.

In the process of his state-building efforts, Shaka reorganized the economy, breaking parts of the cage of norms that stood in the way. He declared that all the land belonged to him, a very radical departure from the initial status quo. As one oral history records:

The land of Zululand belongs to Tshaka, he who unified all of it. Tshaka would take a fancy to a man and then, having conquered some chief’s land, would say this man might go and build at any spot he [Tshaka] might indicate. Men used to be given land by Tshaka, and a man might be given permission to occupy land even though other people might be living on it at the time.

Not just the land, but also the cattle belonged to Shaka. Nevertheless, this was still quite a simple economy. There was little manufacturing, though Shaka monopolized for himself the production of weapons, specifically spears and shields, which he gave to his troops. The anthropologist Max Gluckman underscored the limited extent to which inequality could manifest itself in such a society by observing:

There is only so much maize porridge that a Zulu chief can eat.

All the same, state formation under Shaka coincided with a huge increase in inequality, with Shaka, his relatives, and the core Zulu clan members who made up the royal family being the main beneficiaries. Even if he could eat only so much porridge, Shaka could and did monopolize power completely and establish unchallenged dominance over others. He not only managed to assert property rights over land and cows, he used his control over women and marriage to exert social control. He also monopolized the burgeoning trade with Europeans, who were perched on the coast. He ensured that all trade with Europeans went through his hands and cornered valuable supplies of ivory to sell to them.

But it wasn’t just extraction under Shaka. Once the warfare that created the Zulu state subsided, Shaka, like Kamehameha, set up a legal system and centralized institutions of conflict resolution that helped his people while also improving economic incentives. Oral history has it that Dingiswayo’s initial plan for territorial expansion was precipitated by a desire to stop the constant fighting and conflicts that broke out between small clans and chieftaincies. Indeed, once they were incorporated into Shaka’s state, there was a good deal of order, and the pax Shaka certainly protected people from the threat of raiding and attack from surrounding chieftaincies. Crime within the kingdom also appears to have greatly declined. Thefts of cattle that were quite common before Shaka’s rise largely disappeared because of the severe punishments that Shaka meted out against lawbreakers.

As in our other examples, order in Zululand bred despotic growth, which benefited society to some degree, but then it greatly benefited Shaka and his entourage too.

The Economics of the Rose Revolution

In the freewheeling days after the collapse of Communism in Georgia, there was a bonanza in the private sector for transport services. For instance, there was a boom in marshrutkas, taxi buses that, compared to the previously tightly regulated system, proved hugely attractive and flexible. But the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, whose rise to power we narrated in Chapter 3, soon showed it could regulate too, and in spades.

All marshrutka drivers had to have a medical exam every day to make sure they were not drunk and did not have high blood pressure. If a driver did not display his health certificate, he risked losing his license. By the time Shevardnadze was in power there were hundreds, probably thousands, of marshrutkas ferrying people all over the capital city of Tbilisi. Shevardnadze’s government was detail-oriented not only when it came to taxi drivers. It decided that all of the stalls of petty streetside traders had to conform to a particular architectural design. Like marshrutka drivers, such traders had to renew their licenses twice a year. These regulations were only the tip of the iceberg. Gas stations, for example, had to be located at a specific distance from the street.

Shevardnadze’s state must have accumulated a considerable amount of capacity to implement such measures. In a sense it did, but not in the obvious meaning of the word. In fact, these regulations, and thousands like them, were never intended to be implemented. Nobody really expected marshrutka drivers to have a daily medical exam, and they didn’t. But by creating such a rule, the Georgian state immediately created a pretext for prosecuting the entire fleet of marshrutka drivers. To avoid this, the drivers had to pay bribes. So did the petty traders. So did the gas stations.

There is something in Shevardnadze’s naked actions to extract resources and bribes from Georgians that is a little different from Khaldun’s generational theory, which foresaw that despotism would first fuel some growth and then start intensifying its extraction—a pattern that seems to fit what happened in the Caliphate, in Hawaii, and even in Zululand. Shevardnadze’s state skipped the first step and dived right into thievery. Why was that?

To answer this question we have to first recognize that the treatment of the marshrutka drivers was part of a more systematic policy (if it could be called that), one that was dictated not by economics but by a political logic. It was: Remain in power by creating economic disorder.

Shevardnadze behaved in this way in large part because he was in a much weaker position than the other state builders we have encountered in this and the previous chapter. Even after he outsmarted the warlords he was faced with strong regional powers within Georgia. He was grasping on to power rather than building a capable state, and he tried to do this by placating powerful interests by co-opting them with riches (or at the very least with bribes). Corruption in developing countries is common, so marshrutka drivers’ bribing state officials isn’t that unusual. But what went on in Georgia was a little different from this type of corruption. Shevardnadze set up the system so that the drivers were bound to break the law, and this provided low-hanging fruit for the police. He made lawbreaking inevitable and created a system that encouraged corruption.

The main reason for this was to control society, which was now continually guilty of breaking the law. You could avoid implementation of the law by paying a bribe today, but the state could come after you at any time. Yet this scheme also controlled officials in the state, another potentially powerful group—accepting bribes was illegal, so the state could go after them too if it wanted to.

Shevardnadze combined what we might call this “low corruption” with an equally labyrinthine system of “high corruption.” High-ranking elites, members of the parliament, and senior civil servants were sucked into similar schemes. They were also given a stake in Shevardnadze’s regime because he shared with them the incomes that flowed into his government, mostly from international donors. But they would only enjoy these incomes if Shevardnadze stayed in power. So they had to hitch their horses to his wagon. Shevardnadze used multiple methods to do this and he had a huge advantage thanks to the country’s Communist history: the Georgian government owned most of the productive sectors of the economy. Though there had been token attempts at privatization, this had not really happened prior to his assumption of power. Shevardnadze then immersed himself in Russian-style privatization—selling selected assets for cheap to powerful people or people he wanted to co-opt (we’ll see how this privatization worked in Russia in Chapter 9). Often, to seal the deal, he made them ministers in charge of regulating the firms they owned. In this way he managed to create a series of monopolies. Just as the regulations at the bottom were part of his political strategy, so were those at the top. So, for example, the government passed a law prescribing that every car had to carry a specific type of fire extinguisher—one that was imported exclusively by a relative of the minister of the interior.

Shevardnadze’s family got in on the action too. While most of the population suffered repeated power cuts, two commercial firms owned by the president’s family sold government-produced electricity on the side for a healthy profit of around $30 million a year. There were many regulations of imports and exports, so smuggling was very profitable and happened on a huge scale. In 2003 a parliamentary commission calculated that 90 percent of flour, 40 percent of gasoline, and 40 percent of cigarettes consumed in the country were smuggled. This generated a huge stream of bribes, but since the elites, many in the government, were involved in the illegal trade, it also provided ample ammunition for the state to go after them if it wanted to, just as with the traffic police and the health checks on the marshrutka drivers. The encouragement of illegality was all part of the strategy.

An indication of the extent to which the membership of the cabinet was used as a tool for cooption and corruption is that it was only in 2000, after he had been in power for eight years, that Shevardnadze finally appointed someone from his own political party as a minister. Significantly, that man was Mikheil Saakashvili, who became minister of justice. Saakashvili refused to be co-opted and was quickly fired, but then became one of the leaders of the Rose Revolution of November 2003, which forced Shevardnadze from power.

Shevardnadze’s economic impact was decidedly negative. This wasn’t simply because all the monopolies and regulations undermined the ability of markets to create incentives and opportunities for productive activity. It was also because Shevardnadze managed everything with a great deal of discretion and unpredictability. The aim of this economic disorder was to keep everyone off balance. You might be a minister today with a nice monopoly, and tomorrow Shevardnadze might change his mind and take it all away. The idea was to make people so dependent on the president that they became totally loyal. This worked so well that Shevardnadze managed to stay in power for a full decade. But the ambiguity and unpredictability created tremendous disincentives for investment. As a direct consequence, economic growth, even in its despotic form, did not materialize in Georgia.

The political strategy Shevardnadze quickly developed and perfected is not a Georgian aberration. As we have seen, despotism means silencing and sidelining society’s participation in political, social, and economic decisions, which in turn enables the exercise of despotic power. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the despot will be secure in his position, however, because others may be tempted by the political and economic benefits of controlling a powerful, unrestrained state. The threat of losing power may then push the ruler to structure the economy not for efficiency, but for co-opting willing rivals and cutting down unwilling ones. This is what Shevardnadze achieved in such a short time.

With Shevardnadze, we are thus witnessing the worst facet of despotic growth. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the commonalities linking this episode to other instances. The fragility of despotic growth emanates partly from the fact that it will go on only so long as it is in the interest of the ruler and his entourage. The problem in Georgia was that from the get-go, growth was not Shevardnadze’s priority. He was too focused on weakening society, creating corruption, and buying off other powerful actors in Georgia, all with predictably awful consequences for prosperity.

Caged and Despotic Economics

The scorecard for the economy outside the corridor is decidedly mixed. If you live without the Leviathan, the situation is dire. For one, you may end up with ceaseless conflict “of every man, against every man” as Hobbes foresaw, with dismal incentives and thus “no place for industry.” If your society manages to mobilize its norms and customs to put a lid on conflict and contain violence, then this tends to create a caged economy, constricted by norms and full of distorted economic incentives that do nothing to end poverty.

Despotism may improve on these outcomes, or so thought Hobbes. Compared to Warre or the caged economy, the Despotic Leviathan has clear advantages. Despotic though it may be, the state can prevent fighting, resolve conflicts, impose laws that help economic transactions, invest in public infrastructure, and help generate economic activity. It can even benefit the economy by relaxing the norm-based restrictions on economic activities. The Caliphate shows how it can unleash huge economic potential because of the order it imposes and the productivity-enhancing investments it undertakes or encourages. This is despotic growth at its best. But it is inherently fragile and limited. It is fragile because, as Khaldun anticipated, the Despotic Leviathan will be continually tempted to extract more revenues from society, monopolize more of the valuable resources, and act in more wanton ways. It is also fragile because the power of the state can be used, as Shevardnadze did, to create a hugely inefficient system just to avoid or cripple challenges to the despot’s position. It is limited too when it comes to undergirding sustained economic growth, because it does not activate and nurture the most productive aspects of society—its ability to freely function, generate broad-based opportunities and incentives for economic activity, and bring forth investment, experimentation, and innovation. For that, we have to wait for the emergence of liberty and the Shackled Leviathan.

Chapter 5

ALLEGORY OF GOOD GOVERNMENT

The Frescoes of Piazza del Campo

As you enter the famous shell-shaped Piazza del Campo at the heart of Siena, the Palazzo Pubblico looms above you. Construction started in 1297. It was to house Siena’s government, the most powerful body of which was made up of nine consuls. “The Nine” met in a room in the Palazzo, the Sala dei Nove, the Salon of the Nine. The room has windows only on the side that faces the Piazza. On the other walls are three remarkable frescoes, commissioned by the Nine and painted between February 1338 and May 1339 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Standing with your back to the light, the first one that comes into focus is the one opposite the windows, the Allegory of Good Government (which you can see in the photography section).

The first detail to catch your eye in this complex work of art is a seated figure to the right who appears to be a ruler or king. He is surrounded by artistic representations of different cardinal virtues: Fortitude, Prudence, and Peace on the left, Temperance, Justice, and Magnanimity on the right. So, a just and magnanimous ruler possibly? It seems odd that the Allegory of Good Government would feature a ruler because Siena didn’t have one in 1338, and the Nine would have undoubtedly disapproved of such a person. This mystery is solved by noting that the apparent ruler is wearing black and white, the colors of Siena. At his feet are other symbols of Siena, the wolf and twins, an image appropriated from the founding of Rome by the mythical twins Romulus and Remus, suckled as infants by a wolf. Then look up and above the head of the ruler, and you’ll see the initials C.S.C.V., for the Latin Commune Senarum Civitas Virginis, translated as “The Sienese Commune, the City of the Virgin.” Siena had adopted the Virgin Mary as its patron just before the battle of Montaperti in 1260, when they defeated the Florentines. The ruler in fact represents the commune of Siena.

In this fresco we are seeing something very different from the “will to power” and its consequences. Rulers are in the background and the commune, as a representation of society, has come to the foreground. The Sienese also recognized something special about this form of organization as signaled by their emphasis on “good government.” What was distinctive about Siena and the communes that sprang up around the same time all over Italy was a much greater level of liberty. This undergirded a very different economy with broad-based incentives and opportunities paving the way for prosperity.

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The notion of a commune seems to have emerged gradually in Italy in the late ninth and tenth centuries as citizens from all over northern Italy began to challenge and overthrow the authority of their ruling bishops, ecclesiastical authorities, and lords (see Map 7). In their place they began to create various systems of republican self-government. We do not have a complete picture of these early days, only fragments. In Modena in 891, for instance, we have a record of a “popular conspiracy” against the bishop. We hear of a similar thing in the same decade in Turin and by 924 in Cremona. In 997 in Treviso the bishop acted only “with the consent of all the leading men and judges and the whole people of Treviso.” In 1038 the bishop of Brescia made concessions to 154 named men and “the other free men living in Brescia.” The preponderance of ecclesiastical evidence here is probably a consequence of the church’s better record keeping. Lay authority was almost certainly being challenged as well.

Map 7. The Italian Communes and the Champagne Fairs

The defining feature of this new form of government was the popular election of consuls to run the city for a given period of time. Pisa in 1085 had twelve such consuls elected by a popular assembly. In Siena we know they were in place a little bit later, in 1125. During this period communes appeared all over northern and central Italy; in Milan in 1097, Genoa in 1099, Pavia in 1112, Bergamo in 1117, and Bologna in 1123. Though they were nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, the de facto autonomy of these communes was recognized by the Peace of Constance in 1183, signed with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The treaty even granted the communes the right to build fortifications, perhaps bowing to the inevitable. Barbarossa himself wasn’t too happy about this, but understood the implications of what the communes were attempting for liberty. Bishop Otto of Freising, Barbarossa’s uncle, wrote about Barbarossa’s difficulties in dealing with the communes in The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, arguing that

in the governing of their cities … and in the conduct of public affairs … they are so desirous of liberty that … they are governed by the will of consuls rather than rulers … And in order to suppress arrogance, the aforesaid consuls are chosen … from each of the classes. And lest they should exceed bounds by lust for power, they are changed almost every year. The consequence is that, as practically the entire land is divided amongst the cities … scarcely any noble or great man can be found in all the surrounding territory who does not acknowledge the authority of the city.

Bishop Otto also understood the connection between the political autonomy and prosperity of the communes since, he continued,

from this it has resulted that they far surpass all other states of the world in riches and in power. They are aided in this not only, as has been said, by their characteristic industry, but also by the absence of their princes [i.e., emperors], who are accustomed to remain on the far side of the Alps.

It’s useful to look in detail at what the political institutions of republican Siena looked like at the time of the Nine to get a sense of how communal government worked. The most basic was a popular assembly of all adult male citizens. Though this assembly had atrophied by Lorenzetti’s time, it was still in Siena’s constitution and seems to have met on special occasions, for example, when the new chief magistrate, the Podestà, took office. By the middle of the fourteenth century the role of this assembly had been taken over by a council known as the “Council of the Bell” because it was summoned by the ringing of a bell. This was made up of 300 male citizens, with 100 elected for one year from each of the three main administrative divisions of Siena, known as terzi. The electors for this body were the Nine, the Podestà, and other executive officers of the state including the Chamberlain, the four main treasury officials known as “provisors,” and the state-appointed judges. The main functions of the government were carried out by the Podestà and the Nine, and there were other small groups of consuls representing specific organized interests, particularly the powerful merchant guild and old aristocratic families.

The Podestà was an interesting institution, common to most of the Italian communes. The title comes from the Latin word potestas, meaning “power.” The office had to be filled by someone from outside Siena, so that he could maintain his independence from the different families and factions of the commune. His duties included judicial functions, and calling and presiding over the Council of the Bell. The Podestà didn’t act alone; he recruited other officials he would need to fulfill his duties. In 1295, for example, Bernard de Verano came to Siena with seven judges, three knights, two notaries, six squires, and sixty police he brought from his own province. He was initially chosen with a six-month tenure, but by the 1340s the tenure was extended to a year, after which the person was not eligible to act as Podestà again immediately. The next Podestà was selected out of a list of four candidates proposed by the Nine, by a council composed of the Nine, sixty men selected for this purpose, the consuls of the merchant guild, and the knights.

The Podestà was not allowed to receive gifts from citizens or even to eat with them. He could not move more than one day’s travel from the city, and each Podestà in turn had to reside in a different terzo. When his term was over, the Podestà had to remain in Siena for two weeks while an investigation was conducted of his behavior while in office. This often led to heavy fines on the Podestà.

The Nine had evolved over time, with the form we now recognize emerging after 1292. Between 1236 and 1271 there had been the “Twenty-Four,” who were followed by the “Thirty-Six.” During the thirteenth century the Sienese had also played with bodies made up of fifteen, nine, eighteen, and six. These numbers always had to be divisible by three because each terzo had to have equal representation. The Nine who commissioned Lorenzetti’s frescoes were chosen at a meeting consisting of the previous Nine, the Podestà, the consuls of the merchant guild, and the Capitano del Popolo (another executive position originally intended to represent the Popolo, the people). After serving in the Nine, which was for a two-month period, a person could serve again only after a break of twenty months.

What the Nine were supposed to do is summed up by their oath of office. They had to swear to keep the commune of Siena “in good peace and concord,” which sounds very much like a critical aspect of liberty, and also involves the protection of the commune from dominance by the state institutions themselves. Indeed, the oath was quite specific about recognizing that the shackles on the powers of the Leviathan, in this instance represented by the Nine, were crucial for this sort of liberty. Members of the Nine had to make sure

that law and justice be done and administered to the citizens subject to you and to those persons subject to you without discrimination by your rectors or officials. And that the statutes of your commune and its ordinances be observed for each person who demands it.

But there is more. To some degree anticipating our discussion of the role of the Shackled Leviathan in the origins of economic prosperity, the Nine were charged with economic development:

You must bring about the increase, growth, and conservation of the city of Siena.

Compared to dozens of other communes in northern and central Italy, there was nothing special about Siena, except the beautiful frescoes that are so telling about what its institutions were trying to achieve. In some, like Siena at the time of the Nine, the original popular impulse that had created the commune had succumbed to an oligarchic system, with rich families playing an oversized role. In others, more powerful popular assemblies acted as effective counterweights against these oligarchic interests. But almost all of these communes had critical features similar to those of Siena. They were republics run by elected consuls or magistrates facing strict limits on their power. Representative bodies, such as popular assemblies and other councils, acted as the shackles on the powers of the state and its executives like the Nine. These bodies were not beholden to any aristocratic or ecclesiastical authority. They were self-governing entities, underpinned by a strong society capable of holding its own against the power of the emerging state, a quality that impressed the traveler Benjamin of Tudela during his passage through Genoa, Lucca, and Pisa around 1165. He noted:

They possess neither king nor prince to govern them, but only the judges appointed by themselves.

You can see exactly this in the Allegory of Good Government. We’ve noted how the ruler to the right is surrounded by six virtues. Interestingly, the one farthest to the left is Peace, putting her right in the middle of the fresco. As the philosopher Quentin Skinner puts it in his discussion of the frescoes, Peace is “at the heart of our common life.” To the left of Peace sits another grand figure, Justice. You can tell because she is holding a scale. From the scale a double rope descends and then passes to the other side of the painting, to the ruler, by way of twenty-four figures representing the Twenty-Four who had previously served as consuls in Siena. The Twenty-Four are given the rope by a seated figure named Concordia—concord—who holds a carpenter’s plane in her lap. A plane is used to smooth rough edges and create a level surface, possibly signifying the “rule of law”—the fact that in Siena law was supposed to apply equally to everybody.

It is significant that the Twenty-Four, who represent society, hold the rope but are not held by it. This seems to signify that rule is granted by society, not to society. Notably, when the double rope gets to the ruler on the other side of the scene, it is knotted around his wrist—the Leviathan is shackled by the rope emanating from Justice.

Indeed, there were various types of “ropes” to keep the Nine under control. In addition to their very limited two months in office, an official called the maggior sindaco, who like the Podestà was always from outside Siena, could oppose any proposed constitutional change. To pass a measure that the maggior sindaco had opposed required a supermajority of three quarters of the councillors in favor of it and a quorum of at least two hundred councillors.

It wasn’t just laws and institutions, but also norms that were brought to bear to protect the commune from the Nine and other politically powerful individuals. For example, taking a page from the Athenians who came up with the Hubris Law, you could give politicians that were too big for their britches a “bad name”—literally. Take the Milanese Girardo Cagapisto, who was consul fourteen times in Milan between 1141 and 1180. His name begins with the word caga, or caca, meaning “shit.” Cagapisto means “shit pesto,” as in the Italian pasta sauce. Other examples of politicians whose names include the word “shit” are the brothers Gregorio and Guglielmo Cacainarca, whose family name means “shit in a box.” Similarly, the name of the consul Arderico Cagainosa, who held office between 1140 and 1144, is translated as “shit in your pants.” Other names of prominent political families include Cacainbasilica, “shit in the church”; Cacarana, “shit a frog”; Cagalenti, or “shit slowly”; and even Cagatosici, which means “toxic shit.” Get too powerful or misbehave, and you risked getting a surname featuring Caca.

A few other features of the fresco are noteworthy. At the foot of the ruler, a little to the right, are two kneeling noblemen in armor. They signify the authority of the commune over the aristocracy who too are bound by Justice. Behind them are a group of soldiers carrying lances that may represent the special force that the Nine recruited in 1302 to police the Sienese countryside.

This all sounds very much like liberty from fear (because of Peace), violence (because of Justice), and dominance (because the state and the elite are constrained by laws and popular mandates). At the bottom of the wall are painted words that say as much:

Wherever this holy virtue [Justice] rules,

She induces to unity many souls;

And these, gathered for such a purpose

A common good (ben comun) for their master undertake;

Who, in order to govern his state, chooses

Never to keep his eyes turned

From the splendor of the faces

Of the virtues which around him stand.

For this, with triumph are given to him

Taxes, tributes, and lordships of lands;

For this, without wars,

Is followed then by every civil result,

Useful, necessary, and pleasurable.

There is a significant wordplay in this statement. The common good is associated with the commune. The political form of the commune serves the common good, because the ruler is tied to Justice and indeed it is the citizens who tie together Justice and the ruler. The fresco thus recognizes that it is the rule by society in the commune that makes the commune serve the common good.

The Effects of Good Government

In Chapter 2 we stressed how powerful states can provide not only protection against violence and dominance but also public services. We see these critical roles of the state in Siena. The people that the Podestà brought with him were there to enforce laws, resolve conflicts, and provide notary and other business services. In addition, the volumes recording communal expenditures for the first six months of 1257 mention some 860 offices held by the Sienese in the city. These include 171 night watchmen, 114 supervisors of tolls and customs, 103 syndics of the districts, and 90 officials in charge of tax assessments. We also find supervisors of weights and measures, supervisors of grain and salt sales, jailers and hangmen, trumpeters, masons whose job it was to maintain public buildings, and custodians of the fountains. There were also six “good men” who oversaw the taverns and prevented swearing, and another six whose tasks included keeping wild donkeys, swine, and lepers out of the city. Spinning wool in the street was not allowed, and the city imposed a host of other regulations. For example, planning permission was required for any new construction within city walls, and the city even ruled that bricks and tiles had to be made in uniform sizes. We see this proliferation of offices and regulations in other communes as well.

The communes got very good at raising taxes too. After all, someone had to pay for all these officials. They used tax revenues to provide public services as well. Some, like the standardization of weights and measures, are implied by the above list of administrative positions, but there were many others, including a fire department, a stable coinage and monetary system, and the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges. In 1292 Siena had a “judge of the roads” who was soon supplemented by three general road commissioners. To make sure that people could travel in peace, a “scourer of the highways” was appointed, though the office was discontinued as the Nine built a much more elaborate system for the provision of rural order. In order to secure the property and human rights of Sienese merchants wherever they were, the city also organized “reprisals” whereby they retaliated against the merchants and citizens of other polities that had been guilty of infractions against any Sienese.

These public services and the support for liberty we see in Siena are unparalleled anywhere outside northern and central Italy during this time. But that wasn’t all that the Sienese state promoted. It provided broad-based incentives and economic opportunities as well.

To see that you have to turn your gaze toward the right wall of the Sala dei Nove, where Lorenzetti painted another huge fresco, The Effects of Good Government (which is also shown in the photography section). The fresco depicts a panoramic view of city and country life. On the left, the city is teeming with people. In the foreground, a group of women are dancing, but what is most striking is the flourishing economic activity. To the right of the dancers, a shopkeeper is bargaining over some shoes with a man holding a tethered horse. To the right of them a priest gives a sermon and a woman lays out a stall with jars of olive oil, or maybe wine, for sale. A man passes with a mule loaded with firewood. Others are weaving on a loom and tending a flock of sheep. Two women, one with a basket and the other with a bird, are probably on their way to market. Finally, in the far background, two horses laden with goods pass by. At the top of the fresco a construction crew is busy at work adding to the fine towers that stud the skyline.

The right half of the fresco focuses on the effects of good government in the countryside, where we again witness the distinctive economic implications of the Shackled Leviathan and the liberty it creates. Above the depiction of the countryside, the figure of Security holds a scroll that directly links prosperity to liberty:

Without fear, let each man freely walk,

And working let everyone sow,

While such a commune

This lady will keep under her rule

Because she has removed all power from the guilty.

The fresco depicts a scene that is consistent with these sentiments. In the foreground, we see peasants hard at work in front of a bountiful field of wheat. A hunting party exits the city gates on a paved road, while in the other direction merchants are bringing their wares and a pig for sale. In the background other people are sowing, harvesting, and threshing grain. All is peaceful and prosperous amid the well-tended fields and houses.

The message is clear: Among the many benefits of good government is economic prosperity. Is that right or was Lorenzetti just making it up? Was there really a connection between communal government and economic development?

How Saint Francis Got His Name

The life of one of the most famous saints of the Middle Ages, Saint Francis of Assisi, provides some of the answer to this question. Francis, renowned for his love of animals and nature, bequeathed to posterity one of the great images of Christian worship, the Christmas nativity scene. The “of Assisi” bit of his name came from the commune in central Italy where he was born, probably in 1182. The name Francis is a bit more puzzling. When he was born, Francis was called Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone. So where did Francis come from?

Francis’s father, Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous silk merchant, was in France on business when Giovanni was born. Pietro had married a woman from Provence, Francis’s mother, Pica de Bourlemont. Upon his return to Assisi, Pietro took to calling his son Francesco (“the Frenchman”), perhaps as a sign of his love for France.

That love appears to have been related to Pietro’s business in France. In 1174, a mere eight years before Francis’s birth, Italian merchants had taken part for the first time in the “Champagne fairs” of northern France (see Map 7). These fairs were held six times a year and rotated among four towns in the county of Champagne: Bar-sur-Aube, Lagny, Provins, and Troyes. Each of the fairs usually lasted for six weeks, after which there was a pause that allowed merchants to move to the next town. In consequence, the Champagne fairs turned into a marketplace that was open nearly all year round.

There were several things that were special about Champagne that made it a magnet for trade. One was its location: it became the meeting point for merchants from all over France and then began attracting merchants from the booming cities of Flanders and the Low Countries. The most important advantage of Champagne came from its economic institutions that massively facilitated trade. For one, counts of Champagne recognized a good thing when they saw one. When in 1148 money changers from Vézelay were robbed on their way to the Provins fair, Count Thibault II wrote to the regent of France demanding that the money changers be compensated. “I will not let take place with impunity such an injury, which tends to nothing less than the ruin of my fairs.” Count Thibault liked fairs because he could tax them. No merchants, no tax revenue. By the 1170s the local counts had begun appointing special “fair-wardens” with policing, regulatory, and judicial powers at the fairs to create an attractive institutional environment. It was likely this innovation that induced the Italians, Pietro di Bernardone among them, to venture over the Alps to the fairs. But it wasn’t just the counts that got involved. Three of the Champagne towns, Provins, Bar-sur-Aube, and Troyes, had privileges as communes themselves, entitling them to operate municipal courts during this period. These courts enforced contracts and mediated trade disputes.

These initial institutional innovations focused on providing basic order and security, and judicial services such as the resolution of disputes. As the Italians got more involved in the fairs, the innovations stretched all the way to Italy. In 1242–1243, a group of Italian merchants on their way to the Champagne fairs were kidnapped and robbed by Piacenzans. This is not what the count of Champagne wanted to see. He wrote to the Piacenzan authorities threatening to ban all merchants from Piacenza from trading in Champagne unless the victims were paid due compensation. After problems of order and dispute were addressed, the local authorities got more ambitious and started to improve the roads and to build a canal between the Seine and Troyes.

The Champagne fairs are one of the most famous examples of the so-called commercial revolution of the Middle Ages. The Italian communes were right at the heart of this. That wasn’t a coincidence. The communal system of government created laws and economic institutions that allowed trade and economic activity to take off after the slump that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the late fifth century. Italy was well placed to benefit from this flourishing. In the east and the south were the Byzantine Empire and the new Muslim states, which we encountered in Chapter 4, supplying Eastern spices and many luxury goods. In the north were England and Flanders. England produced the highest-quality wool, Flanders the most sought-after textiles. The stage was set for a huge system of exchange: wool and cloth for luxuries and spices. Southern Italy—by the mid-twelfth century ruled by Norman kings—and Spain were also well placed, but did not have communal governments. So neither took over the trade the way that communal northern and central Italy did. This had a lot to do with how the communes promoted the institutions necessary for trade.

This is obvious when we look at the financial innovation that was so critical for trade. Here the Italian communes led the way. As their economic activities spread around Europe, they set up bases in all the places they traded. More important, they invented the bill of exchange, which became the prime method to organize medieval commerce. Imagine that a Florentine cloth manufacturer wanted to buy high-quality Norfolk wool in England. He could travel to England with some sacks of Italian ducats, find someone in London to exchange them for pounds, buy the wool, and ship it back. Alternatively he could use a bill of exchange. In the standard terminology, there are four parties to such a bill: the remitter, here the cloth manufacturer; the drawer, which would be the remitter’s bank in Florence; the drawee, which would be the corresponding bank of the Florentine bank in England; and the payee, the wool merchant in London whom the cloth manufacturer wanted to buy wool from. In Florence, the remitter would give ducats to the drawer to buy the bill. He would then send the bill to the payee in London, who could take the bill to the drawee and get English pounds for it. Then the payee would ship the wool to Florence. The bill that was bought with ducats in Florence would specify the amount in pounds to be paid in London.

The Florentine bank didn’t even need to have a branch in London; it just needed to be able to deal with another bank that did. The presence of the international bank and the bill of exchange massively facilitated international transactions. Implicit in a bill of exchange is a loan. The cloth manufacturer had to wait before getting his wool, and he was in effect lending money to the London wool merchant. This was compensated by the payment of “interest,” even if this wasn’t always called interest and implemented instead via the use of different exchange rates. For example, say the cloth manufacturer wanted to buy 100 pounds’ worth of wool in London and at the exchange rate in Florence this involved a payment of 1,000 ducats. Then a lower exchange rate was used in London to convert the bill into pounds. Innovative Italians soon created a new credit instrument, the “dry exchange,” wherein the movement of goods became irrelevant and the use of different exchange rates was specified in advance.

The notion of a dry exchange sounds innocuous. But it was edgy because lending for interest was viewed as usury and was one of the many economic activities discouraged or even banned by the norms, customs, and beliefs of medieval Europeans. Jesus had said in the Gospel of Saint Luke, “Borrow and lend freely, hoping for nothing in return.” Church doctrine therefore interpreted the charging of interest on loans as sinful usury. This was a major problem for the development of an effective financial system. It’s natural that some people possess capital and wealth and others do not. But these others could be the ones who have the ideas or investment opportunities. A functioning financial system would allow the people with money to extend credit to those with the ideas. Interest is the return that encourages such transactions to take place and compensates the lender for forgoing other opportunities and for the risk of nonpayment. Blocking interest on lending on the basis that it was a sin would stall the development of a financial system. Part of the commercial revolution in Italy was to use innovations like dry exchange to enable lending and credit, but without it risking being condemned as sin and usury. The Church still maintained that it was, but such innovations allowed this one important aspect of the cage of norms to be relaxed, opening the way for significant growth in investment and commerce. It wasn’t just the innovative Italians who thought of going around the cage of norms. As life in the corridor evolved, restrictions on social and economic freedoms became harder to sustain. Even the Church began to relax the cage a little. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, allowed a debtor to pay “compensation” to a creditor in some circumstances, and this proved to be a flexible justification for interest-like payments. This relaxation of the cage of norms also became a significant source of comparative economic advantage for the Italians, who began to play the role of financial intermediary throughout Europe. The institutional environment of the Italian communes was critical for all of this. Elsewhere, the same activities were not as welcome. In 1394, for example, the king of Aragon was threatening to put on trial all the Italian merchants in Barcelona on the grounds that they were engaging in usury.

Italians led the way with other innovations. They invented mercantile insurance, allowing a third party to take on the risk of trade. They also developed many different contractual forms that facilitated trade. One was the commenda, a temporary partnership between two people, one who provided the capital for a trading mission and another who undertook the mission. When the mission was over, the two partners split the proceeds. The commenda was another way in which usury laws could be evaded. Italians also invented long-lived organizational forms that were precursors to the joint stock company, allowing people who were not actively involved in the actual business to put up capital and earn returns in the form of dividends. Also important was a new emphasis on written legal documents defining property rights and the use of notaries. In the 1280s, in cities like Milan or Bologna, there were twenty-five notaries for every thousand inhabitants.

All of this trade needed advanced accounting practices. It’s not a coincidence that it was an Italian from Pisa, Leonardo Fibonacci, who revolutionized accounting by adapting the Arabic numerical system in 1202. This made financial calculations much more straightforward. By the middle of the fourteenth century, double-entry bookkeeping appeared in Italy for the first time.

The commercial revolution went along with a great deal of economic growth and stimulated innovation outside the financial sector too. Though we don’t have enough evidence to construct national income accounts for this period of history, we can proxy economic development by the extent of urbanization—the fraction of the population living in cities of at least 5,000 people. Urbanization in Western Europe doubled from about 3 percent in 800 at the start of the commercial revolution to 6 percent in 1300. The rise was much more rapid in the places that were heavily involved in this revolution. For Italy in general it increased from 4 to 14 percent over the same period. But this included the south of Italy, which did not experience the flourishing of commerce and communes. The urbanization rate in northern Italy was undoubtedly much higher and has been estimated at 25 percent in Tuscany. Elsewhere, in Flanders and the Low Countries, urbanization increased from about 3 to 12 percent by 1300 and then to a remarkable 23 percent by 1400.

The dynamism of the urban communes is driven home by looking at their relative population size in a wider European context. In 1050 only one of them, Florence, which had a population of just 15,000 people, featured among the thirty largest cities in Europe. By 1200 Florence’s population had increased by 400 percent to 60,000 and it had been joined on this list by Bologna, Cremona, Ferrara, Genoa, Pavia, and Venice. By 1330 fully one-third of all of the thirty largest cities in Europe were Italian communes, with the most populous being Venice with 110,000 people, followed by Genoa and Milan, both with 100,000. Siena had a population of 50,000 at this date. Only Paris and Granada, the capital of the highly urbanized Muslim Spain, had larger populations than Venice, Genoa, and Milan.

Another sign of economic growth can be seen in a critical input of economic activity, education, and skills of the workforce. This seems to have increased dramatically in northern Italy during this period. For example, the New Chronicles, a fourteenth-century history of Florence written by Giovanni Villani, estimates that in early-fourteenth-century Florence there were about 8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls receiving elementary education and another 550 to 600 in higher education, while another 1,000 to 2,000 attended schools designed to impart commercial skills. If this was the typical situation, then as much as half of Florence’s population in this period could have attended some type of formal school. The Florentine Catasto of 1427, a comprehensive survey of the population, suggests that seven out of ten adult males could read and write—a remarkably high number for this era. An estimate for Venice in 1587 suggests that 33 percent of boys were literate.

The spread of literacy and economic development is also illustrated by the data on book production. In the ninth century only 10 percent of the 202,000 books produced in Western Europe were from Italy. By the fourteenth century, Italy was Western Europe’s biggest book producer, accounting for 32 percent of the European total of 2,747,000 books. Italy also had more universities than any other part of Western Europe, 39 percent of all European universities by the fourteenth century.

We find broader improvements in technology in this period as well, some of them critical to the commercial revolution, such as improvements in ship design with the spread of the sternpost rudder (whereas before ships were much less effectively steered by oar, as they had been since Roman days). Also produced in Italy were the first pair of spectacles, the first mechanized textile mill, in Lucca, to produce silk cloth, and the mechanical clock of Giovanni de Dondi built in the 1360s, though it is clear from his writings that clocks had existed for quite a while by then.

The First Cat in the Canary Islands

One of the remarkable achievements of the communes was a high rate of social mobility. A famous example is Francesco di Marco Datini. A story from his hometown, the commune of Prato in Tuscany, gives one account of how he first became commercially successful.

In the days—so the legend runs—when the adventurous traders of Tuscany were sailing to far lands, a merchant of Prato came to a remote island called the Canary Isle; and there the king of the island invited him to dinner.

And the merchant saw the table laid with napkins, and on each of them a club as long as his arm, and he could not fathom its purpose. But having sat down at the table, and the viands having been brought in, the odour thereof brought forth a great abundance of mice, who must perforce be chased away with those clubs, if the guests wished to eat … And the next day, having returned at night to his ship, the merchant came back with a cat up his sleeve. And when the viands came, the mice also appeared; and the merchant brought the cat out of his sleeve, and she speedily killed twenty-five or thirty mice, and the others ran away. “This animal is divine!” cried the king. Whereupon the merchant replied: “Sire, your courtesy to me has been so great that I can only return it by bestowing on you this cat.” The king gratefully accepted the gift, but before the merchant left the island, he sent for him again and presented him with jewels worth 4,000 scudi. And the following year the merchant came back again to the island, taking with him a tom-cat—and this time received a further 6,000 scudi. The merchant of Prato came home a rich man; and his name was Francesco di Marco Datini.

It’s probably not true that this is how Datini got rich. In fact there is no existing record that he ever went to the Canary Islands. What we do know is that he was born the son of a poor taverner, probably in 1335. When he was just thirteen years old, the Black Death (the bubonic plague) struck Italy, and his mother and father as well as two of his siblings perished. Only he and his brother Stefano were left, and there was a little inheritance, a house, a small piece of land, and 47 florins.

About a year after his father’s death, Datini moved to Florence, got an apprenticeship with a shopkeeper, and began to hear stories about the prosperous city of Avignon in the south of France. Between 1309 and 1376, the pope lived in Avignon rather than Rome because of a succession dispute, and the presence of the papal court created a vibrant market where Italian traders flourished. Most of the luxury trade and banking were dominated by some six hundred Italian families who lived in their own quarter of the city. Soon after his fifteenth birthday Datini sold his little plot of land in Prato to raise some capital and move there. By 1361, at the age of twenty-six, we find him in partnership with two other Tuscans, Toro di Berto and Niccolò di Bernardo. Initially he dealt mostly in armor and seems to have done well selling to both sides of local conflicts. In 1368, for example, his books record a sale of arms worth 64 livres to Bernard du Guesclin, the French military commander, and in the same year an extensive sale of weapons to the commune of Fontes, trying to protect itself from the same Guesclin. Before this, in 1363, Datini had his first shop, bought for 941 gold florins, with another 300 paid for the “customers’ goodwill.” In 1367 he renewed his partnership with Toro di Berto, each putting in a capital of 2,500 gold florins, and they now had three shops. In 1376 he began to trade in salt, and launched himself into the money-changing business as well as trading in silverware and works of art. He opened a wine tavern and a draper’s shop, and started to send his people farther afield, for example to Naples, to trade. At this point his main shop in Avignon contained Florentine silver belts and gold wedding rings, leather hides, saddles and mules’ harnesses from Catalonia, household goods from all over Italy, linen from Genoa, fustian from Cremona, and scarlet zendado, a special cloth from Lucca. His store in Florence emerged as an active hub of manufacturing by this time and contained white, blue, and undyed woolen cloth; sewing thread and silk curtains and curtain rings; tablecloths, napkins, and large bath towels; and hand-painted coffers and jewel cases used as part of a bride’s dowry.

When he returned from Avignon in 1382, he set up a business enterprise based in Prato and Florence with branches in Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca, and Ibiza. Between these different emporia sailed iron, lead, alum, slaves, and spices from Romania and the Black Sea; English wool from Southampton and London; wheat from Sardinia and Sicily; leather from Tunis and Córdoba; silk from Venice; raisins and figs from Málaga; almonds and dates from Valencia; apples and sardines from Marseille; olive oil from Gaeta; salt from Ibiza; Spanish wool from Majorca; and from Catalonia oranges, olive oil, and wine. His business documents have letters in Latin, French, Italian, English, Flemish, Catalonian, Provençal, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. He didn’t just trade, he also started a cloth manufacturing business in Florence, buying English and Spanish wool and exporting the finished cloth.

Francesco di Marco Datini made a fortune without any background, connections, or capital, and without the advantage of contacts, monopolies, or government help except for the broad institutional context created by the Italian communes.

There were of course many beholden to the old elite-dominated order who looked upon these developments with dismay. Francesco di Marco Datini represented exactly the sort of upward social mobility that they feared. This was what Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s uncle, Bishop Otto, was railing against when he noted of the Genoese:

They do not disdain to give the girdle of knighthood or the grades of distinction to young men of inferior status and even some workers of the low mechanical crafts, whom other people bar like the plague from the more respectable and honorable pursuits.

Bishop Otto was complaining about the erosion of hierarchy and the norms that had sustained it. But the relaxation of such norms is critical for economic development because they block “nobodies” with talent, like Datini, from rising to the top. Innovation critically rests on empowering talent like this and allowing many nobodies to chart their own paths and experiment with their own ideas.

Francesco di Marco Datini’s isn’t the only famous story of upward mobility in this era. One calculation for Pisa in 1369 suggests that of the 106 Florentine companies using the port, 51 of them belonged to “new men.” A non-Italian example is that of Godric of Finchale (later Saint Godric). Godric was born around 1065 in Walpole, Norfolk, to poor parents. His biographer Reginald of Durham tells us that his “father was named Ailward, and his mother Edwenna; both of slender rank and wealth.” Godric decided against being a “husbandman,” the natural thing to have done for a lad slender in rank and wealth in Norfolk. He instead decided to become a merchant. Without capital, he had to work his way up from the bottom, so he started by learning the ways of a “chapman,” a peddler, and “he began to follow the chapman’s way of life, first learning how to gain in small bargains and things of insignificant price; and thence, while yet a youth, his mind advanced little by little to buy and sell and gain from things of greater expense.” Gradually, Saint Godric accumulated enough capital to launch himself on more ambitious business ventures. Reginald tells us that “he began to launch upon bolder courses, and to coast frequently by sea to the foreign lands that lay around him. Thus, sailing often to and fro between Scotland and Britain, he traded in many divers wares and, amid these occupations, learned much worldly wisdom … at length his great labours and cares bore much fruit of worldly gain.” After sixteen years of successful trade and mercantile activity Godric decided to give all his wealth away and become a monk.

Returning to Assisi, we noted how Saint Francis’s father was a successful merchant in France, but almost certainly still from a modest background. Later in life Saint Francis asked his religious brothers in the Franciscan order, which he had founded, to humiliate him by calling him “worthless peasant-day laborer,” to which he replied, “Yes, that is what the son of Pietro di Bernardone needs to hear.” Most likely, Pietro had come from the countryside from humble origins to make his fortune in Assisi and then France, in much the same way that Francesco di Marco Datini and Godric had.

The Economy in the Corridor

Compared to the economies of stateless societies and under despotism we saw in the previous chapter, we are witnessing something very different in the Italian communes of the late Middle Ages. We see not only greater security and liberty for the citizens of these communes—not only a state providing public services rather than repressing and bullying its people—but also an entirely different set of economic opportunities and incentives created by the Shackled Leviathan.

Prosperity and economic growth originate from a few basic principles. These include incentives for people to invest, experiment, and innovate. Without a state such incentives are largely absent because either there is no law to adjudicate disputes and no protection for property rights in the midst of conflict, or because the norms that have emerged to fill that stateless void distort economic incentives and discourage economic activity—lest economic opportunities destabilize the very essence of these societies. As a result, the fruits of any investments are likely to be stolen, wasted, or scattered. The Despotic Leviathan could enforce property rights and protect people’s investments, but it is often much more interested in imposing high taxes or monopolizing the resources for itself, so economic incentives are often only a little better under his rule than under the Absent Leviathan.

Prosperity and economic growth don’t just rest on secure property rights. They critically depend on broad-based economic opportunities. This is the sort of thing that we sometimes take for granted, but it isn’t, and it hasn’t been, the natural way the economy is organized, as we saw in the previous chapter. Under the Absent Leviathan, the cage of norms often implies that economic opportunities are constricted for everybody. Under the Despotic Leviathan, the ruler and his entourage may have their property rights secure (indeed excessively secure, as they are victorious in any dispute), but not so for regular people. This sort of unequal distribution of economic opportunities isn’t enough to undergird economic prosperity either. You need opportunities to be widely and fairly distributed in society, so that whoever has a good idea for an innovation or valuable investment gets a chance to carry it out. This is an important and sometimes overlooked facet of liberty. Recall that dominance can come from the overwhelming economic power some wield against others or from stifling restrictions imposed by norms. Liberty in the economic domain then necessitates the leveling of the playing field and the lifting of these restrictions. This is exactly what we are seeing with social mobility in the Italian communes. Countless men such as Francesco di Marco Datini and Saint Francis’s father benefited from these opportunities and the liberty that they created to invest, found businesses, experiment with new ideas, innovate, and rise from their “inferior status” to become rich merchants. This bottom-up experimentation and the social mobility it brings are the economic fruits of liberty.

These opportunities and incentives also need to be upheld by a fair system of conflict resolution and law enforcement (or Justice, as the Allegory of Good Government emphasized). This in turn requires that the state and political elites aren’t powerful enough to meddle in the administration of justice and attempt to tilt things in their favor (the ropes in the frescoes). Here we see another critical role of the Shackled Leviathan in laying the groundwork for economic prosperity. If the Leviathan weren’t shackled, how could we make sure that laws applied to it and to politically powerful people? What is sometimes referred to as the “rule of law” also depends on the shackles on the ankles of the Leviathan. And these shackles don’t just come from constitutions and oaths, but as the frescoes emphasize, they are rooted in the ropes that society holds.

Even an abstract commitment to broad-based opportunities and incentives and fair conflict resolution isn’t enough in general. If key infrastructure is missing or if only a few people have access to the knowledge and the skills necessary to thrive in business or in work, then opportunities will still be unequally distributed. So public services are vital, not just because they improve the lives of the citizens who gain access to better roads, canals, schools, and benefit from regulation, but also because they underpin broad-based opportunities. This is what the Italian communes achieved, thanks to their ability to found a Shackled Leviathan, and this is what the Allegory of Good Government so brilliantly explains.

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The reader who is familiar with our earlier book Why Nations Fail will see strong parallels between what we have just described and the conceptual framework developed in that book. (At least we are not entirely inconsistent with our earlier thinking.) There we referred to institutions that provide broad-based opportunities and incentives for people to invest, innovate, and engage in productivity-enhancing activities as “inclusive economic institutions.” We also stressed that these can only survive in the long haul if they are supported by “inclusive political institutions” that prevent the monopolization of political power by a small segment of society while also enabling the state to enforce laws. We emphasized that new innovations, technologies, and organizations, though indispensable for sustained economic growth, will often be resisted because they may destabilize an existing order (what we called “political creative destruction”). The best guarantee that we have to prevent some powerful actors blocking new technologies, and in the process stamping out economic development, is to make sure that nobody, and nothing, is powerful enough to be able to do so.

Looked at from this perspective, our conceptual framework here expands on Why Nations Fail. The Shackled Leviathan is not just the culmination of the inclusive political institutions necessary for inclusive economic institutions. It also critically depends on the Red Queen effect—the ability of society to contend with, constrain, and check the state and the political elites. This brings into focus the central role of norms that help society organize, engage in politics, and if necessary rebel against the state and elites. But it isn’t just the shackles that are important. So is the ability of the Leviathan to have the power to enforce laws, resolve conflicts, provide public services, and support the economic institutions that create economic opportunities and incentives. Thus equally essential is the capacity of the state so long as it is matched with society’s ability to control it.

Another new element here is our emphasis on the relaxation of the cage of norms. This is rooted in our discussion in the previous chapter, which documented how restrictions based on norms, traditions, and customs could dull economic incentives and opportunities, and need to be loosened for economic growth to flourish. This may happen to some degree by itself as people find ways of going around these norms and the most restrictive norms themselves start losing their relevance. But it gets a powerful boost from the Shackled Leviathan, as we already saw in our discussion of Greece in Chapter 2, and this underscores another major role of state capacity—to relax the cage of norms, both to create conditions for liberty and to remove impediments against society’s political engagement. Critically, this happens even as other aspects of norms (especially those related to society’s organization and willingness to take action against elites) are keeping the Leviathan in check. This observation reiterates the multifaceted interaction between state capacity and norms we saw in the Athenian case in Chapter 2.

The Effects of Bad Government

Now that we’ve considered the implication of two sides of the Sala dei Nove, let’s turn to the left and study the final panel. There we see the Allegory of Bad Government, which illustrates the economic consequences of bad government.

This fresco is less well preserved than the others, but the message is clear. It is dominated by a fanged and horned figure called Tyranny (or what we have called despotism). At his feet we see Justice, bound. Flying about, instead of virtues like Magnanimity and Fortitude, we find Vainglory, Treason, Cruelty, Fraud, and Tumult. On the far left we find War with sword upraised. Next to War is Division who, instead of holding a plane, holds a carpenter’s saw to cut an object, suggesting that it is division that tears a community apart and brings war. In the background the fresco vividly captures the economic consequences of Tyranny. To the left, the city is desolate. Piles of rocks litter the floor, houses are ill kept with holes in the walls and balconies. A murder is being committed. There is no trade or commerce. The rural consequences of bad government, desolation and poverty in the countryside, are visible too. An army stalks across the abandoned fields. Houses burn and trees are withered. We see a dramatic description of the economic consequences of a Despotic Leviathan, insightfully blamed on bad government.

How Tortillas Were Invented

The Shackled Leviathan and the economic opportunities and incentives it created were not confined to Europe. Another historical example comes from the Valley of Oaxaca in ancient Mexico around 500 BCE. To understand what happened in Oaxaca around this time, let’s start with the staple of the Mexican diet today—the tortilla.

The domestication of maize by humans was a key moment in the long-run economic development of the Americas. It occurred in Mexico around 5000 BCE and possibly earlier. There are many ways to eat maize. You can roast it and eat the kernels from the roasted cob, a delicacy available in almost any Mexican city street today. Or you can mash it up into porridge. An alternative, which emerged about 500 BCE in Oaxaca, was to turn maize into tortillas. To do this you have to grind the kernels into flour, mix it with water and salt, and cook it on what Mexicans call a comal, a round ceramic plate. A selection of modern comales from Oaxaca is shown in the photography section. We know that the tortillas were invented around 500 BCE because archaeologists discovered that the first comales appeared in the Valley of Oaxaca at that time.

Turning maize into tortillas takes a lot more work than simply roasting the kernels on the cob. But it has the advantage of facilitating the transportation of the maize. Making tortillas keeps only the edible part of the cob, so the rest can be thrown away. Why did the people of the valley, who came to be known as the Zapotec, need to transport maize all of a sudden?

The answer relates to the political history of the valley. Going back to 1000 BCE, the entire valley’s population was about 2,000 people and the first truly urban area there, San José Mogote, probably had already reached a population of 1,000. San José soon faced competition from newer urban centers, in particular, Yeguih in the eastern Tlacolula arm of the valley, and San Martín Tilcajete in the southern Valle Grande arm. Some archaeologists have identified these three places as competing chiefdoms, but they had a lot of culture in common. They all used the symbolism of lightning, earthquakes, and the were-jaguar, and they spoke derivatives of a language we now call Zapotec. The word seems to come from Nahuatl, the dominant language of central Mexico, meaning “inhabitants of the place of sapote,” named after the fruit. In between these three urban centers, where the modern city of Oaxaca stands, was something akin to a no-man’s-land. It was here that the mountain Monte Albán, reaching 400 meters above the valley floor, stood.

Monte Albán was a quite desolate place with no natural water sources and it was far from the best farmland in the valley. In 500 BCE it was still uninhabited. Shortly thereafter the three communities of San José Mogote, Yeguih, and San Martín Tilcajete got together and built a city on the mountain that quickly reached a population of 7,000 people. This city was the capital of a new state that came to integrate the whole of the valley into its territory through a hierarchy of settlements and administrative centers. Most of the buildings constructed in the early days, during the epoch archaeologists call Monte Albán Early I, are now buried under later construction. Excavations nonetheless show clear evidence of three distinct barrios surrounding the initial central plaza of the city. It seems plausible that people from the three communities migrated to the different barrios. In this period, before cisterns were dug to catch rainwater, all the water for the settlement had to be man-hauled up the mountain, and so did the maize. This is where tortillas come in. Though a few agricultural terraces were hewn out of the mountainside, they weren’t nearly enough to grow food for 7,000 people or the 17,000 people who came to inhabit Monte Albán in the Late I epoch. So the food, like the water, had to be lugged up the hill, and tortillas made this easier.

The creation of Monte Albán by the citizens of San José Mogote, Yeguih, and San Martín Tilcajete is another example of pristine state formation, the setting up of a state where none existed before, which we already discussed in Chapter 3. But it was different from the typical pristine state formation. Unlike what Shaka did in Zululand or what we see in the Nile Valley with the emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization, this wasn’t a charismatic leader or a powerful group of political elites imposing their domination over the rest of society. Rather, it has some notable similarities to state building in situations such as Athens and the U.S., where society is already strong and capable of restricting what the state and elites can do. Recall, for example, that after the constitutional convention in Philadelphia and the ratification of the Constitution, the federal government had to decide on a capital city. Initially, Congress met in New York, but there was competition between the Northern and Southern states over a permanent site for the capital. Many different options were discussed. New Yorkers wanted it to stay in New York, while the Southerners wanted it closer to the South. The first president, George Washington, favored a compromise, in neutral territory on the Potomac River, just upstream from his house at Mount Vernon. In 1790 he got his way, thanks to a deal forged by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. The Southern states had been blocking legislation that would have allowed the newly created federal state to take over and pay all of the debts accumulated by the states. For Hamilton this was a critical issue in the building of a new state with a centralized fiscal system and the ability to borrow. In exchange for an agreement that the capital be on the Potomac, at a specific location to be determined by Washington, the Southern states agreed to let the federal government take over state debts. Washington, D.C., was then built in neutral, underdeveloped territory, between the two big rival groupings of Northern and Southern states.

Though we don’t have any written records of its history, it is likely that what happened in Monte Albán has many parallels to the U.S. experience. Just like Madison and Hamilton, the citizens or at least the elites of San José Mogote, Yeguih, and San Martín Tilcajete may have recognized the benefits of creating a more effective centralized state. This is what the archaeological record suggests happened. After the founding of Monte Albán we find lower conflict and less evidence of burned houses and surface remains of charred pieces of daub or other materials. The evidence indicates that this period of state building led to a significant expansion of trade as well. One archaeological site in the Valle Grande area features a large, open, and accessible platform measuring 55 by 38 meters. It is not a temple and is edged by large rocks. There is evidence of specialization in production: misfired pottery, concentrations of chipped chert and quartzite, a mine for quartz, rocks worn in ways suggesting that they were used for grinding or pounding, and there is a bark beater for making paper. In fact, the platform was almost surely a market.

So what sort of political institutions supported greater peace and economic specialization in Monte Albán? Typically, we learn about the political institutions of long-lost polities from their archaeological record, the names and images of their powerful kings, and their tombs full of valuable goods. And yet for the Zapotec we don’t see any of that. We haven’t a clue who the early kings were, or even if they had kings or dynasties. If they did, we don’t know their names, and there are no elaborate tombs, engravings, or palaces. There seems to have been no personalization of power. The religion of the Zapotec, which plays a central role after the foundation of Monte Albán, was the Cojico cult. Cojico was the Zapotec representation of “lightning-clouds-rain,” but this imagery was not captured or co-opted by any individuals. There were no “god kings.” That’s not so uncommon in pre-Columbian Mexico. The great city of Teotihuacán northeast of Mexico city, which had a population of 200,000 people at its height, similarly did not have named kings, royal tombs, or palaces. When what appear to be elites are depicted in murals, they are always masked; power was not flaunted in Teotihuacán, as if there were laws and norms against the dominance of rulers and elites—as if the Leviathan was tightly shackled. Though we don’t know exactly what sort of government either Monte Albán or Teotihuacán had, we do know that at the time of the conquest, there were plenty of states in Mexico that were collectively governed by councils. A well-documented example is the pre-Columbian Tlaxcalan state, which lasted from the middle of the fourteenth century until the Spanish conquest and built sophisticated republican institutions with popular participation. The archaeological evidence makes it likely that the Zapotec were governed in a similar way. So it’s reasonable to assume that the state that emerged in Monte Albán was similarly shackled.

We also observe that Monte Albán’s institutional arrangements had profound positive economic consequences. We already noted that they seem to have promoted peace and the flourishing of markets, and there is evidence of an important uptick in trade. For one thing, compared to the previous period, people stopped building big storage pits for food, presumably because they could readily buy it in the market and had less need for storage. We also see a marked improvement in the quality of house construction. Before 500 BCE houses tended to be made of wattle and daub, with few houses built of stone and mud brick. Construction of the latter type became the norm after 500 BCE. Most dramatically, we see a large expansion of the population of the valley after the formation of the state. As we saw, around 1000 BCE the valley housed around 2,000 people and it stagnated at this level until the Early I period. With the foundation of Monte Albán and its expansion to 7,000 people, the population of the valley appears to have increased to 14,000. Later Monte Albán’s population rose to 17,000 and the population of the entire valley exceeded 50,000. Though Monte Albán grew rapidly, there does not seem to have been a fall in the population of San José Mogote, Yeguih, and San Martín Tilcajete. So while some people may have moved from these places to Monte Albán, their population was soon replenished and the capital city must have benefited from rural-urban migration. There was probably both a marked rise in fertility and a migration of people from outside the valley into the new state as well. Other economic changes included increased production of pottery, the introduction of new types of ceramics, and a notable intensification of agricultural activity. The cultivated areas expanded and there was investment in irrigation for the first time. All the evidence points to increases in agricultural productivity and consumption.

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We have witnessed in this chapter something very different from the type of state brought into being by the will to power, and of course also very different from the weak, essentially absent political hierarchy of the stateless societies. We have also seen, as anticipated in Chapter 2, how this early Shackled Leviathan generated much greater levels of liberty and how it brings into existence an entirely different set of economic opportunities and incentives, unleashing powerful forces toward prosperity.

But what are the origins of this very different type of state-society relationship? That’s the question we turn to next.

Chapter 6

THE EUROPEAN SCISSORS

Europe Moves into the Corridor

The part of the world that developed the enduring Shackled Leviathans that would shape our recent history was Europe, particularly Western and Northern Europe. The Athenian Shackled Leviathan collapsed as the Macedonian Empire expanded. Similarly the Zapotec state had gone out of the corridor and disappeared by the time the Oaxaca Valley was conquered by the Spanish. As we’ll see, the development of a state that was both capable and constrained by society was a gradual, painful historical process in Europe. People who were present at its early stages would not have recognized this as the beginning of a process that would transform their liberty, politics, and economy. But as it evolved, it started bringing liberty, transformed the nature of state institutions, and ushered in a period of prosperity of a sort previously unknown in human society. Why did all of this emerge in Europe?

The answer is not obvious. Going back in history, there was nothing manifest about the rise of Europe. Agriculture originated not in Europe but in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent and then in China. When it spread to European lands, it did so through the colonizing activities of people moving from the Middle East, reaching Britain around 4000 BCE, over 5,000 years after it had become established in the Levant. Similarly the first towns and cities emerged not in Europe but in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq. The Gilgamesh problem, as we have seen, arose first in Uruk, not Uxbridge. To all of the great classical empires, Western and Northern Europe were at best marginal. The Romans built a sophisticated civilization centered around the Mediterranean, but had little interest in much of Western and Northern Europe, except when they ventured to areas that are now part of Germany in order to confront the Germanic tribes, which they viewed as barbarians (though they did conquer Gaul, modern-day France, and part of Britain). Only very late in history do we see Europe coming onto the world stage.

All the same, as we discussed in the previous chapter, by the eleventh century, parts of Europe had developed republican governments and were in the middle of a massive economic boom. How did Europe get there? How did these revolutions in government, society, and economy come about and pave the way to an unprecedented rise of liberty and the spectacular technological and economic advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What was Europe’s advantage?

The answer to these questions lies in a unique series of historical events 1,500 years ago that created a fortuitous balance between the powers of central authority and those of common men (not women, unfortunately). It is this balance that put Europe into the corridor, setting in motion the Red Queen effect in a relentless process of state-society competition. The balance was a consequence of two things. First, the takeover of Europe at the end of the fifth century by democratically organized tribal societies centered on assemblies and norms of consensual decision making. Second, the legacy of critical elements of state institutions and political hierarchy absorbed from the Roman Empire and the Christian church, whose centralizing influence continued even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century. We can think of these two elements as the two blades of a pair of scissors. On its own neither would have put Western Europe onto a new path. But hinge them together and the two blades of the European scissors prepared the scene for the rise of the Shackled Leviathan and the economic incentives and opportunities that it unleashed.

The Assembly Politics of the Long-Haired Kings

To get an inkling of how Europe managed all of this, let’s turn to the depiction of an assembly recorded in 882 by Hincmar, the archbishop of Reims in France. Hincmar’s book, known as On the Governance of the Palace, was written for Carloman II, king of West Francia, on his ascension to the throne. Francia, which was already fragmented by the time Carloman was crowned, was the kingdom created originally by the Franks, a Germanic tribe that had fought against, and sometimes with, the Romans for nearly two centuries. It became one of the beneficiaries of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and then played a defining role in the political developments of post-Roman Europe.

Map 8. The Empires of the Franks: The Merovingian and Carolingian Empires and the Boundaries of the Roman Empire

Carloman was part of the Carolingian dynasty that was created by Charles Martel in the early eighth century and greatly expanded by his grandson Charlemagne. By the time of his death in 814, Charlemagne had united into one state France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy (see Map 8). Hincmar instructed Carloman how to rule over his kingdom by recounting how the kingdom had been run according to Adalhardus, a contemporary of Charlemagne and an eyewitness to how the state functioned then. Remarkably, this rule wasn’t going to involve the king exercising his unbridled wishes, but would be based on popular assemblies. As Hincmar noted:

At that time the custom was followed that no more than two general assemblies were to be held each year. The first assembly determined the status of the entire realm for the remainder of the year. No turn of events, saving only the greatest crisis which struck the realm at once, could change what had been established. All the important men, both clerics and laymen, attended this general assembly. The important men came to participate in the deliberations, and those of lower station were present in order to hear the decisions and occasionally also to deliberate concerning them, and to confirm them not out of coercion but by their own understanding and agreement.

Participation in the second assembly was broader, but in both assemblies a council of “important persons and senior advisers of the realm” played a key role and “proposed questions to the king and received responses,” and

as often as those withdrawn in council wished it, the king would go to them and remain with them for as long as they desired. They then in all friendliness told him how they had found individual matters; they frankly related what they had discussed on one side and the other, in disagreement or argument or friendly rivalry.

The Frankish elites “in council” also could “summon outsiders, as for example … when they wanted to pose questions,” and the king took this opportunity “to interview persons coming from all parts of the realm, to learn if they brought with them information worthy of consideration.” Indeed, before coming to the assembly each participant “was to collect information concerning any relevant matter not only from his own people but from strangers and from both friends and enemies.”

What Hincmar describes was the essence of the assembly politics of Germanic tribes, a remarkably participatory form of government. Charlemagne, and later Carloman, had to play by the rules of these assemblies, consult the wishes of a diverse cross section of (male) society, and secure a degree of consensus for their major decisions. Obviously, the number of people who could appear at such an assembly was limited, but Charlemagne deployed messengers to relate the findings to lower-level meetings so that the whole kingdom was informed. This participation is the first blade of the European scissors.

The roots of these assemblies come from the way the Franks were organized. The best description we have comes from Tacitus’s book The Germania, written in 98 CE. Tacitus was a Roman politician, public servant, and historian, and his book reflected the curiosity that Romans had about the Germans, who had imposed upon them several calamitous military defeats and whose customs and institutions looked so different from theirs. To satisfy this curiosity, Tacitus presented an almost ethnographic account of the organization and culture of the German people. He described their political system in the following way:

On matters of minor importance only the chiefs debate; on major affairs, the whole community. But even where the commons have the decision, the subject is considered in advance by the chiefs … The Assembly is competent also to hear criminal charges, especially those involving the risk of capital punishment … These same assemblies elect, among other officials, the magistrates who administer justice in the districts and villages. Each magistrate is assisted by a hundred assessors chosen from the people to advise him and to add weight to his decisions.