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

Indeed, it was exactly this type of innovation based on experimentation, taking risks, and breaking rules that eluded the Soviet planners for seventy years, and the Chinese economy has not yet cracked it either. One can pour resources into patents, universities, new technologies, and even create huge rewards for success (for some Soviet scientists, the reward was to stay alive). But it’s not enough if you cannot replicate the rambunctious, disorderly, and disobedient nature of true experimentation, and no society outside the corridor has so far managed that.

Chinese growth is not likely to peter out in the next few years. But as with other episodes of despotic growth, its existential challenge lies in unleashing large-scale experimentation and innovation. Like all previous instances of despotic growth, it is unlikely to succeed in this.

Liberty with Chinese Characteristics

Liberty doesn’t easily germinate under despotism. It is no different in China today. While Hong Kong and Taiwan, so close to China and cut from the same cultural cloth, have created societies that have demonstrated the powerful demand for liberty, China has gone in a different direction. As we write, the Chinese government is piloting its “social credit system.” Each Chinese citizen will be monitored and given a social credit score. Monitoring is done of all online activities, but the government is also erecting 200 million face recognition cameras throughout the country, as the image from Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, in the photography section illustrates. In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell famously wrote, “Big Brother is watching.” Technologically this was a dream (or nightmare) in 1949, when the book was published. It isn’t anymore. A person with top social credit scores will get special treatment at hotels and airports, easier credit from banks, and preferential access to elite universities and top jobs. As the propaganda has it:

It will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.

But how freely? Buy alcohol in the supermarket—bad idea, you lose a few points. Points will also be subtracted if a relative or friend does something the authorities don’t like. Whom you date or marry will influence your score as well. If you make decisions the Communist Party doesn’t like, you’ll be locked out of society, unable to travel, rent a car or apartment, or even get a job. This all sounds like a cage, created not by norms but by the state’s watchful eye.

A vivid application of the social credit mentality and what it means for liberty is on view in western China in Xinjiang, home of millions of Muslim Uighur people. The Uighurs have faced constant discrimination, repression, and mass imprisonment, as well as the most intensive use of the state’s surveillance techniques. Now they have to tolerate “big brothers and sisters” in their homes, monitoring their every word and deed. The first wave of these social monitors was dispatched in 2014, when about 200,000 Communist Party members were sent to Xinjiang to “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People,” even if they were as welcome by the Uighurs themselves as the city dwellers sent down to the countryside by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. In 2016, a second wave of 110,000 monitors was sent as the vanguard of the United as One Family campaign, which placed them in the homes of Uighurs whose family members had been imprisoned or killed by the police. A third wave of one million cadres was sent out in 2017. In the mornings, brothers and sisters sing together in front of the Chinese Communist Party local headquarters, and they studiously attend information sessions on the “New China” vision of President Xi.

Uighurs are constantly being watched to check their loyalty. Do they speak Chinese well? Any signs of a prayer mat or kneeling toward Mecca? Did I overhear an Islamic greeting (such as Assalamu alaikum)? Do they own a copy of the Quran? What happens on Ramadan?

For most, liberty with Chinese characteristics is no liberty at all.

Chapter 8

BROKEN RED QUEEN

A Hate Story

Manoj and Babli made a terrible mistake in 2007: they fell in love. They were from Karoran, a small village in the state of Haryana in northwest India. Manoj had dropped out of school and got a job as an apprentice in an electronics repair shop. Babli attended the local girls’ school across the road. They met in the shop, and if it wasn’t love at first sight, it was soon afterward. She took in her perfectly functioning cell phone for him to repair, and when he questioned her, she replied, “Of course there was nothing wrong with it. I just wanted to see you again.”

Both Manoj and Babli were from the same caste, or jati. They were both Banwala Jats. The Jats are what is known as an “Other Backward Class” in India. In itself that wasn’t an issue. In fact, in the Indian caste system there are strict rules of caste endogamy, meaning that people have to marry within their caste. But within a caste there are further restrictions and the fatal problem was that Manoj and Babli were from the same gotra, or clan. A clan is a kinship group. There was no legal reason why Manoj and Babli could not marry according to Indian law, but some things in India are more powerful than the law.

When they decided to elope and marry, Babli and Manoj violated a rule of the caste system so ancient that it is actually stated in the famous treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, written by Kautilya sometime around 324 BCE. Kautilya was an adviser to Chandragupta Maurya, the ruler who created the great Mauryan Empire that spanned northern India. In a section outlining the different duties and responsibilities of the distinct castes, Kautilya stipulates that “the duties of a householder are: earning his livelihood by pursuing his own profession; marrying a woman from the same varna but not of the same gotra.”

By varna Kautilya means one of the four great social distinctions that divide the Hindu population: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra. These are four distinct subsets into which most Indians are divided, with the identity being passed on from parents to children. Kautilya was also very clear on what the different varnas were supposed to do:

The duties of the Brahman are: study, teaching, performing the rituals prescribed for him, officiating at others people’s rituals, giving and receiving of gifts.

The duties of a Kshatriya are: study, performing the rituals prescribed for him, living by [the profession of] arms and protecting all life.

The duties of a Vaishya are: study, performing the prescribed rituals, agriculture, cattle-rearing and trade.

The duties of a [Shudra] are: service of twice-born [i.e., the three higher varnas] [or] an economic activity [such as agriculture, cattle-rearing and trade] the profession of an artisan [or] entertainer [such as actor or singer].

Only the first three were “twice-born” and entitled to take part in particular religious ceremonies. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the Shudras, who were destined to serve the higher varnas and undertake menial tasks, such as being an entertainer. It is possible that the Shudras were originally composed of peoples who had been conquered by the Indo-Aryans as they migrated into India in the distant past and merged into their society. Top of the heap were the Brahmans, the priestly varna that specialized in education as well as religious ceremonies. Next came the Kshatriyas, who were primarily warriors and soldiers, and after them the Vaishyas, who engaged in commerce, manufacturing, and agriculture. Outside this system, and at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, were the people known historically as “untouchables” or Dalits, now more formally referred to as being from Scheduled Castes.

Jatis, nested within the varnas, are the groups that are most properly called castes. The Jats are a jati. It is useful to think of the caste system as being composed of these jatis, of which there are about 3,000 in India, with each jati embedded within one of the varnas. Hence the Banwala Jats to whom Manoj and Babli belonged were members of the Jat jati, who were in turn part of the Shudras, now considered to be part of the more modern Other Backward Classes.

This historical societal organization is not unique to India. As we have seen, Medieval England was also a society of “orders,” and historians often make a tripartite distinction between those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. These roughly correspond to the Brahmans, the Kshatriyas, and the Vaishyas/Shudras. People also took the name of their job which, as we’ll see, is a key part of the Indian caste system. If you were a blacksmith in thirteenth-century England, you were probably called Smith; if you made barrels, you were a Cooper; if you made bread, then a Baker. Likely the son of a Smith was also a blacksmith. The British historian Richard Britnell even used data on last names to develop measures of how economically diverse Medieval England was. He didn’t have actual data on the economy, only on people’s names from tax records, but that turned out to be the same thing. If you knew people’s names, you knew what their economic occupation was, and hence you knew how the economy was organized. These names have persisted over time, but as we saw in Chapter 6, their connection to occupation has been eroded by economic and social change. One of the reasons for the breakdown of name and occupation is that this relationship never got institutionalized in the same way it did in India. In particular, it never got embedded in religion and the nature of the state.

The persistence of caste identities and norms in India is vividly illustrated by the fact that a norm recorded by Kautilya almost 2,500 years ago is still enforced today. Enforced how? Manoj and Babli had to present themselves in court at Kaithal because Babli’s family accused Manoj of kidnapping her. They had to attest to the fact that they were legally married and no kidnapping had taken place. To Babli’s surprise, her brother Suresh and cousin Gurdev appeared. How did they know that the court hearing was to take place? Two other cousins were there too. Still, Manoj and Babli had anticipated that there could be trouble so, at the suggestion of their lawyer, they had asked the court for police protection. After the court hearing the police took them in a car to the bus to go back to Chandigarh, where they had gotten married and were hiding from their disapproving relatives. They got down from the car at Pehowa bus stand to catch the bus to Chandigarh. The relatives had followed them. The police seemed to recognize the problem. Two were sent with Manoj and Babli on the bus to make sure nothing happened. Two cousins boarded the bus. More were in a car. The bus moved off, but when it reached the town of Pipli, the two policemen declared that this was the boundary of their jurisdiction and that they had to leave. Manoj and Babli were alone. In their desperation they jumped on a bus bound for Delhi; the cousins followed. At a toll plaza shortly before the town of Karnal a silver Mahindra Scorpio SUV swerved in front of the bus and blocked it. Manoj and Babli were forced out of their seats and into the Scorpio. They vanished and were never seen alive again. Their bloated, mutilated bodies, with their feet tied together, were pulled out of the Balsamand Minor canal.

Though you might have thought Manoj and Babli were the victims, the local caste council decided to ostracize Manoj’s family. Nobody in the village was allowed to talk to them or sell them anything. If anyone broke this rule, they would be fined 25,000 rupees (about US$350) and ostracized by the rest of the village.

India in the Cage of Norms

In the evolution of Indian state and society, the cage of norms is the big story. While in Athens and Europe the Red Queen not only spawned the development of both state and society but also started relaxing the cage of norms in the process, that didn’t happen in India. The consolidation of the caste system and the subservience of the state to its rigid hierarchy fragmented society and made it turn against itself. Society is never a monolithic entity, and its internal conflicts and the inequalities that these engender play a central role in a nation’s politics. The Red Queen reshapes these divisions through state-society competition and cooperation, as we saw for instance in late-eighteenth-century Britain, where expanding state capacity induced society to develop new identities, new organizations, and more general demands. In contrast, the fragmentation and divisions that the caste system fomented meant that none of this could take place in India; society couldn’t organize and monitor the state and there would be no Red Queen dynamics reshaping society’s identities, even though the peninsula, like Europe, has a deep history of popular participation in government. Instead, because political participation was based on caste and the state itself supported and was bulwarked by the caste system, caste-based identities got repeatedly reconfirmed—with abominable consequences for liberty.

The caste system doesn’t just explain the lack of liberty in India. It also helps explain the country’s poverty. The fact that people are locked into occupations by their inherited status puts a huge impediment in the way of social mobility and innovation. But this is just the visible tip of the massively unequal opportunities and incentives generated by a system based on a rigid social hierarchy and dominance in every nook and cranny of society. Even while India has been a democracy since January 26, 1950, and “liberalized” its economy in the 1990s, the dominance of caste and the gamut of restrictive, divisive, and hierarchical norms have persisted and bred a state devoid of real capacity or much interest in helping its poorest citizens.

To understand all this better, let’s begin at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, with the Dalits.

The Broken People

What does “Dalit” mean exactly? The word doesn’t appear in Kautilya but has much more recent origins. The Dalits used to be called the “untouchables.” The great Indian statesman B. R. Ambedkar, who after independence in 1947 helped draft the first version of the Indian Constitution, coined the term “Dalits.” It means literally “broken people.” But where does “untouchability” come from?

Untouchability means what is says: you cannot be touched. For a higher-caste person to touch a Dalit causes “pollution” which can only be eradicated by ritual cleansing. As a Dalit worker interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Ahmedabad district, Gujarat, in 1998 put it:

When we are working, they ask us not to come near them. At tea canteens, they have separate tea tumblers and they make us clean them ourselves and make us put the dishes away ourselves. We cannot enter temples. We cannot use upper-caste water taps. We have to go one kilometer away to get water … When we ask for our rights from the government, the municipality officials threaten to fire us. So we don’t say anything.

It’s not just a matter of physical touching. If a Dalit casts a shadow on a Brahman, that can require ritual cleansing. Dalits should not wear shoes in the presence of the “twice-born.” Ambedkar, who was himself a Dalit, didn’t like the notion of untouchability and he made sure that the Indian Constitution outlawed it. Article 17, “Abolition of Untouchability,” states in no uncertain terms:

Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.

Yet it is estimated that there may be as many as 200 million Dalits in India today. How is that possible?

Ambedkar’s most famous statement about untouchability came in a lecture he prepared to give in 1936. He never presented it because when he circulated a draft, it was deemed so outrageous that he was quickly disinvited. He printed it at his own expense and called it “The Annihilation of Caste.” Ambedkar knew what he was talking about; as a child he was allowed to go to a school for “touchables,” but he had to sit apart from the rest of the children on a sack so as not to pollute the floor for them. He couldn’t drink all day because the only tap was for higher castes. Ambedkar starts by outlining what it was like to be an untouchable:

The Untouchable was not allowed to use the public streets if a Hindu was coming along, lest he should pollute the Hindu by his shadow. The Untouchable was required to have a black thread either on his wrist or around his neck, as a sign or mark to prevent the Hindus from getting themselves polluted by his touch by mistake. In Poona … the Untouchable was required to carry, strung from the waist, a broom to sweep away from behind himself the dust he trod on, lest a Hindu walking on the same dust should be polluted. In Poona, the Untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot hung around his neck wherever he went—for holding his spit, lest his spit falling on the earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.

But Ambedkar’s agenda wasn’t just abolishing untouchability. Ambedkar wanted to overthrow the entire caste system because he understood its wide-ranging pernicious effects. He attacked this from an economic point of view. It made no sense to him (and makes no sense to us either) that castes, varnas, and jatis have specific occupations. He of course knew it was based on dominance and was a powerful source of illiberty. But even more important, he understood that caste made society turn against itself and stand divided and disorganized. He wrote that

the caste system is not merely a division of labor. It is also a division of laborers. Civilized society undoubtedly needs division of labor. But in no civilized society is division of labor accompanied by this unnatural division of laborers into water-tight compartments. The caste system … is a hierarchy in which the divisions of laborers are graded one above the other … In one of its aspects, it divides men into separate communities. In its second aspect, it places these communities in a graded order one above the other in social status.

Elsewhere he used a different metaphor, likening the caste system to “a multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance. Everybody had to die in the story they were born in.” The division of labor created by the caste system is economically irrational because “it involves an attempt to appoint tasks to individuals in advance—selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the social status of the parent.” You couldn’t build a modern economy on the “dogma of predestination,” and any attempt to do so was like trying to build “a palace on a dung heap.”

Ambedkar was very clear, too, on the dreadful consequences of the caste system for liberty and for politics. Not only was a caste society fundamentally illiberal, but Ambedkar stressed that caste created a highly fragmented, disorganized, and prostate society. “Caste has … completely disorganized and demoralized the Hindus,” he wrote, and this was because “Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes.” Except when they might unite against an outside foe, “each caste endeavors to segregate itself and to distinguish itself from other castes … the ideal Hindu must be like a rat living in his own hole, refusing to have any contact with others … The Hindus, therefore, are not merely an assortment of castes, but are so many warring groups, each living for itself and for its selfish ideal.” The overwhelming role of caste in people’s identities is why “the Hindu cannot be said to form a society.” This is fundamentally because

a Hindu’s … responsibility is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste. Virtue has become caste-ridden, and morality has become caste bound … There is charity, but it begins with caste and ends with caste. There is sympathy, but not for men of other castes.

What about the illiberal nature of caste society? This is perhaps obvious given the restrictions on occupation, lifestyle, residence, and many other things that go along with caste. But Ambedkar wanted to make a deeper point; the caste system could only be maintained by dominance and the threat of violence. He points out that in the great Hindu epic the Ramayana, King Rama beheads a Shudra he finds meditating. Shudras are not twice-born, they are not meant to meditate. India’s oldest law code, the Laws of Manu, is adamant that the king enforce the caste system and specifies very heavy sanctions for breaking with varna. For example, a Shudra who recites or even listens to the Vedas, the ancient holy literature of Hindus, can be punished by having his tongue cut off or having molten lead poured into his ears.

The most menial of tasks were reserved not for Shudras but for Dalits. These include jobs as manual scavengers, tasks such as the removal of dead animal carcasses and human waste (see the photography section for an illustration of one of these jobs). Among other Dalit occupations are cobblers, leatherworkers, and street sweepers. Dalit children are sold off to upper-caste creditors to pay off debts and Dalit girls are sold to temples in the Devadasi system, in effect a form of institutionalized prostitution. Dalit men, women, and children work in appalling conditions for a pittance as agricultural workers. Human Rights Watch reproduces government statistics suggesting that there are at least one million, and probably far more, Dalits who work as manual scavengers. One of the scavengers interviewed in the state of Andhra Pradesh reported:

In one toilet there can be as many as 400 seats which all have to be manually cleaned. This is the lowest occupation in the world, and it is done by the community that occupies the lowest status in the caste system.

The demeaning nature of the work they have to do is part of their domination by the upper castes, and it is supported by norms and the threat of violence. Many of the scavengers are told by the community that they have no choice but to do this work. When the Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, or National Campaign for Dignity, started informing manual scavengers in the state of Madhya Pradesh that they could leave this work if they wanted to, 11,000 of them did so right away. But the pressure and threats on them continued. One scavenger reported that “one of the people I cleaned for warned me, ‘Now, if you come to my farm, I’ll cut off both of your legs.’”

The nature of the caste system and the cage of norms it creates undermines the ability of Indian society to act collectively. Just as Ambedkar pointed out, society is divided against itself. The Red Queen is broken.

Those Who Dominate

Those who dominate were often the highest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Brahmans. Historically, even in villages with multiple castes, the Brahmans dominated local politics and political institutions such as the local village assembly, the panchayat, an institution we’ll return to later in the chapter. An autobiography published in 1903 by Thillai Govindan records several meetings of local panchayats to adjudicate legal cases in the village in Tamil Nadu where he lived. In one, of the 25 people who met, 18 were Brahmans. In the course of his fieldwork in the same state in the early 1960s, the anthropologist André Béteille found that the Brahmans, though they made up only one quarter of the village population, had traditionally completely dominated the panchayat.

Yet by the time Béteille started to study the community, things had started to change. This was both because the Brahmans had migrated to urban areas where their better education allowed them access to higher-paid professions and government employment and because democratic politics had empowered the more populous castes. In the village Béteille studied, this caste was the Kallas, a Shudra jati. They emerged as the most powerful group not just because they were the numerically dominant varna in the village. It was also, as Béteille notes, because

Kallas have a tradition of violence which makes the Adi-Dravidas hesitant in challenging their authority.

The term Adi-Dravidas (meaning literally “Original Dravidians”) is used specifically in Tamil Nadu as a label for Dalits. This term came into usage in the early twentieth century as a way of destigmatizing the Paraiyar community, an untouchable group. From the Paraiyars, we get the English word “pariah,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as outcast, persona non grata, reject, outsider, leper. The Dravidians were the first people to populate southern India before the Indo-Aryan migrations, which seem to have originally brought the caste system, so the description Original Dravidians was intended to raise their status.

This antagonism between what the Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas called the “dominant caste” of a village and the Dalits is common and is often steeped in violence. Human Rights Watch studied this in Tamil Nadu in the context of the conflict between the Dalits and another Shudra jati, the Thevars. As one person they interviewed put it:

The Thevars are opposed to the Dalits. They themselves are not an advanced community. They are landlords but not in a big sense. They are not advanced in education, but still employed the Dalits as laborers.

So there were economic reasons for keeping the Dalits under control, but Human Rights Watch uncovered a much more pervasive system of hierarchy and dominance. As a Thevar politician told them, without any hint of irony:

In the past, twenty to thirty years ago, harijans [Dalits] enjoyed the practice of “untouchability.” In the past, women enjoyed being oppressed by men … Most … Dalit women enjoy relations with Thevar men. They enjoy Thevar community men having them as concubines. It is not done by force. Anything with Dalits is not done by force. That’s why they don’t react. They cannot afford to react, they are dependent on us for jobs and protection … Without Dalits we cannot live. We want workers in the fields. We are landholders. Without them we cannot cultivate or take care of our cattle. But Dalit women’s relations with Thevar men are not out of economic dependency. She wants it from him. He permits it. If he has power, then she has more affection for the landlord.

These dominating relationships not only obliterate liberty for the dominated but also poison the functioning of local political institutions. Supposedly there are seats on the panchayat reserved for Dalits. These reservations challenged the previous hegemony of the dominant castes. In 1996, in the Tamil Nadu village of Melavalavu, the majority caste community, including the Thevars, let it be known that no Dalit should run for the panchayat. A story in the Times of India reported that “they were warned that they would lose their jobs as farmhands and not be allowed to graze cattle or draw water from wells located on patta [unutilized] land held by the dominant castes.” Elections were scheduled for October, but in the face of this intimidation they had to be canceled because all the Dalit candidates withdrew. In February a Dalit, Murugesan, had the temerity to run. As the dominant castes boycotted the election, he won. Thereafter, however, he needed police protection and he was not able to enter the panchayat buildings because the Thevars prevented him. Murugesan was the target of constant threats, and in June 1997 he was murdered. A firsthand account relates:

There were nearly forty of them. They were all Thevars. They stabbed Murugesan on the right side of his belly. It was a very long knife. From outside the bus Ramar [the leader] instructed the Thevars to kill all the Pariahs. Among twelve, six were murdered on the spot. They pulled all six out of the bus and stabbed them on the road with bill hooks more than two feet long … Five Thevars joined together, put Murugesan on the ground outside the bus, and chopped off his head, then threw it in a well half a kilometer away.

After this massacre, outside intervention allowed five Dalit women to be elected to the panchayat. In response the Thevars fired Dalit workers and prevented others from hiring them. Dalit children were afraid to go to school. One of the elected women told Human Rights Watch:

The office is in the caste Hindu area. I am not allowed in the office. So we have to hold our meetings in our TV room here; it is a makeshift office. They are still threatening us. They are watching and following me … If the elected Dalit women go there, the upper caste would do some harm. If the women insist on going into the office, they will hit them. There is one police guard for me. He has a gun, but he puts it inside his bag … Everything is paralyzed.

At another Tamil village, a woman called Veludavur told Human Rights Watch about the endemic sexual violence against Dalit women:

In the village, the Thevars entered the house and had sexual intercourse with the Dalit women. They used force and committed rape. My husband died, so if I had stayed then the same things would happen to me … I left all the lands. This is the regular lot of the dominated persons.

The Caged Economy of Caste

Even if Dalits are at the base of a caste system that segregates people socially and economically, you may be skeptical that this ancient social hierarchy could be so rigid as to determine people’s occupations in recent times. Who would enforce that? It is certainly not part of Indian law. But we’ve already seen the power of caste norms in enforcing caste regulations and even encouraging the murder of people who violate them. Could these norms have created a durable association between a person’s name and their caste and their occupation?

The first person who systematically investigated this question was a British colonial administrator, E. A. H. Blunt, who published The Caste System of Northern India in 1931. Using data about caste and occupation from the British colonial censuses, Blunt estimated the extent to which different jatis undertook their traditional occupations. He first sorted the different jatis into twelve broad categories starting with agriculture, laborers and village menials, pastoral occupations, learned professions and going all the way through trade and industry, dealers in food and drink, and even beggars. Within these broad classes were much more specialized occupations. For instance, in agriculture there was the growing of flowers and vegetables, poppy cultivation, and water-nut cultivation. Within learned professions there was astrology, writing, and of course the priesthood, which mapped onto the Brahmans. Within trade and industry Blunt identified thirty-five different specializations that were matched almost one for one to different jatis. For example, the Lohar jati were blacksmiths, the Sonar goldsmiths, and the Pasi toddy drawers (toddy is the sap used to make palm wine). Obviously agriculture was by far the largest occupation, the vocation of 90 percent of all the castes in this category. Yet agriculture was less interesting than the others because it was also a much more general occupation, water-nut cultivation notwithstanding. More astonishing were the results for specific occupations. Blunt found that 75 percent of the sweeper jati followed their profession, and so did 75 percent of goldsmiths (Sonars), 60 percent of confectioners and grain parchers, 60 percent of barbers and washermen, and 50 percent of carpenters, weavers, oil pressers, and potters.

But this segregation doesn’t mean that the different castes are autarkic. They are linked by the Jajmani system, which specifies a network of services and favors that different castes have to provide for one another. On the face of it, it is a vast system of in-kind mutual gift giving. Some people’s gifts are much more valuable than others’, however. The first detailed description of how this worked was made by a missionary, William Wiser, in the 1930s in Karimpur, a village in northern India close to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Wiser, along with his wife, Charlotte, subsequently wrote an ethnography of Karimpur, documenting the intense dominance in the village:

The leaders of our village are so sure of their power that they make no effort to display it. The casual visitor finds little to distinguish them from other farmers … And yet when one of them appears among men of serving caste, the latter express respect and fear in every guarded word and gesture. The serving ones have learned that as long as their subservience is unquestioned the hand which directs them rests lightly. But let there be any move towards independence or even indifference amongst them, and the paternal touch becomes a strangle-hold … in every detail of life have the leaders bound the villagers to themselves. Their favour may bring about a man’s prosperity and their disfavour may cause him to fail.

There were 754 people in Karimpur, divided into 161 families. Brahmans made up 41 of the 161 families, and Wiser identified 24 different jatis in total, 2 types of Brahmans, 2 types of Kshatriyas, 12 different Shudra jatis and 8 untouchable categories. He mapped an intricate system of customary services that different jatis had to do for one another. Let’s start with the Brahmans. In principle Brahmans were priests who tended to the religious needs of the rest of the castes. The most prestigious of the Brahman families acting as priests served only the other Brahman families and received religious services from an even more superior family from outside the village. The next Brahman families in the hierarchy tended to the religious needs of the Kshatriyas and Shudras. Brahmans, who owned most of the land in the village, were owed services by other castes. A carpenter, born into the Barhai jati, had to remove and sharpen his plow blades once or twice a week. When it was harvest season, he had to keep sickles sharp and renew handles as often as required. If a cart was broken, he had to mend it and do other errands that required his skills. Other castes, such as ironworker, barber, water bearer, and potter, had similar fixed tasks that they had to undertake for different people. In exchange there were prespecified payments, normally in kind, which differed according to caste. For example, a Brahman would give the carpenter and ironworker 10.5 pounds of grain each season for every plow owned. Non-Brahmans would give 14 pounds of grain per plow. Such differences were the norm even when monetary payments were involved. The seamster, for example, received from a Brahman half of what non-Brahmans would pay for the same piece of clothing. When a Brahman bought milk it cost 50 percent less than it did for non-Brahmans. Fixed amounts of village land were set aside for the higher castes; Brahmans got the most, but land was also allocated to the carpenter, the sweeper, the oil presser, the seamster, and the washerman. The most onerous service of all occurred in the fields owned by the Brahmans, where lower-caste families were required to work at fixed rates of remuneration.

At the bottom of the social hierarchy, of course, were the untouchables. There were eight families of Chamars, leatherworkers who had a number of fixed tasks such as skinning animals, making leather, and using it to repair shoes, baskets, and bags. The Wisers noted about a Chamar:

In the village he is regarded not as an individual, but as so-and-so’s chamar. Outside of the intimate affairs of family life, his time and services and his sons’ time and services are in the hands of his master. His wife too must be ready to help in the fields or at the heavier tasks in the house of the patron, whenever sent for. The patron’s work and interests come first. If there is any time left over, the chamar and his sons spend it on the plot of land granted him as payment for his services. He makes no plans and undertakes nothing that requires time or money without the consent of his patron.

In effect, then, the Jajmani system was an intricate web of services with fixed customary payments that people were obliged to make, based on the hereditary division of labor embodied in the caste system. This might remind you of the Tiv’s economy, regulated and constricted by rigid norms, from Chapter 4. But while the Tiv imposed these norms on economic relations in order to preserve equality, especially political equality, the Indian caste system was deliberately anti-egalitarian. Not everyone served everyone else. For instance, thirty-eight of the Brahman families didn’t serve anyone, but they received services from others, and the terms of service always favored the higher castes. Exactly as Ambedkar put it, people were trapped into “water-tight compartments,” blocking their incentives and opportunities. Talent and ability are widely misallocated, wasted. Not only liberty but economic efficiency was sacrificed at the altar of India’s cage of norms. No wonder the country has suffered from endemic poverty and underdevelopment. (And we might add that none of this was made better by 150 years of East India Company and British colonial rule and before that the hegemony of the Mughal Empire, both of which built on and reinforced the caste system.)

But if India is so hierarchical and so riven with divisions, why has it also sustained democratic elections since independence and is it often held up to be the world’s largest democracy? Why has this democratic system failed to mobilize anything like the Red Queen? The answer to the first question, as we’ll see next, is related to India’s history of popular political participation, in many ways similar to those of the Germanic tribes we discussed in Chapter 6. The answer to the second is again related to the factors Ambedkar identified, which shaped the democratic politics of India along the lines of the caste system.

Ancient Republics

Before there was writing, much history was recited orally and passed down from generation to generation of historians. These oral histories were often employed by governments to preserve dynastic traditions, partly to legitimate their power. But they were also preserved by bards and storytellers, as much for pleasure as for legitimation. This is the origin of the great works of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, which told the history of the Trojan Wars and their aftermath. These wars occurred around 1200 BCE, but the stories about them were written down at least six hundred years later. In between they were preserved orally.

India too has its versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, most notably the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which were composed sometime between 400 BCE and 400 CE. Even earlier, and more useful for our purposes, are the so-called Vedas. There are four of these, preserved orally by the Brahmans, the priests of the Hindu religion, and first written down as early as 1000 BCE. One of them, the Rig Veda, contains over a thousand hymns and poems. The Vedas are thought to be the literature of Indo-Aryan peoples who migrated into India over a long period of time, probably in many waves. The Rig Veda contains descriptions of society, warfare, and politics. But any interpretation of these requires care, since it is often unclear if they represent history or fiction. What we do get, however, is a pretty clear picture of what political institutions looked like. There were chiefs, called rajas, but they were elected, or at least selected, and their power was heavily circumscribed by assemblies called vidatha, sabha, and samiti, though there is uncertainty about the exact way these institutions worked with one another. The sabha seems to have been smaller, perhaps including only elites, while the samiti was large, perhaps including all free adult male citizens. The importance of the assemblies is illustrated by a passage from another of the Vedas, the Atharva Veda, where a king asserts:

In concord may Prajapati’s two daughters sabha and samiti protect me. May everyman I meet, respect and aid me. Fair be my words, oh, my fathers, at the meetings.

We know thy name, oh, sabha, thy name is interchange of talk. Let all the company who join the sabha agree with me.

Of the men seated here, I make the splendor and lore my own. Indra make me conspicuous in all this gathered company.

Prajapati, the creator god, is seen as the source of the assemblies, which are presented as bodies for deliberation and discussion. The passage makes it clear that the king needs their support.

In fact, the rajas look quite a lot like the war leaders of Germanic tribes described by Tacitus. The vidatha, for example, seems to have been an assembly where war booty was divided. “Tribe” is also the word used by Indian historians to describe social organization in this period. The Rig Veda mentions thirty different tribes. Society appears to have been based on kinship and clans.

In the later Vedic period, probably around 600 BCE, we see a divergence between different types of states. In some parts of northern India, chiefs began to evolve into kings and hereditary monarchies sanctioned by religion, and the varna system overseen by Brahmans started to play a pivotal role in legitimizing the authority of a hereditary monarchy. In other parts, assembly politics persisted and even intensified. These latter states are called gana-sanghas by historians.

The best documented of the gana-sanghas is the Licchavi state based at Vaisali, now called Basarh, in the state of Bihar, just north of the river Ganges (see Map 12). One contemporary source states, “In that city [Vaisali] there are always 7,707 kings [rajas] to govern the kingdom and a like manner of viceroys, generals and treasurers.” Another source reports that there are “the Licchavis of the ruling family to the number of 7,707 and their abode at Vaisali. And all of them given to argument and disputation.” Historians interpret these numbers to suggest that the citizen body of Vaisali was probably 4 x 7,707, or 30,828, and perhaps one quarter of these, the “kings,” had special political rights and formed the assembly. This was at the heart of the Licchavi state, which might have comprised 200,000 or 300,000 people. As a proportion of the total population, if the total number of citizens was 30,000, then this would be quite similar to the proportion of citizens in ancient Athens or the late Roman Republic. The assembly elected a council of nine, which did most of the routine administrative work, and one of these was elected as the chief king with executive authority. It is possible that this position, once filled, was held for life. The Buddha himself in one text is recorded as saying that the Licchavis “held full and frequent public assemblies” and they came together, debated “in concord,” and “rose in concord,” Decisions were taken by majority rule and officers who had to undertake specific tasks, like one called the salaka-gahapaka, were elected. Five qualities were stipulated for this position. A man had to be “one who does not walk in partiality … in malice … in folly … in fear and one who knows what votes have been taken and what have not been taken.” The title salaka-gahapaka was derived from salaka, meaning a wood chip, which, like our modern ballot papers, was used for recording votes. The Licchavis had other remarkable institutions, including a judicial structure that supposedly had eight layers with a hierarchy of appellate courts that had a great deal of popular participation, just as in ancient Athens. Though our information about the Licchavis is the best, other contemporary states, such as Sakya, where the Buddha was from, appear to have had similar republican and democratic political institutions.

Map 12. Indian Empires and the Cradles of Participatory Politics

The importance of the gana-sanghas can be judged by the way that Kautilya refers to them in the Arthashastra. Kautilya was the closest Indian equivalent of Lord Shang and similarly attempted to compose a manual of statecraft and set of instructions for would-be rulers on how to organize their state. When considering the construction of an ideal state, Kautilya pays no attention to assemblies and has in mind a monarchical, highly hierarchical system. Yet in the part of the book that deals with foreign policy, Kautilya explicitly considers gana-sanghas, for which he uses the term sanghas. He notes:

Because sanghas are cohesive entities, enemies cannot break them [easily].

The chief of a sangha shall endear himself to his people by just behavior, being self-controlled and diligent in pursuing activities which are liked by the people and are of benefit to them.

More remarkable, the gana-sanghas also developed the idea that people collectively agreed to create the institutions of government. This was best articulated in Buddhist writings such as the Digha Nikaya. The Buddha’s birthplace, Sakya, was as we noted one of the gana-sanghas, and according to this text there had been a long period of perfection and happiness before rottenness set in. With this rottenness came differences in colors, sexes, and suddenly food, drink, and nourishment were required. Life in heaven gave way to life on earth. People started to create institutions such as the family and property, and disputes and even theft followed. As a result, the people assembled to choose a ruler who was “the best favored, the most attractive and the most capable.” Once chosen, the person agreed “to be indignant at that where one should rightly be indignant, to censure that which should be rightly censured, to banish him who deserves to be banished.” To compensate him the people agreed to give rice. The Digha Nikaya records that the ruler was elected and held three titles: mahasammata, khattiya, and raja. The first means “chosen by all the people,” the second “lord of the fields,” and the third “one who charms the people by means of dharma.”

The word dharma used in the Digha Nikaya is significant; it comes from the Dharmashastra, a group of texts, the earliest of which date back to between 600 and 300 BCE. Dharma is the proper conduct of a person living in society and the word can be translated as “righteous conduct.” The benefit of such moral conduct was the accumulation of spiritual merit that bodes well for one’s future lives after reincarnation. Dharma was the Indian version of Chinese Confucian ethical principles, supposed to induce the ruler to rule in a moral way, for the benefit of the people. We saw in the previous chapter that even though Chinese emperors all claimed to be adhering to Confucian principles, these did not always effectively constrain their behavior. The same was true for dharma in India.

When monarchies appeared, they developed a very different rationale to justify the new structure of authority. Critically, this was heavily influenced by the varna system. In many texts, the justification for state power is tied to the need to maintain a social order based on the varnas. This is clear in Kautilya when he notes about the varna system that

when it is violated, the world will come to an end owing to confusion of castes and duties. Hence the king shall never allow people to swerve from their duties; for whoever upholds his own duty, ever adhering to the customs of the Aryas, and following the rules of caste and divisions of religious life, will surely be happy both here and hereafter.

So the king had to focus on making sure people stuck to their duties according to their varna and caste. In turn the varna system, in the guise of the Brahman rituals, legitimized the state. This is evident from the most famous coronation ritual of the time, the ratnahavimsi. The king went to the house of each ratnin, or jewel-holder, and made prayers there. Different authors list different numbers of ratnins, between eleven and fifteen, but they all agree on one thing: the Brahman was first. This ceremony signified who held power and to whom the king was responsible for his authority. This relationship between the varnas and the state is another critical reason that the Red Queen was broken in India. The state was supposed to support and honor the varna system, not break it up. The caste system, in turn, preserved hierarchy and prevented society from challenging the state.

The Mauryans, guided by Kautilya, managed to create an empire of a scale previously unknown in India (see Map 12). One way to get a sense of its expanse is from the location of the so-called Rock Edicts of Ashoka, Chandragupta’s grandson, the most famous of the Mauryan emperors. Ashoka ruled from 268 to 232 BCE. He had various laws and guiding principles carved onto rocks and stelae throughout his kingdom, presumably so that they were readily available to people. His Major Rock Edicts were carved in Kandahar, all the way in the west in what is now Afghanistan; in Yerragudi, south of Hyderabad in modern Andhra Pradesh; in Dhauli in the east in modern Odisha (Orissa); and far in the north in Shahbazgarhi, Pakistan. This gives a sense of the extent of Ashoka’s empire, and the text of the edicts presents us with a window into how he ruled. Though the Arthashastra suggests that the Mauryan Empire had a dense bureaucracy which penetrated right down to the village level, modern historians believe this is highly unlikely. On this point, Kautilya’s book was more about what was desirable rather than what actually happened and would have been feasible. To compensate for the absence of such control, Ashoka converted to Buddhism and propagated dharma as a philosophy of rule; the Edicts capture what this was supposed to be about. In Major Rock Edict 6, Ashoka asserts:

Reporters have to report to me the affairs of the people at any time (and) anywhere, while I am eating, in the harem, in the inner apartment, at the cowpen, in the palanquin, (and) in the park. And everywhere I shall dispose of the affairs of the people.

And also, if in the council (of Mahāmātras) a dispute arises, or an amendment is moved, in connexion with any donation or proclamation which I am ordering verbally, or (in connexion with) an emergent matter which has been delegated to the Mahāmatrās, it must be reported to me immediately, anywhere, (and) at any time.

Thus I have ordered. For I am never content in exerting myself and in dispatching business.

Here Ashoka is projecting the image of a highly accountable ruler concerned with the welfare of his people. The last line of this edict is interesting. Ashoka wryly observes, “But it is difficult to accomplish this without great zeal.” Indeed, and great zeal was mostly lacking. The Mauryan Empire collapsed in 187 BCE, less than fifty years after Ashoka’s death.

The gana-sanghas survived the rise of the Mauryans and persisted for a long time. Though a series of lesser states waxed and waned in northern India in the thousand years after the collapse of the Mauryan Empire, it was perhaps only with the rise of the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century and subsequently the creation of the Mughal Empire after 1526 that more despotic state institutions were constructed throughout India. Before then we find, for example, the Chauhans—one of the main Rajput clans that ruled Rajasthan prior to the creation of the Delhi Sultanate—having to obtain the agreement of a village assembly to raise new taxes. In the same context we also find the word panchayat being used for “assembly”; as we’ve seen, the word is still used in India for local caste and political assemblies. Even when more despotic institutions started developing, they often did not penetrate local society everywhere, particularly in the south, to which we now turn.

Land of the Tamils

Assemblies and representative systems were not the monopoly of northern India. They were everywhere, probably more so in the south of the peninsula. Here even the Mughals did not consolidate their control and there was a great deal of autonomy up until the British colonial period, which began with the rule of the East India Company (lasting until 1857) and then continued with direct control by the British government until independence in 1947.

Let’s examine the Chola state, which illustrates not only the vibrant assemblies in southern India, but also how centralized states emerged from a bottom-up process where autonomous polities voluntarily came together. The Chola state ruled large parts of southeastern India from its base in Tamil Nadu, the “land of the Tamils” (see again Map 12). It likely started in the eighth or ninth century and lasted until the end of the thirteenth century. The early capital was at Thanjavur, southwest of modern Chennai in Tamil Nadu; later capitals included Kanchipuram and Madurai. At the local level their administration was based on village assemblies. In villages dominated by peasants these assemblies were called ur, while in villages where Brahmans held power they were called sabha, a term we’ve seen before. The ur seems to have included all adult males of a village, as did the sabha. But there is also some evidence suggesting that the members of the sabha were chosen by lot from the eligible people. A remarkable inscription from a temple in Uttaramerur, a Brahman-controlled village, records a large number of details about how these institutions functioned:

There shall be thirty wards. In these thirty wards those that live in each ward shall assemble and shall select each person possessing the following qualifications for inclusion for selection by lot:

He must own more than one quarter of the taxpaying land. He must live in a house built on his own site. His age must be below seventy and above thirty-five. He must know the mantras and the Brahmanas [from the Vedic corpus].

Even if he owns only one-eighth of the land, his name shall be included provided he has learned one Veda and one of the four Bhashyas.

This was followed by a long list of relatives who could not be considered at the same time. A person was also not eligible for the assembly if he was “one who has stolen the property of others. One who has taken forbidden dishes.” Also ruled out was anyone who had been on a committee for any of the last three years or who had been on a committee prior to that but had never submitted his accounts.

Excluding all these, names shall be written on tickets for thirty wards and … put into a pot. When the tickets have to be drawn a full meeting of the great assembly including the young and old members shall be convened.

There then came a detailed list of instructions for drawing the tickets that made sure nobody could cheat. By lot, thirty men, one per ward, were chosen. These men sat on various committees, such as the Garden Committee, the Tank Committee, and the Annual Committee. We don’t know exactly what the Garden Committee did, but the Tank Committee likely organized water tanks and critical public services for drinking water and irrigation. Irrigation is often mentioned in inscriptions. For example, one records:

The brahmana assembly … makes an agreement with two brothers … Because water does not reach the canal flowing to the lake of the brothers’ village, the assembly shall desilt their own lake, provide half the labour on a connecting canal, and allow runoff water from their own lake to travel through that canal to the lake of the neighbouring village.

An inscription from a different village discusses “two small canals” where

a meeting of the local brahmana assembly and the larger nadu assembly determines land boundaries of these canals in relation to surrounding fields, without lowering the water level in canals going to a neighbouring village.

Other villages also had the Fivefold Committee and the Gold Committee.

While in Siena, Italy, assemblies were convened by the tolling of a bell, in one Tamil village it was by the beating of a drum. The ur and the sabha were also in charge of collecting taxes, some of which they kept themselves and some of which they remitted to the Chola state. They also resolved disputes over land and other legal issues.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. The urs and sabhas were collected together into a larger unit, called a nadu, mentioned above in the inscriptions about canals. The individual urs and sabhas seem to have elected representatives to the nadu, which made collective decisions. One key feature is that the geographical pattern of nadus is very irregular, and some were quite small. For instance, an inscription records that the nadu of Adanur-nadu contained just two villages. Another records that four villages collectively made up the nadu of Vada-Chiruvayil. However, some nadus had as many as eleven or fourteen villages. The historian Y. Subbarayalu used hundreds of inscriptions, mostly on temples, to draw maps of the nadus for the Chola mandalam, the heart of the kingdom around the Kaveri River valley. These show that the shapes and areas of the different nadus varied widely, even in the river valley, which likely had quite uniform population density. This was because, rather than being imposed by some central government on the territory, the Chola state was an amalgam of previously autonomous villages. The state was constructed from the bottom up, a bit like the Swiss state we’ll encounter in the next chapter. This inference is confirmed by another inscription from the twelfth century emphasizing that the consent of the nadu had to be obtained to install Rajadhiraja II on the Chola throne.

It is significant too that the region came to be called Tamil Nadu, nowadays translated as “Land of the Tamils,” so that the very word for the village groupings, nadu, ended up describing the bigger region of the Tamils.

From Gana-Sangha to Lok Sabha

We’ve now seen that the word sabha has deep roots in India. It dates back at least to the assemblies of the gana-sangha states of northern India, over 2,500 years ago. Today the lower house of the Indian parliament is called the Lok Sabha, meaning the Assembly of the People. But how real are these continuities?

The answer: Pretty real. India is a large and heterogeneous country and there is no doubt that there was a lot of variation in the operation of sabhas, even though they appear to have been everywhere. The states of northern India, especially the Mughal Empire, were constructed by outside invasion and were certainly not a bottom-up innovation in the same way that the Chola state was. Nevertheless, the Mughals did not construct the type of state bureaucracy that would have been necessary to replace the sabhas and their village republics. Instead, they were happy to tolerate local autonomy as long as land taxes got paid. The main method for this was a system of tax farming; the Mughals gave an individual known as a zamindar the right to collect taxes in a specified area, and he could keep a share, usually 10 percent. The Mughals did have revenue officials who were able to collect accurate information about local production and productivity, but they did not create a bureaucratic system of tax collection. How did the zamindars collect the taxes? In some situations they were armed pre-Mughal elites who had their own coercive resources, but often they collected the taxes in collaboration with village authorities. In other cases there were no zamindars, and the Mughals dealt directly with village authorities who were collectively responsible for taxes.

There was a lot of continuity in these village institutions too. They were recognized by officials of the British East India Company in the eighteenth century, especially after 1765 when the company was granted the right to collect taxes in Bengal and Bihar by the Mughal emperor. The situation was nicely summarized in the famous Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company presented to the British parliament in 1812. The report focused on the institutional innovations of the company since 1765, particularly with respect to the collection of tax revenues. But it records an interesting evaluation of Indian village life as well.

A village … politically viewed … resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following. The potail, or head inhabitant, who has the general superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants, attends to the police, and performs the duty … of collecting revenues within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people renders him best qualified to discharge.

The report then lists a large number of village officials undertaking different tasks, including “the superintendent of tanks and water-courses,” and notes, “Under this simple form of municipal government the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial.” In the 1830s Sir Charles Metcalfe would write that

Village Communities are little Republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations … The union of the Village Communities, each one forming a separate little State in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India through all revolutions and changes which they have suffered.

The Fifth Report does not use the word panchayat, but it appears soon after in other contemporary sources and colonial documents. For example, Henry Sumner Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West, published in 1871, refers to the existence of “village councils” in India with elected functionaries, while B. H. Baden-Powell’s The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India, published in 1899, has extensive discussion of panchayats, though he seems to regard them as largely oligarchic. By 1915 John Matthai was observing that “the most characteristic feature of the government of a village community was the panchayat or village council,” which “might denote either a general meeting of the inhabitants or a select committee chosen from among them.” In fact, by 1880 British authorities were already trying to tap into these village institutions. The Report of the Indian Famine Commission of that year records:

In most parts of India some village organization exists which offers a ready and natural … machinery … for village relief. For the future progress of the country, the encouragement of the principle of local self-government by which business of all kinds should be left more and more to local direction.

In 1892 an act stipulated that panchayats should be elected by the people “in any manner convenient,” while an act of 1911 passed in Madras allowed for the election of panchayats and listed a large number of tasks that they should undertake, including the lighting of public roads, cleaning public roads, drains, tanks, and wells, and establishing and maintaining schools and hospitals.

It’s no coincidence then that Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of an ideal India was based on autarkic villages, what he called Hindu Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule. British colonial authority tried to tap into the same traditions. After independence, these village institutions were strengthened. Clause 243 of the Indian Constitution allows for the creation of a Gram Sabha, a village assembly consisting of adults qualified to vote who would democratically elect a panchayat to govern village affairs. These institutions were further empowered by the Panchayati Raj Act of 1992, which created a hierarchy of three sorts of panchayats and institutionalized them in the Indian political system.

No Honor Among Varnas

So democracy in India has deep roots. But deep-rooted or not, democratic politics doesn’t work too well in a society turned against itself, discombobulated by an even deeper hierarchy. This can be seen in the northern state of Bihar (which is also shown on Map 12), where local democracy has created an additional impetus toward divisions in society and in the process undermines rather than builds state capacity, in contrast to what we would have expected from the Red Queen. And this time it wasn’t the twice-born ganging up against those below them, but lower castes undermining higher castes, especially between 1990 and 2005, when the chief minister of the state was either Lalu Prasad Yadav or his wife, Rabri Devi.

Bihar is one of the poorest states in India. In 2013 about one-third of its 100 million people lived in poverty. This is one of the highest poverty rates in India. In contrast, only 11 percent of the population of Tamil Nadu is poor, and only 7 percent in Kerala. Bihar also has the lowest rate of adult literacy of any Indian state, 64 percent according to the 2011 census, far below a state like Kerala, at 94 percent. Poverty and illiteracy are pervasive in Bihar because of its crumbling state capacity. The neighboring state of Jharkhand, which was part of Bihar until 2000, when it was split off, shows alarming rates of teacher absenteeism, with 40 percent of teachers who ought to be in school nowhere to be found. The situation in Bihar is similar.

Bihar’s local state has so little capacity, in fact, that it cannot collect the payments that the central government is supposed to give it. Indian states receive a large fraction of their revenues from the central government, and to get these, they have to apply for them and complete a number of bureaucratic procedures. This of course requires (a little bit of) capacity. You need to be able to fill in the forms in time, track what’s available, make budgets, and approve spending plans. But huge amounts of money earmarked for Bihar never get allocated or spent. Take for instance Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a prominent program to improve primary education, something Bihar sorely needs. Between 2001 and 2007, 52 billion rupees were earmarked for Bihar, but only half of this, 26 billion, was actually spent. At the same time, in the period between 2002 and 2006, 40 billion rupees were allocated for the state under a program known as Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana. This was money that could be used to fund different sorts of investments in physical and social infrastructure in backward areas. The Bihar state government was able to secure only 10 of the 40 billion and of that, just 62 percent got spent. Even worse was the implementation of the flagship program to boost rural roads, the Gram Sadak Yojana. Here Bihar managed to spend only 25 percent of the money allocated to it. Meanwhile, half of the 394 projects approved under the national government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme were never started. The state systematically claims less than it could from the national government and it massively underspends even what it manages to claim.

This is all due to the inefficient structure of the local state in Bihar. It was centralized in an absurd way; any spending decision that involved more than 2.5 million rupees (US$55,000 in the mid-2000s) had to be approved by the state cabinet. This caused huge delays, and because 60 percent of any initial installment of money from Delhi has to be spent before other installments are released, it was often too late to request or use anything other than the first installment. According to a World Bank report in 2005:

The existing civil service rules envisage a merit-based system of recruitment, placement, promotion, sanctions and rewards. However, the system operates in an ad hoc, non-transparent and nonmeritocratic manner. Problems related to the work environment (including those faced by women employees), infrastructure, and accommodation, local tensions and delayed salaries together affect staff morale… . The district magistrates appear to be frustrated by centralization, absence of support and understanding from their superiors, and inaction on reports of malfeasance and inefficiency at subordinate levels.

This assessment suggests a complete failure in the institutions of the state, but there is more to it than that. It was not just that “the system operates in an ad hoc, non-transparent and nonmeritocratic manner”; in many cases there was actually nobody there at all to work the system. In the 1990s, there were vast numbers of unfilled vacancies in the government, including an acute shortage of engineers. The main reason for this was not the absence of qualified people, but the fact that the departmental promotion committee did not hold meetings, and even when meetings were held, the committee’s recommendations were not approved. The consequence was that the positions of engineer in chief in the two principal engineering departments, the Road Construction Department and the Rural Engineering Organisation, were vacant for long periods of time. All 15 posts of chief engineer in those two departments, as well as 81 out of the 91 superintendent engineer positions, were similarly vacant. Lower down in the bureaucracy, of the 6,393 positions for executive, assistant, and junior engineers, 1,305 were vacant. This failure to appoint people was endemic. A 2006 document published by the government of Bihar itself directly connects the problem of vacancies with the inability to access funds from the national government.

There has been an acute shortage of technical personnel at all levels in the Road Construction Department and Rural Engineering Organisation. There has not been any significant recruitment at entry levels and promotions have not materialized. The Quality Control Organisation in the Road Construction Department is non-functional for want of equipment, chemicals and personnel. Advance Planning Wing is also non-functional. There has been a total collapse of technical administration. This is a serious constraint not only for implementation of works but also for preparing project proposals for getting more funds from the Central Government or other sources.

Failure to fill vacancies, the underclaiming and underspending of resources, and the general lack of state capacity in Bihar are not just consequences of disorganization. They result from political strategies rooted in the division and fragmentation of society. In fact, the lack of state capacity, though always present in Bihar as in much of India, significantly intensified after 1990, when Lalu Prasad Yadav became the chief minister. The Yadavs are a jati that are part of the Shudra varna and they are the most populous caste in the state. Like most places in India, historically higher castes, particularly Brahmans, had dominated politics in Bihar. But the Shudras displaced the Brahmans and took control of local politics under Lalu Yadav. To gain power, the Yadavs forged a new political coalition with the castes below them as well as the Muslims who were outside the caste system. Their explicit aim was to replace the high castes in power. This is key for understanding all the vacancies. The people who were primarily qualified to be engineers or fill other high-skill jobs were from the upper castes. Lalu Yadav refused to appoint them. Even though the resulting state incapacity meant he lost resources and was unable to provide public services his supporters sorely needed, Lalu Yadav downplayed the impact of “development,” claiming that this benefited only high-caste people.

The Broken Red Queen

India is an enigma. A very poor country with endemic state failure and political dysfunctionality, it is at the same time the world’s largest democracy, with intense political competition. What explains this puzzling assortment? We have argued that the roots of India’s democracy go back to its history of popular participation in politics, resembling the assembly politics of the Germanic tribes we discussed in Chapter 6. But the parallel with the European path stops there. While the Red Queen got to work in Europe and simultaneously expanded state capacity, institutionalized and strengthened society’s mobilization, and in the process dissolved the cage of norms in Europe, no such thing happened in India. This is because of the nature and legacy of the caste system. Caste divisions not only manufactured ingrained hierarchies and inequities in society, but they distorted the nature of politics. Society, fragmented and at war with itself, failed to monitor state institutions and singularly lacked the ability to push the state to build further capacity. The Brahmans at the top were too busy dominating the rest and the rest were too preoccupied with their position in the social hierarchy. Everybody was too trapped in the cage of norms. Historically, at least, the state saw it as its duty to enforce and reaffirm the caste system, strengthening the cage of norms at every turn.

When democracy arrived after independence, castes defined the battle lines for political competition and sapped the energy of democratic competition. As the anthropologist Béteille observed, “The weakness of the village panchayat seems to arise from the imposition of a democratic formal structure on a social substratum which is segmented and hierarchical in nature.” The same was true of democratic politics at the state and national level. The Red Queen remained broken as caste divisions made it impossible for society to get organized beyond the existing social hierarchy, keep politicians accountable, or induce the state to serve the people. Instead, caste politics often further eroded state capacity, as we have seen in Bihar.

The broken Red Queen had predictable consequences in terms of poverty. But more fundamentally it meant that even if situated in the context of democratic politics, liberty has been absent not just for Dalits but for all Indians, who collectively continue to be dominated by social hierarchy and the cage of caste norms.

Chapter 9

DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

European Diversity

Though as we have seen in Chapter 6 the two blades of the European scissors put much of the continent near or inside the corridor, quite a bit of diversity remained and developed over the next several centuries. England was moving in the corridor toward a much more participatory form of government overseeing the deepening of the state’s capacity. The Swiss Confederation, squeezed between France, Italy, southern Germany, and Austria, was likewise already inside the corridor and had created both a “citizen army” to defend itself against the Habsburgs and a powerful assembly controlling politics. In the words of Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince, written in 1513:

Rome and Sparta for many centuries stood armed and free. The Swiss are extremely well armed and are very free.

Indeed, Tom Scott’s summary of the consensus among historians is that Swiss peasants were “free of feudal servitude and, as a sign of their liberty, these mountain peasants bore arms and demanded ‘honour’ even from nobles … Their medieval clan structures had little to do with our images of democratic forms but these peasants were ‘free.’” Farther north, however, Prussia developed a very different type of state, whose despotic character is epitomized by the French philosopher Voltaire’s quip that while

other states possess an army, Prussia is an army which possesses a state.

A little farther south the situation was completely different in Albania and Montenegro, which lacked any centralized authority and continued to experience uncoordinated violence well into the twentieth century. The Montenegrin writer and intellectual Milovan Djilas described the extent of feuding in the 1950s by writing about his own family history:

The men of several generations have died at the hands of Montenegrins, men of the same faith and name. My father’s grandfather, my own two grandfathers, my father, and my uncle were killed, as though a dread curse lay upon them … generation after generation, and the bloody chain was not broken. The inherited fear and hatred of feuding clans was mightier than fear and hatred of the enemy, the Turks. It seems to me that I was born with blood in my eyes. My first sight was of blood. My first words were blood and bathed in blood.

What explains these differences? Why did these European polities diverge so sharply starting from broadly similar conditions?

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In this chapter we explain how our conceptual framework is useful for answering these questions and in the process show how it sheds light more broadly on the effects of political, international, economic, and demographic changes, sometimes referred to as “structural factors.” The most common way in which social scientists have discussed the implications of different structural factors is by arguing that they create natural affinities for certain types of economic and political development—for example, war and military mobilization are argued to induce greater state capacity, while certain types of crops, such as sugar and cotton, lead to despotism and others, such as wheat, prepare the conditions for democratic politics. Our framework shows why this is not necessarily so. The same structural factor can have very different impacts on a polity’s political trajectory depending on the prevailing balance of power between state and society.

The key ideas can be seen in the context of Figure 1 from Chapter 2 summarizing our conceptual framework, which is replicated here as Figure 2. It makes clear that broadly similar conditions in terms of the power of state and society are no guarantee that two different polities will follow very similar trajectories. That depends on whether they are on the same side of the boundaries demarcating the regions of the Despotic, Shackled, and Absent Leviathans. This figure also highlights the fact that the effects of structural factors will be quite distinct depending on the initial positions of different nations. Take an increase in the state’s capacity, which in the figure corresponds to a vertical move up as the state’s power increases (while society’s power remains unchanged). This could be just the shift that puts a polity inside the corridor, as Arrow 1 in the figure indicates. But it could also be the force that moves a society that was lodged in the corridor away from it and toward the Despotic Leviathan, as Arrow 2 illustrates. Or it might be not so consequential at all because it moves a society with the Absent Leviathan a little bit closer to the corridor, but leaves its long-run destination unaltered, as shown with Arrow 3. So when it comes to the effects of structural factors the devil is decidedly in the details.

Figure 2. The Divergent Effects of an Increase in the Power of the State

In the rest of this chapter, we develop these ideas, first focusing on European history and the contrast between Switzerland, Prussia, and Montenegro, and a very specific type of structural factor—the increase in the capacity and power of the state brought forth by military mobilization and war. These ideas and their applications are not confined to European history. We show that they are also useful in understanding how more recent big shocks have led to highly diverse responses, for example, in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which opened the way to the birth of all kinds of states in Eastern Europe and Asia. We finally discuss how the first wave of economic globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century differentially impacted individual postcolonial societies, focusing in particular on the divergence between Costa Rica and Guatemala.

War Made the State, and the State Made War

This title is a direct quote from the political sociologist Charles Tilly, who formulated one of the most famous theories about the role of a specific structural factor—increased incidence and threat of interstate warfare—on state building. He applied this idea to Western Europe in the early modern period arguing that the threat of increased warfare following the “military revolution” in the seventeenth century led to the creation of modern states. The military revolution introduced more portable and powerful firearms, new military tactics, and improved fortifications. Standing armies and intensified interstate competition followed. Tilly argued that it revolutionized politics too because it forced states to create much more effective systems for raising taxes and providing infrastructure so they could pay for, equip, and transport larger militaries. In terms of our theory, this corresponds to an induced increase in the state’s power in order to deal with the necessities of war. Tilly was right that such a change can fundamentally alter the dynamics of political development, as Arrow 1 in Figure 2 illustrates, but it can have quite different implications as well.

Switzerland provides the perfect illustration of Tilly’s argument, even if state building in this case predates the military revolution. Switzerland was historically part of the Holy Roman Empire, the successor institution to the eastern part of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire. The empire still had an emperor, but it had fragmented into many small and relatively independent polities, and the emperor was actually elected by some of them. We have already seen how in northern Italy, which was quite far from the core of the empire centered on Germany, these polities asserted their independence. Switzerland was also on the periphery of the empire, even if not separated and isolated by the Alps like Italy. The Holy Roman Empire’s imperfect control over this area allowed the component Swiss polities, the cantons, to develop their own systems of assemblies. These cantons, some rural, some largely urban, thus came to reflect the broader pattern of assembly politics inherited from Germanic tribes, which had reemerged as the empire had weakened. The Swiss Confederation started in 1291 with the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden taking oaths and signing the Bundesbrief (Federal Charter) at Rütli, a meadow above Lake Lucerne (see Map 13). The charter was an attempt toward centralization of authority and was particularly concerned with public order and lawlessness. The first substantive clause read:

Thus, all people of the valley community of Uri, the entirety of the Schwyz valley and the community of people from the lower Unterwalden valley recognize the malice of the times and for their own protection and preservation they have promised to assist each other by every means possible with every counsel and favor, with persons or goods within their valleys and without against any and all who inflict on them or any among them acts of violence or injustice against persons or goods.

It was in effect a pact committing the three cantons to come to one another’s aid and providing a framework for resolving disputes, stating that “should disputes arise among any of the people bound by this oath, the most prudent among the confederates shall settle the conflict between the parties. All other confederates shall defend this verdict against anyone who rejects it.” It didn’t specify who the “most prudent” was, but this clause is interpreted as stipulating arbitration by one of the cantons if two others, or the citizens of two others, got into a dispute. Might we have here the roots of the fabled Swiss ability to find compromises?

Map 13. European Divergence: Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland, and Montenegro

Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were all part of the Holy Roman Empire. They were supposed to be subservient to the Habsburg Duke of Austria. They had no business signing pacts. The Habsburgs didn’t approve of such autonomous organization, and they certainly didn’t like the clause that read:

We have further unanimously vowed and established that we in these valleys shall accept no judge who has gained his office for money or for any other price and who is not our resident or native.

No Habsburg judges were to be tolerated anymore. In 1315 the first Habsburg army was driven off after the battle of Morgarten. More pacts followed and what came to be known as the Swiss Confederation spread. Lucerne joined in 1332. The League of Zurich of 1351 specifically stipulated that everyone who signed would come to the aid of any other threatened by the Habsburgs. Glarus joined in 1352 and Bern in 1353. Duke Leopold II of Austria finally decided to put a stop to this Swiss recalcitrance, but his army was routed at the battle of Sempach in 1386 by the combined forces of the confederation. Leopold himself was killed along with a lot of the local nobility who had been fighting with him. This didn’t exactly free the Swiss from Habsburg dominance. That had to wait until a final war in 1499, followed by the Treaty of Basel, which recognized the confederation’s de facto autonomy. Undeterred, the bottom-up construction of the Swiss state continued throughout the fifteenth century. As part of this process, rural people bought themselves out of any residual feudal obligations, and as that happened, what was left of the Swiss nobility slowly withered away. By this time the transformation going on among the Swiss had been noticed throughout the empire and the expression “schweytzer werden”—“going Swiss”—was coined. It meant peasants trying to become autonomous. After 1415 an assembly made up of delegates from all the cantons in the confederation began to meet regularly. Fribourg and Solothurn were admitted in 1481, Basel and Schaffhausen in 1501, and Appenzell in 1513.

Consistent with Tilly’s theory, this all happened in the context of rising military threats from the Habsburgs, which made it more beneficial for the cantons to come together and increase the Swiss state’s capacity. The victory at Sempach had shown the power of Swiss infantry even over armored knights. As early as 1424 Florence asked the Assembly of the confederation for mercenaries, and for the next few centuries the Swiss specialized in providing such troops for warring countries all over Europe. At first the recruitment of these mercenaries was decentralized, organized by private entrepreneurs and various cantonal bodies. But it became apparent that the mercenary activity posed a threat to security and to the state’s authority. So the Assembly passed a law in 1503 stipulating that a majority of the body had to approve any recruitment. One reason for this was to avoid the possibility of two Swiss armies facing off against each other, as had happened in Novara in 1500 with one in the employ of France, the other fighting for Milan. The final peace with the Habsburgs didn’t stop further threats from France, Milan, and the Dukes of Württemberg, and the military exigencies facing the Swiss state continued, as did the process of state building.

In the Swiss case the threat of warfare, in particular the persistent threat from the Habsburgs to reinstate the overlordship of the Holy Roman Empire, seems to have been an important incentive for the otherwise individualistic cantons and cities to unite into a larger confederation, centralize authority, and increase their state’s capacity. Before this centralization, the Swiss cantons were arguably outside the corridor, relying on clan structures rather than laws or state authority for resolving disputes or enforcing laws. But this inheritance also meant that Swiss peasants were free and society already mobilized. The centralization that began in 1291 came in the context of a society that was strong enough to withstand and counterbalance the increasing power of the state, engendering a transition into the corridor and spearheading a process of gradual expansion of the capabilities of both state and society.

The movement of state and society along the corridor created not just the conditions for liberty but also, predictably, incentives and opportunities for economic prosperity. The Swiss became famous first for their watches and subsequently their machine tool industry, and then they took over the world pharmaceutical industry. They used their comparative advantage in cows and milk to become a major producer of chocolates. Switzerland has the highest income per capita of any European country (not counting the small enclaves such as Luxembourg and Monaco).

War made the state in Switzerland, as Tilly would have it, but it also made society. Switzerland went on to build one of the most vibrant democracies in Europe. Yet as Figure 2 emphasizes, such a process is by no means preordained. The threat of war can unleash very different dynamics too.

The Sort of State That War Made

You don’t have to look far within Europe to see that if war made the state, it made very different types of states in different circumstances. The prime example is Prussia. Though Prussia was never part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1618 it merged through marriage with Brandenburg, which was (see Map 13). The ruling family of Brandenburg, the Hohenzollerns, became the ruling family of Brandenburg-Prussia, with the ruler known as the elector. These were difficult times, as the Thirty Years War was afoot and invading armies crisscrossed Central Europe. The elector Georg Wilhelm desperately tried to stay out of the conflict, but had to cave in when told by the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, that neutrality was not an option. “What can I do? They’ve all the big guns,” was how Georg Wilhelm famously reported the incident. Brandenburg was particularly devastated, losing as much as half of its population.

In 1640 Frederick William I came to the throne as the new elector. He ruled for forty-eight years and charted a new course for Brandenburg-Prussia, and in the process came to be known as the Great Elector. The Prussian experience during the Thirty Years War convinced Frederick William that he too needed “big guns.” As he put it:

I have experienced neutrality before; even under the most favorable circumstances, you are treated badly. I have vowed never to be neutral again as long as I live.

This all meant greater state capacity. With big guns, the state could control more. But to get big guns, it needed more tax revenues. More tax revenues would be easier to raise if Frederick William could increase his power over society, and that’s what he did. Previously taxes had to be negotiated with various representative bodies, such as the Estates of Kurmark in Brandenburg. He started out by trying to get permanent grants of taxation, which would free him from the need to endlessly seek the approval of the estates. In 1653 he negotiated the so-called Brandenburg Recess, which gave him 530,000 thalers over a period of six years. Crucially, he, rather than the Estates of Kurmark, got to collect the taxes. In exchange he gave the nobility, which made up a chamber in the estates, tax-exempt status. This was a clever strategy of “divide and rule,” which successfully separated the different chambers of the estates and made sure they would not form a unified force against him. He went on to extract similar concessions from the Prussian estates.

Frederick William then overrode the authority of the estates and started to tax without their agreement, something he could do because the 1653 decision allowed him to initiate the building of a tax administration. In 1655 he founded the Kriegskommissariat (“war commissary”), which covered both tax collection and military organization. By 1659 the estates had already atrophied and retreated to just dealing with local issues. Frederick William also transformed the royal council, previously made up of a few aristocrats, into an administration staffed by professional officials. Between 1348 and 1498, 16 universities were founded within central Europe and by 1648 another 18 opened. This meant that there was a large pool of well-qualified graduates trained in Roman law who could be attracted to staff a meritocratic bureaucracy. Governors were appointed to run the various territories under the elector’s control. After 1667 he introduced indirect taxes on trade. The administration of the royal estates was also reconfigured and the land was let out to private farmers for money, dramatically increasing government revenues. By 1688, Brandenburg, Prussia, and Kleve-Mark, the largest territories, were paying one million thalers a year in taxes, with about another 600,000 coming in from the other regions under Frederick William’s control.

In 1701 Frederick William’s son Frederick III changed Brandenburg-Prussia to the Kingdom of Prussia and crowned himself King Frederick I. His son King Frederick William I (not to be confused with the Great Elector of the previous century with the identical name) ruled between 1713 and 1740, and his grandson Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great, ruled from 1740 to 1786. Father and son intensified the project that the Great Elector had started.

In 1723 the bureaucracy was restructured again with the creation of the General Directory, merging the previous war commissary with the administration of the royal estates and putting everything at the service of the military. In 1733 Frederick completely reorganized the basis of military recruitment. He divided the territory into cantons of 5,000 households with a regiment assigned to each for recruitment. At the age of ten every male child was included in the recruitment rolls. Though some occupations and people were exempted, at least a quarter of the male population was included in the rolls. This dramatically increased the potential size of the army. In 1713 the army had about 30,000 soldiers in peacetime. By 1740, when Frederick the Great took over from his father, the figure was 80,000. In the meantime his father had managed to increase tax revenues by almost one half. Frederick the Great had a new strategy for further expanding Prussia’s tax base and military machine: he launched an aggressive strategy of territorial expansion.

War might have made the state in Prussia, but it made a famously despotic one. That’s certainly how its rulers thought about it. The Great Elector himself observed, “So long as God gives me breath, I shall assert my rule like a despot …” Frederick the Great agreed, remarking:

A well-run government must have a firmly established system … in which finance, policy and military all combine to promote the same end, the strengthening of the state and the expansion of its power. Such a system can only derive from one brain.

In the sixteenth century Prussia, like many other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, was inside the corridor with the powerful estates constraining the monarchy. Warfare, by increasing the state’s power, pushed it out of the corridor, as Arrow 2 in Figure 2 illustrates—a very different outcome from the one that warfare helped create in Switzerland. Prussia didn’t look back and rapidly progressed along the despotic path.

This had predictable consequences for liberty, which far from flourishing as in the Swiss case, was completely snuffed out. In the assessment of the British envoy Hugh Elliot:

The Prussian monarchy reminds me of a vast prison in the center of which appears the great keeper occupied in the care of his captives.

Freedom on the Heights

The impact of warfare isn’t confined to creating Shackled or Despotic Leviathans. Montenegro had a large number of similarities to Switzerland. It too had been part of the Roman Empire, even if more peripherally, and it shared a mountainous ecology and an economy based on herding. The great historian Fernand Braudel emphasized how European terrain created particular types of societies, arguing that “mountains are mountains: that is, primarily an obstacle, and therefore a refuge, a land of the free.” Free, like the Swiss. But in some sense people were pretty free in Montenegro and Albania too. Edith Durham, one of the first Western Europeans to systematically study the Balkans, starts her famous book High Albania with a line from a poem by Lord Tennyson, “Of old sat freedom on the heights.” Yet the connection between freedom and the state is complex. As we’ve seen, the expansion of the state is often resisted because people want to preserve their freedom from its authority. That’s exactly what happened in Montenegro even though it continually experienced the pressure of warfare.

Prior to 1852 Montenegro was in effect a theocracy, but one wherein the ruling bishop, the vladika, could exercise no coercive authority over the clans that dominated society. After a visit to Montenegro in 1807, the French general Marmont observed, “This Vladika is a splendid man, of about fifty-five years of age, with a strong spirit. He conducts himself with nobility and dignity. His positive and legal authority is unrecognized in his country.”

The key to understanding why this was so and why no state formed in Montenegro is that it was further from the corridor than Switzerland was. It was made up of kinship groups, clans, and tribes, and lacked the elements of centralization that the Swiss had inherited from the Carolingians. There are many similarities between Montenegro and other societies, such as the Tiv, that have steadfastly refused centralized state authority. As one scholar put it for Montenegro, “Continued attempts to impose centralized government were in conflict with tribal loyalty.”

Warfare with the Ottomans did induce the clans to try to coordinate more. Just before a key battle at Krusi in 1796 an assembly of Montenegrin tribal chiefs met at Cetinje and adopted a measure called Stega, or “fastening,” which proclaimed the unification of the Montenegrin heartlands. Two years later they met again and agreed to convene a “council” of fifty members, in effect the first time there had been any institutionalized structures of government above the tribe. The first attempt at a legal code in 1796 by Vladika Peter I reflected the fact that order in society was regulated by the institution of blood feuds and included the clauses:

A man who strikes another with his hand, foot, or chibouk, shall pay him a fine of fifty sequins. If the man struck at once kills his aggressor, he shall not be punished. Nor shall a man be punished for killing a thief caught in the act.

If a Montenegrin in self-defense kills a man who has insulted him … it shall be considered that the killing was involuntary.

This looks more like Clovis’s Salic Law or King Alfred’s law code than a modern legal system. But there was little of the subsequent state-building effort of Clovis or Alfred in this case. The feud continued with centralized state authority nowhere in sight.

The lack of state authority and dominance of the feud lasted sufficiently long that the anthropologist Christopher Boehm was able to reconstruct it in great detail in the 1960s. Boehm captures the essential difficulty of central authority in Montenegro when he writes, “It was only when their central leader attempted to institutionalize forcible means of controlling feuds that the tribesmen stood firm in their right to follow their ancient traditions. This was because they perceived in such interference a threat to their basic political autonomy.” Boehm is referring to the attempts of Vladika Njegoš to establish the state’s authority in Montenegro in the 1840s. Djilas analyzed the same situation in the following terms:

It was a clash between two principles—the state and the clan. The former stood for order and a nation, and against chaos and treason; the latter stood for clan freedoms and against the arbitrary actions of an impersonal central authority—the Senate, the Guard, the captains.

Djilas records that Njegoš’s reforms were immediately confronted by the revolt of the Piperi and Crmnica clans because “the imposition of government and a state was putting an end to the independence and internal freedom of the clans.” Njegoš was succeeded by his nephew Danilo, who made himself the first secular prince of Montenegro in 1851, but his project to build something resembling a state ran into fierce opposition too. An attempt to raise taxes in 1853 triggered clan revolts with the Piperi, Kuči, and Bjelopavlići declaring themselves independent states. A member of the Bjelopavlići assassinated Danilo in 1860.

War did make states of different sorts in Switzerland and Prussia, but not so in Montenegro or, for that matter, in neighboring Albania, where society remained highly fragmented and suspicious of centralized power. Montenegrins fought the Ottomans not by creating a powerful centralized authority but by using their tribal structures. Any pressure to increase state capacity, just as with Arrow 3 in Figure 2, was not sufficient to bring Montenegro or Albania close to the corridor. They would stay with the Absent Leviathan.

Our theory also highlights the ironic implications of this resistance for liberty. Even though they remained free from state control, and maintained their egalitarian clan structures, Montenegrins were still subject to dominance and insecurity due to endemic feuding. For them this was better than being dominated by the Ottomans or the vladika, but it was still very far from liberty. Society was armed and violent. An interesting question is, Why, in contrast to many other stateless societies, such as the Asante, the Tiv, and the Tonga, whom we have seen in Africa, did Montenegro or Albania not develop norms to control feuds and recurrent violence? One possibility is that this was in fact because of the incessant wars. Violence had to be part of any order in these societies, and this made it difficult to create any type of nonviolent social order.

Differences That Matter

Readers familiar with our earlier book Why Nations Fail will see some parallels between our discussion of the divergent implications of structural factors here and the role of small institutional differences during critical junctures in our earlier work. Our discussion in Why Nations Fail emphasized how large shocks can lead to very different responses depending on prevailing institutions. Our theory here goes further both because it distinguishes between societies under the control of despotic states and those without any centralized state, and also because it explicitly focuses on the dynamics of the state’s capacity and society’s ability to control the state and the elites. This enriched framework leads to a more nuanced discussion by clarifying the sources of divergent behavior—changes in various structural factors can move us into different parts of Figure 2. This framework highlights the dynamic implications of such differences in a way that goes considerably beyond our earlier book. For example, Prussia, like Switzerland, was able to build considerable state capacity in the face of increasing threats of interstate warfare, but this ushered in a very different type of evolution of the state.

Indeed, consistent with our theory here, Prussia ultimately ended up with less state capacity than Switzerland. This may at first appear paradoxical. Shouldn’t all of that emphasis on controlling society, raising revenues, and fighting wars lead to a huge amount of capacity? The fact that it doesn’t is one of the distinctive implications of our theory as already emphasized in Chapter 2. In the absence of the Red Queen effect, the development of state capacity will remain incomplete.

Take one of the most basic public services a state is supposed to provide—dispute resolution and justice. Though Prussia created a despotic state, it did this without the cooperation of society. As a result, state institutions were built on preexisting feudal structures. The new merit systems were merged with an older structure described by one historian as being “sustained by aristocratic patronage, social heredity, amateurism, and, often, proprietary tenure.” This tenure was evident in the prominence of several aristocratic families, for example, the Heinitzes, von Redens, von Hardenbergs, von Steins, Dechens, Gerhards, and their kinsmen dominating bureaucratic offices. As they filled the positions at the top, they intensively repressed the serfs at the bottom, who made up 80 percent of the labor force in agriculture. They achieved this through their control of manorial courts, which could administer punishments ranging from small fines for minor misdemeanors to corporal punishments, including whippings and imprisonment. So there was little provision of justice, but instead a systematic use of courts to impose the feudal order. Although it looked impressive, this despotic state had a hard time enforcing most of its policies. An obvious consequence of this lack of capacity, despite all the tax revenues and military expenditures, was the shattering defeat of Prussian armies at Jena in 1806. A big French advantage came from the fact that three different people were nominally in charge of the Prussian army and they had five different battle plans which they couldn’t agree on.

The situation in Switzerland was very different. The Swiss confederacy was founded in 1291 on a demand for the objective resolution of disputes, which Habsburg courts did not deliver. Magistrates were elected at the local level and the state was built up from the bottom by a series of oaths, covenants, and pacts that recognized the autonomy and self-governance of local society. Feudal dues lapsed or were negotiated away. Manorial courts were gradually replaced by equality before the law. The Swiss eradicated the type of local despotism that Prussian peasants had to put up with (and did not cooperate with if they could get away with it).

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Armed with this general framework, we now revisit several iconic turning points in European history, some of which were discussed in Why Nations Fail, but now with additional insights about the dynamics that they imply for European states and societies.

One important turning point in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the huge collapse of the population following the Black Death. As we saw in Chapter 6, the feudal order, even if it could not completely obliterate the balance between state and society in England, had created a significant edge for elites in their control over peasants and society in many parts of Europe. With declining populations and society getting emboldened as a result of the greater scarcity of labor, feudal elites became less able to control and obtain taxes and servile labor obligations from their serfs. Serfs asked for their obligations to be reduced and, despite feudal restrictions on labor mobility, started leaving manors. In our framework, this change corresponds to an increase in the power of society, and in many parts of Western Europe the result was a further move away from despotic control of the state and elites over society. This was a significant step up in the corridor. But in Eastern Europe, where, by the fourteenth century, landowners and elites were already more dominant, things worked out quite differently. In this case any mobilization of peasants was more limited and insufficient to move these areas closer to the corridor, and there was no lasting damage to the power of the Despotic Leviathan. Then the subsequent act of this confrontation played out with the “second serfdom,” significantly increasing the dominance of elites over society. In the context of the declines in the population throughout Europe and growing demand for agricultural produce in the West, the East’s powerful landlords were incentivized to increase their demands from the peasants, which they achieved by tightening their grip over them. By the end of the sixteenth century a much more intense exploitation of serfs had emerged in the East. So while England, France, and the Netherlands moved up in the corridor, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe launched deeper into the lands of the Despotic Leviathan.

Potentially divergent influences on a nation’s political development come not only from military threats or demographic shocks but also from major economic opportunities. Such a change reconfiguring European trajectories arrived with the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias. Once again, the different balances between state and society produced divergent responses. In England, as we mentioned in Chapter 6, the tight limits on what the crown and its allies could do in terms of monopolizing overseas trade meant that it was new groups of merchants that benefited most from these economic opportunities. This fueled a rise in the power and assertiveness of society in its protracted struggle against the crown. Merchants who had already profited from trade with the New World were looking to continue doing so and became some of the chief supporters of Parliament in the English Civil War between 1642 and 1651 and then later constituted major segments of the opposition to Charles II and James II in the run-up to the Glorious Revolution. While in England these new economic opportunities tilted the balance between state and society in favor of the latter, they did no such thing in Spain and Portugal, where the monarchies had been able to create overseas monopolies. This difference was largely due to the initial balance of power, which favored the elites in these countries. Roman Iberia had been conquered by a German tribe too, the Visigoths, who left a legacy of assembly, later institutionalized as the Cortes of Castile, León, or Aragon (see Map 8 in Chapter 6). But these survived only in the north of the country after the Arab invasions starting in the eighth century pushed Iberia out of the corridor. The “reconquest” of the penninsula from the Arabs greatly intensified the despotic instincts of the Iberian state. The more despotic Spanish and Portuguese monarchies and their allies could then more successfully control the economy and monopolize Atlantic trading opportunities. As a result, rather than facing emboldened opposition, they themselves got richer, more powerful, and even more despotic, and society became more crippled. There would be no respite from despotism in the Iberian Peninsula.

The next big economic opportunity played out similarly. We have seen in Chapter 6 how the pace of societal transformation in Britain got a lot more intense and the Red Queen effect more fervent after the Industrial Revolution. These changes offered a multitude of new economic possibilities, and in most cases it was people from every nook and cranny of society who took advantage of these. But there would be no such Red Queen effect in parts of Europe that had already diverged quite considerably. In the Habsburg Empire or in Russia, as we recounted in Why Nations Fail, the Despotic Leviathan tightened its grip and even resisted the introduction of new industrial technologies and railways, lest this reawaken their submissive societies.

So it is the same pattern we see in all of these examples. The outlines of European history, very much like the history of other parts of the world, are heavily shaped by the impact of big shocks but critically, this happens on a canvas drawn by the balance of power between state and society.

In the Lenin Shipyard

Divergent effects of big shocks have characterized other iconic episodes, including the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet state was a perfect specimen of the Despotic Leviathan at home in Russia, and acted as the fountainhead of despotic power in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet republics it controlled in Asia. Its collapse in 1991 thus corresponded to a sharp decline in the state’s power. As Czech playwright and dissident, and soon-to-be president, Václav Havel put it in his essay The Power of the Powerless:

Not only is the dictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and structured in the same way … but each country has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the superpower center and subordinated to its interests.

But now there was a disintegration of not just the Soviet “manipulatory instruments” and the state’s capacity to control society. The newly independent countries were also left without tax systems and many other aspects of modern administrations.

All of this didn’t happen at once, of course. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, his plan was to revitalize, not destroy, the Soviet Union. He launched the joint policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). It was mostly perestroika that Gorbachev was interested in, so that he could reconfigure the institutions and incentives of the stagnating Russian economy. But he feared that hard-liners within the Communist Party would never accept these reforms, so he complemented them with a political opening that was designed to weaken the hard-liners. It’s not clear if he foresaw the risks, but his strategy ended up unearthing massive discontent, particularly in regions that resented the centralized control of Moscow. Nowhere was this discontent larger than in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States that had been occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Anti-Soviet protests had flared up before, in Hungary in 1956 and in the Prague Spring of 1968, where Havel cut his political teeth, but had been crushed. By January 1990 the Polish Communist Party was voting to disband itself, and by December of the next year Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to declare the Soviet Union extinct. Russia was soon flooded with Western economists and experts to help the new government forge a transition to a market-based liberal democracy. Poland was too, but the two countries ended up on remarkably different paths.

The fall in the state’s power brought about by the Soviet collapse had very different effects depending on where a country was relative to the corridor. Though there were many similarities between them, Russia was much deeper into the territory of the Despotic Leviathan. Poland, when Gorbachev rose to power, was under the iron fist of general Wojciech Jaruzelski, but was still closer to the corridor because its state, propped up by Soviet power, had less dominance over society and its civil society was less emasculated than in Russia. In fact, Jaruzelski’s rise to power was a response to the reawakening of Polish civil society in 1980–1981. The collapse of the Soviet Union pushed Jaruzelski from office and pushed Poland into the corridor.

There were other, deeper differences too. For one, the mass collectivization of agriculture that Stalin had engineered in Russia and Ukraine never happened in Poland. People were mostly left with their land; there was some respite, some breathing space for civil society to grow under the shadow of the hammer and sickle. Ironically enough, it was in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk that Polish society really got organized. Led by Lech Wałęsa, an independent trade union, Solidarity, emerged in September 1980. One year later it had mushroomed throughout Polish society with ten million members, perhaps two-thirds of the labor force. The government responded with martial law and the appointment of Jaruzelski. But by this time Solidarity was too big to be easily put down and a stalemate ensued. By January 1989, Jaruzelski had reconciled himself to a power-sharing arrangement. In April 1989, Solidarity signed the Round Table agreement with the government that allowed for elections to be held in June of that year. But everything was rigged so that the Communists, who had reserved seats, would have a majority and Jaruzelski would be elected president. He hoped that Solidarity would be mollified by this vote. This was exactly how the German playwright Bertolt Brecht characterized the East German state’s attitude toward elections in the 1950s:

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

But Jaruzelski had miscalculated. The Communist Party lost every single seat where there was free competition, completely undermining the legitimacy of the whole agreement. Solidarity pushed for more, and by August had taken over the government and appointed Tadeusz Mazowiecki prime minister.

Mazowiecki was now faced with the unenviable task of masterminding the transition from socialism. First in line was economic restructuring and he appointed Leszek Balcerowicz to come up with a plan. The plan turned out to be a famous instance of what became known as “shock therapy,” a dramatic “leap” to a market economy. Balcerowicz removed price controls, allowed state-owned businesses to go bankrupt, and taxed wages in state-owned enterprises to deliberately make them noncompetitive with the new private sector. And they did go bust! National income fell sharply and there were mass layoffs from the state-run industries that were allowed to wither away.

Society reacted and protested. Instead of democracy pacifying the labor movement, it led to an incessant wave of strikes as incomes fell and unemployment mounted. From 250 strikes in 1990 there were 305 in 1991, then over 6,000 in 1992 and over 7,000 in 1993. Protests, demonstrations, and strikes provided an important source of pressure on the government to build social consensus around its agenda. After Wałęsa’s election as president, Balcerowicz conceded to bringing trade unions into the discussion over wage policies and particularly the contentious tax on wage increases in state-owned enterprises. By the end of 1991, Balcerowicz was fired, but the transition had already mobilized society. By 1992 there were twenty-eight different political parties in the Polish parliament, the Sejm, and of course a lot of disagreement about how to move forward. Despite these divisions the Sejm managed to negotiate the “Little Constitution,” which was a mixed system of parliamentarianism and presidentialism set in place until a new constitution was finally introduced in 1997. In the meantime, Wałęsa tried to increase his own power at the expense of the Sejm, but couldn’t. The resulting political compromise led to an adjustment in the economic transition of the country. The government started to allocate more resources to the state sector and tried to cushion the pain of shock therapy. A new broad-based personal income tax was introduced. In February 1993, Minister of Labor Jacek Kuroń proposed the formation of a tripartite commission wherein the government, management, and trade unions could discuss economic policy making. Some in the West fulminated at how this was undermining the transition to a market economy, but it provided legitimacy to the reforms and got society at large on board, without which a transition into the corridor had no hope, as we’ll now see in Russia.

Moving into the corridor created the conditions for liberty in Poland, which rapidly built a vibrant democracy on the back of its highly mobilized civil society. Its track record on democratic politics and civil rights persuaded the European Union to accept Poland into its club. However, moving into the corridor does not immediately generate liberty, which only emerges after the Red Queen gets into operation. In 2015 the Law and Justice Party came to power in Poland and had to be sanctioned by the European Union for attempting to undermine the independence of the Supreme Court. Liberty is always a work in progress, not least in nations that have suffered decades of despotic rule.

The UnTaming of the Russian Bear

As General Jaruzelski began negotiating with Solidarity in the spring of 1989, Gorbachev proposed his own carefully crafted version of democratization for the Soviet Union. As part of this process, Boris Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet in May 1990. By August, Yeltsin was famously announcing to other regional leaders that they should “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” Soviet hard-liners next attempted a coup to stop the inevitable, arresting Gorbachev. Yeltsin bravely defied the coup by standing on the turret of a tank. He survived and the coup failed. By Christmas the Soviet Union had fallen and in the summer of 1991 Yeltsin was elected to the newly created position of Russian president. His platform, on the basis of which he beat four Communists and a hardcore nationalist, included a radical program of market reform just like the one in Poland. Democracy, economic reforms—it looked like the Russian despotic state was getting tamed.

Yeltsin picked Yegor Gaidar to run the economic reform program, and Gaidar in turn nominated Anatoly Chubais to spearhead the privatization of state-owned industry. Gaidar and Chubais had to come up with a strategy to put the main assets of the Soviet Union into private hands. Starting in the spring of 1992, the government began to sell off small firms such as stores and restaurants. People could take ownership of their own apartments for free, or almost for free. In late 1992 Chubais started on the big firms. Large and medium-sized enterprises were required to sell 29 percent of their shares in “voucher auctions,” and in October 1992, each Russian adult was issued vouchers with a nominal value of 10,000 rubles that could be acquired at the local branch of Sberbank for just 25 rubles. By January 1993 almost 98 percent of Russians had claimed their vouchers. These vouchers could be sold or used to bid for the shares of specific companies when they were privatized.

The first auctions were held in December 1992. About 14,000 enterprises held such auctions. Most of the assets from these firms went to their workers and managers, however. A law allowed for workers and managers to buy 51 percent of the voting shares of a firm at a discount and using the firm’s own funds. In effect the majority of privatizing firms’ assets were handed to insiders at huge discounts. Even shares that had been distributed more widely re-concentrated. In 1994 workers owned 50 percent of the average Russian enterprise; by 1999 this was down to 36 percent. By 2005, 71 percent of medium and large industry and communications enterprises had a single shareholder who owned half the stock.

The most controversial stage of the privatization was the “loans for shares” deal in 1995 in which the most valuable state assets in the energy and resource sector were given to a group of politically connected people who promised to finance Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. Here’s how the details worked. State shares in twelve highly profitable enterprises concentrated in the energy sector were used as collateral for bank loans. If the loans were not paid off, the banks would have the right to sell the shares. In fact, the government never had any intention of paying off the debts. Between November 1996 and February 1997 the government sold shares of the energy giants Yukos, Sidanko, and Surgutneftegas, and in each case banks themselves bought the shares in auctions where outside bids were ignored or disqualified. After Yeltsin’s reelection two of those closely involved in this deal, Vladimir Potanin and Boris Berezovsky, were brought into the government. Berezovsky and another oligarch, Vladimir Gusinsky, dominated the media by controlling two national television stations.

In the meantime Yeltsin had pushed for, and got, a constitution with strong presidential powers. Nobody was able to oppose him, and unlike in Poland, the Russian transition had not involved the mass mobilization of society. Nobody organized en masse against the “loans for shares deal,” and people voted Yeltsin back into power with the help of money he raised from his new backers. But the new Russian elite used its power to extract all sorts of concessions from the state. In 1996 the Ministry of the Economy declared that beer was a nonalcoholic beverage so that Russia’s largest brewers could avoid a tax hike. But they were living in a system with a lot of potentially despotic power at the top, and after Yeltsin left the scene, they fell prey to Vladimir Putin. Rather than the “liberal democratic” state that Westerners had hoped would emerge in the 1990s, after 2000 a new type of despotism was busy consolidating itself using the playbook of the old Soviet state.

Someone who saw it from the inside was Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was an operative in Russia’s FSB (Federal Security Bureau), the successor to the Soviet-era KGB (the Russian abbreviation for “Committee for State Security”). It was even housed in the same building in Lubyanka Square. Litvinenko and the FSB were heavily involved in the war against separatists in Chechnya starting in 1994. In that conflict, as Litvinenko put it, “secret services enjoyed generous operational freedom: they could detain, interrogate and kill without legal constraints”—just like the good old days, and all during Russia’s “transition to a market economy.” The government decided to start a new top-secret unit with the acronym URPO. The URPO soon got involved in all sorts of “activities,” and Litvinenko was assigned to work for them. He explained:

My unit was ordered to plan the assassination of Boris Berezovsky, the entrepreneur-turned-politician who was close to President Yeltsin. No one told us of the reason, but there was no need to: Berezovsky was the most visible of oligarchs.

It wasn’t quite the shock therapy that Western economists had envisioned, but it showcased the new activities of the security services. They didn’t stop at proposing to kill the president’s friends. They also accumulated vast personal fortunes. This was done via a coalition with drug lords and involved massive extortion rackets. Litvinenko remembered how

a local shopowner had been visited by a man claiming to be a police officer and demanding protection money. The demands went up and up from $5,000 a month to $9,000 then to $15,000 and more. Next the shopowner received a visit at his home—he was beaten up and threatened.

Litvinenko watched horrified, and took notes. But whom to trust? In July 1998 he thought he had caught a break. Yeltsin appointed a relative outsider to head the FSB, Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB. Litvinenko went to him and put his cards on the table, detailing all of the crime and rackets he had documented. He recalled, “Before our meeting, I spent all night drawing up a chart with names, places, links—everything.” Putin listened pensively and the same day opened a “file” on him. Litvinenko was fired from the FSB. A friend told him, “I do not envy you, Alexander. There is common money involved.” A mutual acquaintance said, “Putin will squash you … and no one can help you.” In October 2000, Litvinenko fled the country with his family and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. He wrote two books documenting what he had learned about the corruption and violence of the Russian state. But the arm of the FSB is long. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko fell ill in London after meeting with two former KGB agents. They had put poison in his teacup, and he died three weeks later of polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.

When Putin took over, the oligarchs were finished; they were exiled or jailed, and their assets were expropriated—unless they were Putin’s loyal allies. Any modicum of liberty that had emerged since 1989 was next. Today in Russia independent media is suppressed and journalists are murdered. Politicians who dare to oppose Putin, most recently Alexei Navalny, are jailed or banned from politics. Despotism is back, untamed.

Why did the Russian “transition” fail so spectacularly? The most basic reason is that Russia was too far outside the corridor. After the Soviet Union collapsed, though state institutions were reconstructed, there wasn’t much of an attempt to reform the security apparatus. Indeed, politicians thought they might be able to use it to their advantage, as in Chechnya. At the root of the problem was lack of popular mobilization or even independent private interests that could stop the unrestrained exercise of power of the state and limit the sort of high-level discretion that Yeltsin enabled. Privatization and economic reform on their own could not create the broad and legitimate distribution of assets that might have formed the economic underpinnings of a Shackled Leviathan. This allowed Putin to reverse the gains of the 1990s and consolidate a new despotism. Indeed, the inequality that resulted from privatization, particularly the “loans for shares” deal, not only re-concentrated the ownership of key assets in Russia, but also completely delegitimized the reform process. This made it very easy for the reenergized KGB, under Putin’s leadership, to grab control of the economy and society.

Russia was too distant from the corridor. Though the collapse of the despotic Soviet state pushed it in the right direction, it wasn’t enough to tame the Russian state, which just picked up where the Soviet one had left off and reconstituted its despotic control over society.

From Despotism to Disintegration

Even if the decline in the power of the state and Communist Party elites was insufficient to move Russia away from the orbit of the Despotic Leviathan, it was more than enough to completely change the trajectory of a state that had a more precarious hold on society, such as the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan on the border with Afghanistan and China. As the Soviet Union crumbled, Tajikistan had to decide on its future. First Party Secretary Kakhar Makhkamov initially supported the putschists who briefly imprisoned Gorbachev in August 1991. When the putsch failed, mass demonstrations in the capital, Dushanbe, forced Makhkamov to resign. Tajikistan was independent by the next month and Rakhamon Nabiev was elected president shortly thereafter.

To follow what happened next in Tajikistan you have to understand the avlod. In the words of the Tajik sociologist Saodot Olimova, “An avlod is a patriarchal community of blood relatives who have a common ancestor and common interests, and in many cases shared property and means of production and consolidated or coordinated household budgets.” Sounds a bit like the cage of norms we saw with stateless societies, except that this system survived under the despotic reign of the Russian and then the Soviet state. Tajikistan was conquered by the Russians in the second half of the nineteenth century and then ruled by the Soviets until 1991, but the underlying social structures, the clans, persisted relatively unchanged. In a 1996 nationwide survey 68 percent of Tajiks said they belonged to an avlod. It is useful to think of the clans as regionally based aggregations of these avlods. Political scientist Sergei Gretsky describes how in the 1940s the clans from Khujand were allowed to take over much of the local Soviet state administration:

When the Khujandis ascended to top party and government positions in Tajikistan … they endorsed localism as the corner stone of their policy, and kept regional rivalries boiling, while preserving for themselves the role of arbiter … In Tajikistan the popular wisdom put it in the following way: “Leninobod governs, Gharm does business, Kulob guards, Pamir dances, Qurghonteppa ploughs.”

Leninobod is the capital of the Khujand region in the northwest of the country. Despotic though its rule was, the Soviet state controlled Tajikistan indirectly via the regional clans. Much of the arbitration was through clan relations and alliances, and outside the formal state institutions.

President-elect Nabiev was from one of the traditional ruling families of the Khujand. He faced immediate opposition from other parts of the country, particularly from the Gharm and Pamir who began to organize demonstrations. In response, Nabiev handed out 2,000 machine guns and formed irregular forces to repress the opposition. His opponents managed to take the capital and the Khujandis withdrew to start a guerrilla war that they eventually won. In the process, the state completely collapsed and Tajikistan was plunged into five years of horrific civil war between the clan-based regional alliances. The death toll is uncertain with estimates ranging from 10,000 to as many as 100,000. More than one-sixth of the population was displaced and national income fell by 50 percent.

The difference between Tajikistan and Poland or Russia is clear: Tajikistan, ruled by the Soviets through regional clans and alliances, started the transition process with a weak state and a society without any institutionalized means of participating in politics. Once the despotic power of the Soviet rule melted down in 1991, the country had no easy way of mediating disputes between the clans, which were now intensified with the prospect of taking control of the assets of the country and the vestiges of the Soviet state. The clans armed themselves and fought while the state disintegrated.

*

—

So we see an even richer tapestry of divergence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decline in the power of the state wasn’t enough to dislodge Russia away from despotism, but just enough to open a door into the corridor for Poland, and more than enough to hurl Tajikistan into a situation wherein the state completely collapsed and civil war and clan conflicts ensued. Figure 3 sketches how in our framework these different responses may come from the same impulse: the collapse of the Soviet Union leading to a decline in the power of the state. Arrow 1 is the hopeful scenario where the reduction in the power of the state moves the country into the corridor, as was the case for Poland. Arrow 2 is the case, as in Russia, where a country starts so far from the corridor that even after the decline in the power of the state, the Despotic Leviathan has commanding control. Finally, Arrow 3 illustrates the possibility that, starting with a sufficiently weak state and society, the same change can cause the state’s control to wither completely, moving society toward the Absent Leviathan.

Figure 3. The Soviet Divergence

This richness of outcomes underscores that even after decades of the state gaining power at the expense of society, big enough shocks—in this case the collapse of the Soviet Union—can completely reconfigure the subsequent trajectories of state and society. The evolution of a Leviathan is always subject to myriad influences and disruptions.

Because We Have To

Economic opportunities created by new technologies haven’t just influenced the development path of European nations. They have also shaped the pattern of colonial divergence, as illustrated by the contrasting trajectories of Costa Rica and Guatemala in the nineteenth century.

Institutions of Central American neighbors Costa Rica and Guatemala were initially similar. Both countries were still under the despotic control of the Spanish colonial state until 1821. But in the next hundred years they diverged as sharply as any of the examples we have discussed in this chapter. Costa Rica gradually witnessed the strengthening of society and moved into the corridor over the course of the late nineteenth century. By 1882, Costa Rica was holding regular and peaceful elections, and the role of the military and general repression had started to wane. These changes meant not only much greater security and lower violence for Costa Ricans, but a very different social and economic world. For example, by 1900, 36 percent of adults were literate, and by 1930, two-thirds of all adults could read and write.

Guatemala looked very, very different. A sense of how different and why can be gleaned from the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. Menchú is from the Quiché indigenous people of Guatemala, a country made up of “twenty-two indigenous groups … twenty-three including the mestizos, or ladinos.” The ladinos are those of Spanish descent, or at least mixed Spanish and indigenous descent. Menchú’s grandmother

got work as a servant to the town’s only rich people. Her boys did jobs around the house like carrying wood and water and tending animals. But as they got bigger, her employer said she didn’t work enough for him to go on feeding such big boys. She had to give away her eldest son, my father, to another man so he wouldn’t go hungry. By then he could do heavy work like chopping wood or working in the fields but he wasn’t paid anything because he’d been given away. He lived with the ladinos for nine years but learned no Spanish because he wasn’t allowed in the house … They found him repulsive because he had no clothes and was very dirty.

Eventually Menchú’s father left and found work on the coffee estates, the fincas, along Guatemala’s Pacific coast. He brought his mother and “got her away from that family as soon as he could. She’d sort of become her employer’s mistress although he had a wife. She’d had to agree because she’d nowhere else to go.” The fincas became their life. Menchú was born in 1959. “From when I was very tiny, my mother used to take me down to the finca, wrapped in a shawl on her back.” Trucks would pick them up from the highlands. Menchú recounts, “I remember the journey by lorry very well. I didn’t even know what it was … [It] holds about forty people. But in with the people, go the animals (dogs, cats, chickens) which the people from the Altiplano take with them when they are in the finca.” The trip took two nights and a day during which time people soiled the truck and vomited. “By the end of the journey, the smell—the filth of people and animals—was unbearable … we were like chickens coming out of a pot … we could hardly walk.”

From the age of eight Rigoberta worked on the coffee plantation, and then on a cotton plantation; she never went to school. (The photography section shows a contemporary scene of Guatemalan women and children on a coffee finca.) The workers were given tortillas and beans to eat but the cantina of the finca had other things too, especially alcohol. “Every finca in Guatemala has a cantina, owned by the landowner, where the workers get drunk … and pile up debts. They often spend most of their wages. They drink to get happy and to forget the bitterness.” But Rigoberta was taught to be very careful. “My mother used to say: ‘Don’t touch anything or we’ll have to pay for it.’ … I used to ask my mother, ‘Why do we go to the finca?’ And my mother used to say, ‘Because we have to.’”

Rigoberta recalled the first time she saw the landowner. “He was very fat, well dressed and even had a watch. We didn’t know about watches then.” Rigoberta didn’t have shoes, let alone a watch. When the landowner arrived,

he was accompanied by about fifteen soldiers … The overseer said, “Some of you have to dance for the owner” … The landowner was speaking, and the overseer started translating what he was saying. They told us we all had to go and make a mark on a piece of paper … We all went to make our mark on the paper … I remember that the paper had some squares with three or four drawings on it … He warned us that anyone who didn’t mark the paper would be thrown out of work [and] not paid.

The landowner left, but afterwards … I dreamed about him over and over again … it must have been the fear, the impression made on me by that man’s face … All the children there ran away … and cried when they saw that ladino, and even more at the soldiers and their weapons. They thought they were going to kill their parents. I thought so, too. I thought they were going to kill everybody.

Finally the “election,” Guatemalan-style, took place. “They came to the finca and told us that our President had won, the one we had voted for. We didn’t even know that they were votes they’d taken away. My parents laughed when they heard them say, ‘Our President,’ because for us he was the President of the ladinos, not ours at all.”

The state of Guatemala was distant, alien. It was not even a state for the majority of the population; it was a state for the ladinos. The first time Rigoberta went to the capital, Guatemala City, she had to be careful. Her father had been called to the INTA (the National Institute for Agrarian Transformation) and explained that “there was a prison for the poor people and if you didn’t go to that office, that’s where they put you … My father said the people there didn’t let you in unless you showed respect. ‘When you go in, keep still, don’t speak,’ he said.”

Back in the countryside the Quiché people had to deal with a hierarchy of government officials, starting with the military commissioner, then the mayor and then the governor, all ladinos. Rather than provide public services, the officials extracted bribes: “To get to see the Military Commissioner, you first have to give him a mordida, that’s what we call a bribe in Guatemala.” A mordida, literally “a bite.” Rigoberta ruefully concluded, “In Guatemala if it’s to do with the Government, there’s no way we can defend ourselves.” They tried. Rigoberta’s father and brother started to organize the local village. On September 9, 1979, her brother was murdered by the army.

They took him over rough ground where there were stones, fallen tree trunks. He walked about two kilometers being kicked and hit all the time … His whole face was disfigured with beating, from striking against stones, the tree trunks; my brother was completely destroyed … They tied him up, they tied his testicles … they left him in a hole with water and a bit of mud in it, they left him naked there all night. There were a lot of corpses there in the hole with him … My brother was tortured for more than sixteen days. They cut off his fingernails, they cut off his fingers, cut off his skin, they burned parts of his skin. Many of the wounds, the first ones, swelled and were infected. He stayed alive. They shaved his head, left just the skin, and also they cut the skin off his head and pulled it down on either side and cut off the fleshy part of his face. My brother suffered tortures on every part of his body.

Not content with this barbarism, the army then brought the captives back to the village as a lesson to the people. “The captain gave a panoramic description of all the power they had, the capacity they had. We, the people, didn’t have the capacity to confront them.” The captives, including Rigoberta’s brother, were then covered in gasoline and set on fire. This was brutal, violent dominance over society. A world apart from neighboring Costa Rica.

So why this savagery in Guatemala while Costa Rica had already brought violence under control, built a democracy supported by a fairly well-organized society, and created the preconditions for liberty? How did they diverge so completely? The answer is related to coffee.

Grounds for Divergence

The rapid growth of Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century did more than transform their economies. By creating a huge demand for tropical crops, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee, and the technological opportunities for transporting them across the world, this growth also reconfigured postcolonial societies. Steamships came early in the century, and by 1838 the SS Great Western, designed by British entrepreneur Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was the first constructed for regular service between Bristol and New York. The Great Western was made of wood and used steam-driven side paddle wheels. By 1845 Brunel had launched the Great Britain, which had an iron hull and used a steam-powered screw propeller. Iron hulls were cheaper and could be used to build much larger ships, and propellers were far more powerful than sails or paddle wheels.

After these technological changes, it became profitable to export crops like coffee in large quantities to distant parts of the world. Central America was at the epicenter of this trade not only because of its great climate for growing coffee, but also because it was situated close to the booming markets of the United States, where coffee imports doubled between 1830 and 1840 and then increased by another 50 percent by 1850. This was followed by steadily rising prices of coffee in the rest of the century.

To take advantage of this growing demand, some basic public services were needed. Roads and enough infrastructure had to be built to export the crops, and property rights in land had to be sorted out so that people would be willing to undertake the necessary investments to plant coffee (since it takes three to four years after planting before a coffee bush bears fruit). All of this required an expansion of state capacity. It was this demand for increased state power and capacity that underpinned the subsequent developments in Costa Rica and Guatemala.

Costa Rica was part of the Kingdom of Guatemala during the colonial period and both briefly unified with Mexico after gaining independence in 1821 and then joined the Federal Republic of Central America. Costa Rica seceded in 1838 and finally became an independent nation. It had been peripheral throughout colonial times, and it escaped the Bourbon reforms aimed at strengthening colonial states and increasing tax revenues. There were few indigenous peoples left after imported diseases had undermined their population in the sixteenth century, and it had no precious metals or minerals worth mining. At independence it had a population of 60,000 to 70,000 people, most of whom lived in the highland central valley. The colonial economy was largely underdeveloped except for a brief boom in cocoa on the Caribbean coast in the seventeenth century. Guatemala, which controlled the colonial monopoly, had blocked the development of tobacco growing in Costa Rica. Costa Rica therefore lacked both powerful elites and a dominant city or town at independence. The four main population centers, Cartago (the colonial capital and center of conservative groups), San José, Alajuela, and Heredia, were fierce rivals. Each town conducted its own foreign policy and sought alliances with powerful factions in neighboring countries, such as Colombia. As the Argentine politician and intellectual Domingo Sarmiento put it, “the South American republics have all, more or less, passed through the propensity to decompose into small fractions, attracted by anarchical and rash aspirations to ruinous, dark independence … Central America had made a sovereign state out of every village.”

In 1823 and 1835 this “propensity to decompose” led to civil wars and San José subsequently established itself as the capital city. But while the towns might compete, they could also cooperate. In 1821 as Latin American independence beckoned, the council (ayuntamiento or cabildo) of Cartago, the colonial capital, invited the councils of the other towns to discuss how they should declare independence. In October of that year the four main towns, along with Ujarrás, Barba, and Bagaces, jointly issued the “act of the ayuntamientos,” declaring independence from Spain. By December they had signed the Pacto de la Concordia, which created a governing junta made up of seven popularly elected members. The location of the body would rotate between the four main towns. These towns made heavy use of the cabildo abierto, a type of open council meeting that allowed for much broader political participation.

Though Costa Rica was gradually unraveling itself from the Spanish Empire, it remained poor and underdeveloped. The one asset it had was a lot of unexploited land. The first wave of politicians after 1821 understood this very well. Just as the United States had passed the Northwest Ordinances as early as 1787 to govern the expansion of the Union, Costa Ricans did the same thing. By 1821 San José was giving away land for free to anyone who could fence it and grow and export crops. Laws granting title and subsidies to smallholders for coffee were then passed by the central government in 1828, 1832, and 1840. By 1856 all public lands had been sold off. These laws opened up the lands of the central valley that were previously state owned. Individual towns tried to attract labor and migrants by selling them land at low prices and by encouraging coffee production. A measure of 1828 induced settlement and agricultural exploitation outside the four townships by granting up to 110 acres of land for free in underpopulated areas. Costa Rica was in fact the first Central American nation to start exporting coffee, and during the 1840s, after independence, exports increased fivefold to 3,800 tons. At this point, coffee represented 80 percent of Costa Rica’s exports. That decade saw the construction of the first road from the central valley to the Pacific port of Puntarenas so that coffee could be shipped by ox carts rather than on the backs of mules.

It was this early dynamic for the distribution of land that was responsible for the absence of a large class of landowners in Costa Rica. Instead, the economic elites of Costa Rica, such as they were, concentrated on the control of finance, purchase, and export of the crop. Thus there was never any coalition in favor of the type of labor coercion that was so prevalent in Guatemala. Even rich families who went into the coffee business were generally well diversified. There certainly were attempts by the Costa Rican elite to reduce the prices at which they bought coffee from smallholders, and they profited from high prices for loans and finance, which they fought to protect. The most famous example of this is the overthrow of President Juan Rafael Mora by the Montealegre family in 1859 because Mora proposed to create a bank to lend directly to smallholders, thus breaking the market power of financiers. But none of this derailed the smallholder coffee economy. The historian Ciro Cardoso summed up the state of the Costa Rican economy as “there was an absolute predominance of small farms, both of numbers and of the total land occupied.”

The coffee business required institutional support. For one thing, land had to be surveyed and property rights defined and enforced. After independence, president Braulio Carrillo began to build a state capable of performing these duties. He promulgated civil and criminal codes and constructed a state bureaucracy for the first time. He also reorganized the national militia and created a national police force. Though he considered himself a dictator for life, he made little effort to create a large military and had an army of no more than 500 soldiers.

The most likely explanation for Carrillo’s policies is that, like the Federalists of the United States, he recognized that without a central authority it would be difficult to provide the basic public services that the new country needed to take advantage of the new economic opportunities and maintain order in the face of the competition between the four main towns. But like the Federalists, he was also probably wary of the Gilgamesh problem—how to control a very powerful state—and refrained from building a large military. After Carrillo was deposed in 1842, the increasing power of coffee elites became evident, since different families and factions backed separate candidates for president and elections were marred by military involvement. Some presidents, like Mora, were overthrown in revolts, and others, like Jesús Jiménez in 1870, were cast aside by coups. At the urging of the Montealegre family, Jiménez was replaced by Tomás Guardia, the first military man to serve as president in nineteenth-century Costa Rica. He stayed in power for twelve years, and in the process professionalized the military with the help of Prussian advisers and reduced its size so that in 1880 there were a mere 358 professional soldiers (though there was a militia that could be called upon in emergencies). As a result of these reforms, the military remained out of politics. It was after Guardia’s death in 1882 that Costa Rica started holding regular elections, though it did take until 1948 for electoral fraud to be brought under control. Like Carrillo, Guardia expanded state capacity, increasing the size of the civil service by close to 40 percent. He also organized the construction of the first railway linking the central valley to the coast. Instead of the military, Costa Rica invested in education. A major educational reform of 1888 started increasing literacy.

By this point, Costa Rica was already in the corridor, moving along in it. In 1948 the slow transition toward democracy was finally consolidated after a fraudulent election led to a brief civil war where rebels led by José Figueres were victorious. Figueres led a junta for eighteen months before giving way to the legitimate winner of the 1948 election. In that period he oversaw some dramatic changes, not least the abolition of the army. Costa Rica is the largest country in the world that doesn’t have an army (others include Andorra, Liechtenstein, and a group of small island nations, like Mauritius and Grenada). The junta also created a constitutional convention and passed a series of laws to develop a meritocratic bureaucracy, introduce compulsory public education, and enfranchise women and illiterates. Since then Costa Rica has been democratic and peaceful, a rather remarkable achievement in a region where every other country has been a dictatorship at some point since the 1950s, often for long periods of time.

Repression on the Finca

While a smallholder coffee economy, and together with it a type of Shackled Leviathan, developed in Costa Rica, coffee expanded in Guatemala too, but in a very different, repressive direction. The reason why Rigoberta Menchú was witnessing such savagery can be traced to the edifice of labor coercion surrounding coffee cultivation in Guatemala. The logic was that anything that could threaten this machine would have to be stamped out with extreme force.

Guatemala had been the seat of colonial power in Central America, and unlike Costa Rica, it had a strong conservative merchant guild and powerful big landowners. It had a much more developed economy as well. The Indigo Growers Society had been founded as early as 1794. Guatemala also had a dense population of indigenous people. After Guatemala became independent it was ruled by a dictator, Rafael Carrera, who was in power either de facto or de jure for much of the period between 1838 until his death in 1865. As Carrera’s biographer Ralph Lee Woodward put it:

Notwithstanding the importance of Carrera’s army as the base of power for the dictator, it was the consolidation of the conservative elite of the capital that gave the regime its character and was important in establishing policies that made Guatemala the “citadel of conservatism” … While Carrera always reserved the right to make final decisions … he usually allowed a small clique of well-educated and aristocratic advisers to make and execute policy. The consolidation of this conservative elite in Guatemala and its control of the capital’s society, economy, and political structure is what so clearly distinguishes the period 1850–1871.

During this period Guatemala maintained colonial-era policies including various types of monopolies. In marked contrast to Costa Rica, little attempt was made to develop agricultural exports. All the same, the growth of markets led to a gradual expansion of coffee production. In 1860 exports had been negligible but they expanded rapidly as the decade went on. By 1871 coffee exports made up half of Guatemala’s total exports. In that year the government of Vicente Cerna y Cerna, one of Carrera’s conservative successors, was overthrown by a revolution that brought the “Liberals” to power, first Miguel García Granados and soon after the more enduring figure of another military caudillo, Justo Rufino Barrios, who ruled until 1885.

The new regime had the explicit goal of developing the agricultural export economy. To achieve this, it sought to privatize landholdings. Among other things, this involved the expropriation of land from indigenous people. Between 1871 and 1883 nearly one million acres of land were privatized. One of the key problems was that much of the indigenous population was in the highlands, while the prime coffee-growing areas were lower down toward the Pacific coast. Barrios used the coercive power of the state to help large landowners gain access to labor. There was a long tradition of coerced labor in Guatemala, going right back to the early colonial days, when indigenous people had been divided up in grants of encomienda and entrusted to Spanish conquistadors. The onset of large-scale coffee production induced the state to recodify and increase the intensity of coercion by reintroducing or reinventing colonial-era institutions such as the mandamiento and also through debt peonage, much in evidence in Rigoberta’s description of the finca’s cantina. Mandamiento (literally “commandment” or “order”) was a system in which employers could request and receive up to 60 workers for 15 days of wage work. These workers could be forcibly recruited unless they could demonstrate from their personal workbook that such service had recently been performed satisfactorily. Land policies were designed not just to allocate land to politically connected people; they were also intended to facilitate labor coercion by undermining the subsistence economy of the highland indigenous people. Without access to subsistence, they would be easier to incorporate into the wage economy at low pay or by coercion if necessary. The way to do this was to eliminate traditional communal lands and deprive people of the possibility of a subsistence life. To live, you had to go down to the finca.

Nothing much had changed by the time Rigoberta was describing it. This strategy was complemented by other legislation such as laws to “prohibit vagrancy,” another pretext for coercing people to work. While the Guatemalan government focused on “land privatization” and other related policies, it failed to provide much in terms of public services. There was a reason why Rigoberta did not attend school. As her memoir documents, child labor was widespread in the 1960s; children’s nimble fingers were just too useful not to be put to work picking coffee. The lack of interest in providing any sort of public services shows up in data on education and literacy in Guatemala. In 1900 a mere 12 percent of adults could read and write. As late as 1950 this was only 29 percent, while nearly every adult in Costa Rica could read and write.

The Guatemalan state wasn’t content to expropriate people’s lands in the nineteenth century. It was still doing it in the 1960s and 1970s when Rigoberta was growing up. One day around 1967 people turned up and started surveying the land that Rigoberta’s village farmed in the highlands. She recalled, “The Government says the land belongs to the nation. It owns the land and gives it to us to cultivate … we could either stay and work as peónes [sic] or leave our land.”

Work for whom? The politically connected families. She names the Martínez, García, and Brols families, who had been handing out “big bites” to get the government to allocate the land to them. Though they tried to complain,

we didn’t realize then that going to the Government authorities was the same as going to the landowners … They turned us out of our houses, and out of the village. The Garcías’ henchmen set to work with ferocity … First they went into the houses without permission and got all the people out. Then they went in and threw out all our things. I remember that my mother had her silver necklaces, precious keepsakes from my grandmother, but we never saw them again after that. They stole them all. They threw out our cooking utensils, our earthenware cooking pots … they hit the ground and broke into pieces.

They fled.

*

—

The staggering divergence that took place in Costa Rica and Guatemala over the past 150 years was not something that was preordained. The two countries had similar histories, similar geographies and cultural inheritance, and were faced with the same economic opportunities in the nineteenth century. But it is once again in line with the implications of our conceptual framework. The same impulse to increase state capacity, brought about by international economic changes, had hugely different consequences because it was coming in the context of different balances between state and society. Compared to Costa Rica, Guatemala had more of a history of militarized labor coercion and a significantly larger indigenous population, and had inherited the despotic state institutions of the Kingdom of Guatemala. The state-building incentives of the coffee boom at the end of the nineteenth century thus created a powerful Despotic Leviathan there. In Costa Rica, the collapse of the Spanish Empire meant that there were no powerful central state institutions at all and four towns vied for control. Coffee helped them to stave off collapse and pushed Costa Rica into the corridor. The Red Queen effect was most evident in the emergence of a smallholder coffee economy bolstered by public services and improved property rights in land. Within a few decades, this process forged the social basis for a functioning democracy.

How History Matters

We have seen several examples of the same impetus for building a stronger state, or in some instances the same forces reducing the despotic control of the state, having very different implications for the subsequent path of states and societies. This is the most important lesson of the current chapter. In contrast to the prevailing emphasis in much of social science, structural factors do not create strong dispositions for one type of economic, political, or social template to emerge. Rather, they generate “conditional effects”—meaning that their consequences are very much dependent on the existing balance of power between state and society.

This point is general and helps us understand certain key turning points in European as well as world history, and it has some very novel implications going beyond the scope of this chapter. Most important, such structural factors, especially those related to the nature of economic relations and the tendencies created by international relations, not only shift the position of a nation in Figure 2 and Figure 3, but can also alter the shapes of the different regions in these figures. Most crucially, the lines demarcating the boundaries of the Despotic, Shackled, and Absent Leviathan change as these factors change. This, as we will see in Chapters 14 and 15, has a lot to tell us about what types of societies are more likely to build and maintain a Shackled Leviathan because they have a wider corridor.

Our discussion in this chapter also clarifies why history matters in our framework. Once a society is in the corridor, it behaves very differently from when it is in the orbit of the Despotic Leviathan or living under the Absent Leviathan, so historical differences tend to persist. It is for this reason that the balance of power between state and society often endures. But of course, this balance in turn depends on certain economic, social, and political relationships and it is in this sense that the structure of the economy or politics in a country not only determines the width of the corridor but also shapes its future path. For example, a history of labor coercion renders the state and elites more powerful against an emaciated society, and this makes labor coercion more likely to persist and intensify, as our discussion of Guatemalan history illustrates; or past collectivization of agriculture makes despotism more likely to endure because it emasculates society, as our discussion of recent Russian history emphasizes. Indeed, it is this persistence that belies any simple tendency for there to be an “end of history,” where all nations eventually converge toward the same types of states, societies, or institutions. History does persist and does generate divergences that aren’t easy to erase or undo. More interestingly, different historical evolutions of the relationship between state and society can have momentous implications when confronted with changes in structural factors and big shocks like those discussed in this chapter. This is both because, as we have just noted, such things as a history of labor coercion, industrialization, or deep-rooted social hierarchy impact the shape of the corridor, but also because countries with different pasts will find themselves with different balances of power between state and society, laying the groundwork for divergent consequences of the same structural factors.

This discussion highlights as well, and later chapters will underscore, that history isn’t destiny. Nations move in and out of the corridor, altering their historical trajectories, even if the likelihood and the manner in which this happens are themselves heavily influenced by their history (where the country is in the figure) and by economic, political, and social conditions that determine the shape of the corridor. This approach then gives us a way of thinking about what social scientists call agency—the ability of key actors to influence the course of their societies, for example by forming new and enduring coalitions; articulating new demands, grievances, and narratives; or coming up with technological, organizational, or ideological innovations (as we saw in Chapter 3). Agency matters in our framework not because it can freely reshape the trajectory of a nation as if it were a blank slate. Instead, agency, as well as sometimes completely insignificant-looking contingencies, can have durable effects by tilting the prevailing balance of state and society and modifying the way that a nation responds to structural factors. We saw with the Federalists in Chapter 2 the role that leaders capable of articulating a new vision and forming new coalitions can play in state building. We see the same in the Costa Rican case too. Though there were structural differences between Costa Rica and Guatemala, the path Costa Rica took was also significantly influenced by individuals such as Braulio Carrillo in the 1830s and 1840s. His decision to separate Costa Rica from the Federal Republic of Central America allowed the country to diverge from the rest of the isthmus. His decisions to build more-effective state institutions allowed for the smallholder coffee economy to develop. Perhaps most interesting of all, his decision to keep the army small paved the way for a relatively muted role of the military in Costa Rican politics and its eventual abolition in 1948. Had Carrillo made different decisions, Costa Rica would likely be much more like Guatemala today. It took another individual, José Figueres, to finally abolish the military and create the constitutional basis for a modern state and functioning democracy. As with the choices of Carrillo, there was nothing predetermined about what Figueres did, bordered as he was by a recently emerged dictatorship under the Somozas in Nicaragua. In all of this, agency influenced how the forces highlighted in Figure 2 and Figure 3 played out, but did not act freely from the prevailing balance of power. Indeed, it would have been impossible for Carrillo or Figueres to build a Shackled Leviathan if Costa Rica had had the same labor-repressive agriculture as Guatemala.

Chapter 10

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH FERGUSON?

A Killing at Noon

Shortly after noon on August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a city in St. Louis County. Brown had stolen a packet of cigarillos from a store and was with a friend when Wilson, who had learned of the robbery on his radio, asked them to stop. A struggle took place with Wilson still in his car, and two shots were fired. Brown fled and Wilson chased him, eventually hitting him with six bullets. A mere ninety seconds expired between Wilson’s encountering Brown and the young man’s death.

The tragic killing arose in the context of highly strained relations between Ferguson’s predominantly African American population and its almost totally white police force. Brown’s killing led to days of prolonged rioting that brought the city to the attention of the world. More rioting followed when a grand jury decided not to indict Officer Wilson. The subsequent Justice Department report on the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) revealed staggering violations of the constitutional rights of the citizens, particularly the black citizens, of Ferguson. According to the report, it was typical for the FPD to harass African Americans. For example,

in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car.

The report noted that the Ferguson police’s pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause along with their use of excessive force all violated the Fourth Amendment; their infringement of free expression as well as retaliation for protected expression violated the First Amendment. What’s worse, “excessive force” was a constant in Ferguson.

In January 2013, a patrol sergeant stopped an African-American man after he saw the man talk to an individual in a truck and then walk away. The sergeant detained the man, although he did not articulate any reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot. When the man declined to answer questions or submit to a frisk—which the sergeant sought to execute despite articulating no reason to believe the man was armed—the sergeant grabbed the man by the belt, drew his ECW [electronic control weapon, usually known as a Taser], and ordered the man to comply. The man crossed his arms and objected that he had not done anything wrong. Video captured by the ECW’s built-in camera shows that the man made no aggressive movement toward the officer. The sergeant fired the ECW, applying a five-second cycle of electricity and causing the man to fall to the ground. The sergeant almost immediately applied the ECW again, which he later justified in his report by claiming that the man tried to stand up. The video makes clear, however, that the man never tried to stand—he only writhed in pain on the ground. The video also shows that the sergeant applied the ECW nearly continuously for 20 seconds, longer than represented in his report.

What happened in Ferguson is not an isolated incident. Similar violations of basic rights of African Americans and excessive force have been widespread in many cities and towns across the country. The consequences of this abuse along with the violence that is endemic in many U.S. poor urban areas are illustrated by the torment that lack of effective law enforcement creates among the most vulnerable citizens. Leaving aside the toll of murder and physical violence, a recent study of an inner-city neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia, found that fully 46 percent of people suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Wasn’t this sort of trauma something that war veterans who witnessed huge levels of violence and danger while fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq suffered? Yes, but that’s not so different from the daily threat inhabitants of poor neighborhoods in many inner cities experience. In fact, their average rate of PTSD, at 46 percent, exceeds that of war veterans, which stands at around 11 to 20 percent.

This doesn’t look much like liberty. Fear and violence are everywhere in these neighborhoods. So is dominance. What’s going on in Ferguson? In the United States?

The Collateral Damage of American Exceptionalism

The most common narrative of U.S. history emphasizes its exceptionalism in building durable republican institutions, starting with the brilliant design of the Constitution. The reality is more complex. There is indeed much to admire in the evolution of the American Leviathan, but it has also inflicted collateral damage, as in Ferguson, along its path. As we recounted in Chapter 2, the American Leviathan was in some sense created by the Federalists. Their project of building a state was not without anxieties. They were worried that a powerful president could get out of control and abuse his powers or be captured by some group, or “faction”; hence all the checks and balances and the separation of powers between the executive and the legislature. They were also worried that there would be too much popular participation; hence the indirect election of senators by state legislatures and the Electoral College to elect the president. They had to make concessions to those who worried about the preservation of “states’ rights” and the autonomy of the constituent states; hence the limits on federal power and the understanding that anything not specifically in the Constitution was the domain of the states. They also had to make concessions to the mobilized, rebellious, and suspicious common people who worried that this could all spell despotism; hence the Bill of Rights.

The story of this chapter is that this architecture, though it worked to lever the U.S. into the corridor, was a Faustian bargain. One of the major things it protected was the ability of Southern slaveholders to exploit their slaves, making the hands of the state not just tied but also sullied. These sullied shackles meant that the federal state remained impaired in some important dimensions. For one, it obviously didn’t protect slaves and later its African American citizens from violence, discrimination, poverty, and dominance. It is emblematic of this pattern too that it was the poor, black citizens of Ferguson who were harassed, fined, imprisoned, and even killed.

For another, the concessions to the states and the various constraints also meant that the federal state would be hobbled when it came to protecting all of its citizens, not just African Americans, from violence and economic hardship.

Another related consequence of the Constitution’s architecture, especially the limits on federal taxation, is the state’s difficulty in providing broad-based public services. This can be seen in the frequent reliance on public-private partnerships for providing even the most basic public services—from various war efforts to health insurance to law enforcement. Public-private partnerships involve the state providing support, inducement, and sometimes funding, but then counting on the private sector and segments of society to implement policies and also sometimes to influence their directions. This strategy is often praised in popular discussions as a way of tapping into the energy and creativity of the private sector. It has sometimes achieved that, and more important, it has helped keep the U.S. in the corridor despite deep conflicts and myriad new challenges which the state has had to rise up to. The Red Queen then contributed to a steady expansion in the American state’s capacity, but its weakness and inability to tackle urgent problems have remained, and as a result many things have fallen by the wayside. Some public services, such as healthcare and infrastructure, not to mention redistribution of income via taxation, are much harder to provide effectively with public-private partnerships—because markets, even with the support of the state, will often not provide the right level of provision or coverage. The public-private partnership model becomes even more problematic when it comes to law enforcement and conflict resolution. We have seen several times already that “society” is not a monolithic entity, and it will be its more mobilized and politically engaged and powerful segments that succeed in turning societal relations and norms to their advantage, just like elders and men in many stateless societies (Chapter 2) or the Brahmans in India (Chapter 8). The same has been true in the United States in general, and even more so when it has come to public-private partnerships. It has been these segments that have taken part in these partnerships and managed to imprint their wishes on conflict resolution, law enforcement, and public services. African Americans and the poor, the less well-organized groups in U.S. society, have often been left out, with detrimental consequences for their liberty.

Like other Shackled Leviathans, the American state has been quite successful in providing economic opportunities and incentives, and the unification of markets over this vast territory and the modicum of coordination of policies between states that followed the Constitution created an environment ripe for economic growth. Americans took advantage of this with gusto. The economy industrialized rapidly in the nineteenth century, and became the world’s technological leader in the twentieth. But this prosperity too has borne the stamp of American exceptionalism—with all the constraints on the central state, the enduring power of elites and the states, and the peculiarities of the public-private partnership model, American economic growth has been associated with significant inequality and with certain segments of the population, not just the slaves before the Civil War, being completely left out of its benefits.

From this perspective, it’s no surprise that the United States has a homicide rate about five times as high as the Western European average. Or that there are high levels of poverty in many parts of the country and that African Americans have often been excluded from opportunities and public services. Nor should we be surprised that this public-private partnership model hasn’t worked well for providing a social safety net to poor Americans. As society became more mobilized and assertive, the American Leviathan has sometimes been induced to step in with programs such as President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” to fill this void, but this has often been an incomplete effort.

Perhaps paradoxically, we’ll also see that this path of the American Leviathan has had another important unintended consequence: the lack of effective monitoring of state activities in some crucial dimensions. Hemmed in by the straitjacket imposed by the Federalists’ compromises and the public-private partnership model, the American state could not deal through legitimate channels with the increasingly complex security challenges posed by the Cold War and the recent rise in international terrorism. Nor could it effectively play its role as the most powerful country, the de facto policeman of the world. So it developed these capacities on the side without much oversight from society. This set the scene for a Leviathan, though subject to myriad constraints and still wearing the imprint of its foundational weakness, in command of an unshackled security service and military. The resulting fearsome face of the American Leviathan was on display when Edward Snowden laid bare the massive surveillance and data-gathering activities of the National Security Agency targeted at U.S. citizens that had been taking place without any checks from society or even other branches of government.

What Bill of Rights?

So why did the FPD harass the city’s black citizens so much? The short answer is: Money, no doubt mixed with racism. Ferguson used its police department to raise revenues. Officers were ordered to issue as many tickets as possible in order to boost the city’s resources. This meant that any pretext could be used to slap a fine on someone, and a big fine at that. The Department of Justice documented instances in which people were charged $302 for a single Manner of Walking violation, $427 for a single Peace Disturbance violation, $531 for High Grass and Weeds, $777 for Resisting Arrest; and $792 for Failure to Obey and $527 for Failure to Comply, two charges that officers appear to use interchangeably. Once ticketed, if you failed to appear at court, you were issued further tickets. The report recorded an iconic example:

An African American woman who has a still-pending case stemming from 2007, when, on a single occasion, she parked her car illegally. She received two citations and a $151 fine, plus fees. The woman, who experienced financial difficulties and periods of homelessness over several years, was charged with seven Failure to Appear offenses for missing court dates or fine payments on her parking tickets between 2007 and 2010. For each Failure to Appear, the court issued an arrest warrant and imposed new fines and fees. From 2007 to 2014, the woman was arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and paid $550 to the court for the events stemming from this single instance of illegal parking. Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full … As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541.

Since all of this abuse was targeted at them, it led to a serious deterioration in the African American community’s trust in and cooperation with state institutions. The FDP didn’t dispense justice; it dispensed tickets. The basic function of law enforcement broke down and the police were viewed with suspicion and dread.

But how could the FPD violate the constitutional rights of Ferguson’s inhabitants with such impunity? Isn’t the Bill of Rights meant to protect them? Well, actually only to a point. The compromise that created the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government, not the states. The states ended up with something called “police power,” granting them immense discretion. Though the actual language of the Bill of Rights didn’t spell this out, it was understood at the time. The issue was definitively settled by the Supreme Court in 1833, which ruled that the Bill of Rights applied only to actions that the national legislature could take. For example, the First Amendment states that

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Fourth Amendment asserts:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yet the 1833 ruling made it clear that states could pass laws that abridged the freedom of speech and allowed for unreasonable searches and seizures since they were not covered by the Bill of Rights. Only the national legislature was barred from making such laws. The main aim of this interpretation of the Bill of Rights in Southern states was to ensure that slaves did not have any of the rights that “free citizens” had.

The attempted secession of the U.S. South and its defeat at the end of the Civil War in 1865 should have been the death knell for this view of the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, stated:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Yet the Supreme Court repeatedly decided that this did not override the police power of the states. In 1885 Associate Justice Stephen Field argued that “neither the Fourteenth Amendment, broad and comprehensive as it is, nor any other amendment, was designed to interfere with the power of a state, sometimes termed its police power.”

All of this has to be understood in the context of the Redemption period in the South after 1877. The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three amendments aimed at the Reconstruction of the South, meaning institutional reforms aimed at ending slavery and guaranteeing that African Americans had economic opportunities and political rights. Yet in 1877 President Rutherford Hayes doubled down on the original Faustian bargain and gained a majority in the Electoral College by making a deal with Southern politicians to withdraw Northern troops and end Reconstruction. Once Northern troops were gone, the South was “redeemed”—the thrust of Reconstruction was thrown into reverse and many of the old repressive institutions were refashioned in new guises. Particularly notorious were the “Jim Crow” laws which consolidated racial segregation. By the 1890s Southern states were rewriting their constitutions to disenfranchise blacks through poll taxes and literacy tests. Police power was at the heart of the action. The North agreed to leave the South alone and tolerate Jim Crow, and the “interpretation” that the Bill of Rights did not apply to state legislatures was critical to this deal.

It is true that states themselves wrote “bill of rights” amendments to their constitutions. The first thirty-five clauses of the current Constitution of Missouri constitute such a bill of rights. Yet these were not meant to, and did not, have the same bite as the federal Bill of Rights when it came to protecting citizens against state power. The Justice Department report makes it clear that the Ferguson Municipal Code violates the Missouri Bill of Rights. It observes that Section 29-16(1) declares it unlawful to “fail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties where such failure interfered with, obstructed or hindered the officer in the performance of such duties.” The report found that many legal cases initiated under this provision began with an officer ordering an individual to stop even though there was no objective indication that the individual was engaged in any wrongdoing. The order to stop is not a “lawful order” under those circumstances because the officer lacks reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. Yet when people did not stop, they were arrested anyway.

The South that Redemption created persisted right up to the 1960s. A major disruption came with the appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court in 1953 just as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. Warren decided that the Constitution had to adapt to changing circumstances, and there was a majority of like-minded justices on the court. They decided that many of the police actions being used in Southern states to repress and harass civil rights activists were unconstitutional, police power or no police power.

The Supreme Court’s first opportunity to make this point came on May 23, 1957, when police officers muscled their way into the house of Dollree Mapp in Cleveland, Ohio. Mapp worked in the illegal gambling or “numbers” business, and police had received a tip-off that they would find at her house a man named Virgil Ogletree, suspected of bombing a rival numbers boss, Don King (the man who later went on to become boxer Muhammad Ali’s manager). The police found Ogletree, though he turned out to be innocent. They also found some betting slips and some pornographic magazines that Mapp claimed had been left by a previous tenant. She was charged and sentenced to seven years in prison for possession of pornographic materials. Mapp took the case to the Supreme Court, claiming that there were no reasonable grounds for suspecting her to have such materials and that the police did not have a search warrant. In its verdict in Mapp v. Ohio, the court stated that the Fourth Amendment prohibited states from conducting unreasonable searches, concluding that “all evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Federal Constitution is inadmissible in a criminal trial in a state court.” Note the expression “state court.” The Supreme Court then went after a list of other behaviors by states which, while they might have been consistent with individual states’ bills of rights and their police power, were not consistent with the Constitution. In Gideon v. Wainright (1963), it ruled that anyone charged with a felony had the right to an attorney. In Malloy v. Hogan in 1964, the justices decided that the right against self-incrimination, part of the Fifth Amendment (hence the expression “taking the fifth”), applied to state courts. In the famous case of Miranda v. Arizona in 1965, they ruled that confessions elicited from people who had not been read their rights were inadmissible in state courts. And in Parker v. Gladden (1966) and Duncan v. Louisiana (1968), they established that the Sixth Amendment gave people the right to an impartial jury in state courts. The cumulative effect of these rulings was to push the criminal justice systems of the states to conform to the federal Bill of Rights. The evidence from Ferguson, however, suggests that this is still a work in progress.

This pattern of discrimination against African Americans has deep roots, and paradoxically, it was intertwined with the whole creation of American liberty—for some.

American Slavery, American Freedom

Slavery was central to the debates about the reach of the federal government. Slaves weren’t only a huge part of the “assets” of some of the richest people in the original thirteen colonies, but their status was a crucial element in how political power in the new federal state would be distributed. In American Slavery, American Freedom, the historian Edmund Morgan asked how it came to be that so many of the leading figures who formulated the Constitution—George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson—were slaveholders from Virginia. Jefferson was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, which gloriously states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

There are many things to note about this assertion, such as the focus on “men” and not people. But even more blatantly, the government that Jefferson, who owned around six hundred slaves, conceived of was obviously not going to be ultimately instituted with their consent or for their “pursuit of Happiness.” Rather, it made sure that they had no rights for another eighty-seven years.

Morgan’s aim wasn’t just to condemn the hypocrisy of these sentiments, but to understand the connections between slavery and freedom. How could they coexist? And did the freedom for white men in some way rest on the fact that there was a great deal of unfreedom for black folk?

Returning to the beginnings of the colonization of Virginia, starting with the foundation of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607, there was no plan to import slaves. The first and most central leg of the initial design was to exploit indigenous peoples. But indigenous people were few on the ground in Virginia. The second leg was to use indentured English people, who signed themselves up for seven years of service in exchange for room and board and a free passage to the Americas. The option of the indentured laborers was tried, but it turned out that they were difficult to control once on the ground, especially since they could run away to the open frontier. Treating them more harshly wasn’t an attractive option either, as this would make it very difficult to induce more to come. In 1618, the Virginia Company switched from a strategy of trying to exploit indigenous people and indentured laborers to one based on incentivizing colonists. They freed them from their labor contracts, gave them land, and made the whole transition credible by granting white men political rights in a newly conceived General Assembly.

Yet the colony was not economically viable. Early on the colonists had tried to cultivate the local tobacco, but the quality was not good. John Rolfe, who famously married the local princess Pocahontas, experimented with different varieties from the West Indies with much better results. In 1614 the first shipment of tobacco was exported from Jamestown. In the fall of 1619 the first group of some twenty slaves was acquired from a visiting Dutch ship in exchange for Virginia provisions. Tobacco, though it was at first strenuously discouraged by the Virginia Company, eventually made the colony prosperous. After the company collapsed in 1624, there was no holding people back. The indentured laborers could be used to work on tobacco, but soon it became clear that buying slaves was cheaper. The colony spread geographically and many colonists became landowners and tobacco planters. As the space began to fill up, they had second thoughts about the nature of the Assembly and in 1670 decided to restrict the franchise, noting that many

haveing little interest in the country doe oftener make tumults at the election to the disturbance of his majesties peace, then by their discretions in their votes provide for the conservation thereof.

Landowners, on the other hand, could be relied on to behave more responsibly. Just a year previously the Assembly had passed “An act about the casual killing of slaves” which stipulated that “if any slave resist his master … and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accompted Felony, but the master … be acquit from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that prepensed malice (which alone makes murder Felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate.” Who would hold malice toward his own property, after all?

As the slave economy flourished, some got very rich and accumulated large plantations with numerous slaves. But it wasn’t just the large-plantation owners who benefited. Less prosperous citizens acquired land and slaves too, even if in more modest quantities. The wealth that the tobacco-slave complex generated came to be shared more equally among the whites. Between 1704 and 1750, for example, the average size of landholdings in the Tidewater, the area along the navigable waterways that provided prime tobacco land, fell from 417 to 336 acres. At the same time the number of property owners increased by 66 percent. Looking at the Chesapeake Bay area more broadly, evidence from wills shows a steadily more equal distribution of wealth in the eighteenth century. In 1720 some 70 percent of the people who died had estates that were valued at 100 pounds or less. By the 1760s such people made up just over 40 percent of the population, with a corresponding increase in the number of people worth more than 100 pounds. The Virginia Assembly, which had previously changed the franchise to exclude those without property, adopted policies that were friendly toward those same people. It reduced the poll tax and legislated improved terms and conditions for white servants. In any case, the majority of white men were becoming landowners. The slave economy thus created a certain solidarity among white people. Indeed, in Virginia all the slaves were poor and, in effect, all the poor people were slaves. As the English diplomat Sir Augustus John Foster noted in the early nineteenth century, the Virginians “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”