so persistently rare under extractive institutions or that
illustrate the synergy between extractive economic and
political institutions than the Congo. Portuguese and Dutch
visitors to Kongo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
remarked on the “miserable poverty” there. Technology was
rudimentary by European standards, with the Kongolese
having neither writing, the wheel, nor the plow. The reason
for this poverty, and the reluctance of Kongolese farmers to
adopt better technologies when they learned of them, is
clear from existing historical accounts. It was due to the
extractive nature of the country’s economic institutions.
As we have seen, the Kingdom of Kongo was governed
by the king in Mbanza, subsequently São Salvador. Areas
away from the capital were ruled by an elite who played the
roles of governors of different parts of the kingdom. The
wealth of this elite was based on slave plantations around
São Salvador and the extraction of taxes from the rest of
the country. Slavery was central to the economy, used by
the elite to supply their own plantations and by Europeans
on the coast. Taxes were arbitrary; one tax was even
collected every time the king’s beret fell off. To become
more prosperous, the Kongolese people would have had to
save and invest—for example, by buying plows. But it would
not have been worthwhile, since any extra output that they
produced using better technology would have been subject
to expropriation by the king and his elite. Instead of
investing to increase their productivity and selling their
products in markets, the Kongolese moved their villages
away from the market; they were trying to be as far away
from the roads as possible, in order to reduce the
incidence of plunder and to escape the reach of slave
traders.
The poverty of the Kongo was therefore the result of
extractive economic institutions that blocked all the engines
of prosperity or even made them work in reverse. The
Kongo’s government provided very few public services to
its citizens, not even basic ones, such as secure property
rights or law and order. On the contrary, the government
was itself the biggest threat to its subjects’ property and
human rights. The institution of slavery meant that the most
fundamental market of all, an inclusive labor market where
people can choose their occupation or jobs in ways that are