so crucial for a prosperous economy, did not exist.
Moreover, long-distance trade and mercantile activities
were controlled by the king and were open only to those
associated with him. Though the elite quickly became
literate after the Portuguese introduced writing, the king
made no attempt to spread literacy to the great mass of the
population.
Nevertheless, though “miserable poverty” was
widespread, the Kongolese extractive institutions had their
own impeccable logic: they made a few people, those with
political power, very rich. In the sixteenth century, the king of
Kongo and the aristocracy were able to import European
luxury goods and were surrounded by servants and slaves.
The roots of the economic institutions of Kongolese
society flowed from the distribution of political power in
society and thus from the nature of political institutions.
There was nothing to stop the king from taking people’s
possessions or bodies, other than the threat of revolt.
Though this threat was real, it was not enough to make
people or their wealth secure. The political institutions of
Kongo were truly absolutist, making the king and the elite
subject to essentially no constraints, and it gave no say to
the citizens in the way their society was organized.
Of course, it is not difficult to see that the political
institutions of Kongo contrast sharply with inclusive political
institutions where power is constrained and broadly
distributed. The absolutist institutions of Kongo were kept
in place by the army. The king had a standing army of five
thousand troops in the mid-seventeenth century, with a core
of five hundred musketeers—a formidable force for its time.
Why the king and the aristocracy so eagerly adopted
European firearms is thus easy to understand.
There was no chance of sustained economic growth
under this set of economic institutions and even incentives
for generating temporary growth were highly limited.
Reforming economic institutions to improve individual
property rights would have made the Kongolese society at
large more prosperous. But it is unlikely that the elite would
have benefited from this wider prosperity. First, such
reforms would have made the elite economic losers, by
undermining the wealth that the slave trade and slave
plantations brought them. Second, such reforms would