have been possible only if the political power of the king and the elite were curtailed. For instance, if the king continued to command his five hundred musketeers, who would have believed an announcement that slavery had been abolished? What would have stopped the king from changing his mind later on? The only real guarantee would have been a change in political institutions so that citizens gained some countervailing political power, giving them some say over taxation or what the musketeers did. But in this case it is dubious that sustaining the consumption and lifestyle of the king and the elite would have been high on their list of priorities. In this scenario, changes that would have created better economic institutions in society would have made the king and aristocracy political as well as economic losers.
The interaction of economic and political institutions five hundred years ago is still relevant for understanding why the modern state of Congo is still miserably poor today. The advent of European rule in this area, and deeper into the basin of the River Congo at the time of the“ scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century, led to an insecurity of human and property rights even more egregious than that which characterized the precolonial Kongo. In addition, it reproduced the pattern of extractive institutions and political absolutism that empowered and enriched a few at the expense of the masses, though the few now were Belgian colonialists, most notably King Leopold II.
When Congo became independent in 1960, the same pattern of economic institutions, incentives, and performance reproduced itself. These Congolese extractive economic institutions were again supported by highly extractive political institutions. The situation was worsened because European colonialism created a polity, Congo, made up of many different precolonial states and societies that the national state, run from Kinshasa, had little control over. Though President Mobutu used the state to enrich himself and his cronies— for example, through the Zairianization program of 1973, which involved the mass expropriation of foreign economic interests— he presided over a noncentralized state with little authority over much of the country, and had to appeal to foreign assistance to stop the provinces of Katanga and Kasai from seceding in the