motion very different responses. This is the reason why the
relatively small institutional differences in England, France,
and Spain led to fundamentally different development
paths. The paths resulted from the critical juncture created
by the economic opportunities presented to Europeans by
Atlantic trade.
Even if small institutional differences matter greatly
during critical junctures, not all institutional differences are
small, and naturally, larger institutional differences lead to
even more divergent patterns during such junctures. While
the institutional differences between England and France
were small in 1588, the differences between Western and
Eastern Europe were much greater. In the West, strong
centralized states such as England, France, and Spain had
latent constitutional institutions (Parliament, the Estates-
General, and the Cortes). There were also underlying
similarities in economic institutions, such as the lack of
serfdom.
Eastern Europe was a different matter. The kingdom of
Poland-Lithuania, for example, was ruled by an elite class
called the Szlachta, who were so powerful they had even
introduced elections for kings. This was not absolute rule
as in France under Louis XIV, the Sun King, but absolutism
of an elite, extractive political institutions all the same. The
Szlachta ruled over a mostly rural society dominated by
serfs, who had no freedom of movement or economic
opportunities. Farther east, the Russian emperor Peter the
Great was also consolidating an absolutism far more
intense and extractive than even Louis XIV could manage.
Map 8 provides one simple way of seeing the extent of the
divergence between Western and Eastern Europe at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. It plots whether or not a
country still had serfdom in 1800. Countries that appear
dark did; those that are light did not. Eastern Europe is
dark; Western Europe is light.
Yet the institutions of Western Europe had not always
been so different from those in the East. They began, as we
saw earlier, to diverge in the fourteenth century when the
Black Death hit in 1346. There were small differences
between political and economic institutions in Western and
Eastern Europe. England and Hungary were even ruled by
members of the same family, the Angevins. The more