states did form to exploit the slave trade, they were based
on warfare and plunder. The critical juncture of the
discovery of the Americas may have helped England
develop inclusive institutions but it made institutions in
Africa even more extractive.
Though the slave trade mostly ended after 1807,
subsequent European colonialism not only threw into
reverse nascent economic modernization in parts of
southern and western Africa but also cut off any possibility
of indigenous institutional reform. This meant that even
outside of areas such as Congo, Madagascar, Namibia,
and Tanzania, the areas where plunder, mass disruption,
and even whole-scale murder were the rule, there was little
chance for Africa to change its institutional path.
Even worse, the structures of colonial rule left Africa with
a more complex and pernicious institutional legacy in the
1960s than at the start of the colonial period. The
development of the political and economic institutions in
many African colonies meant that rather than creating a
critical juncture for improvements in their institutions,
independence created an opening for unscrupulous
leaders to take over and intensify the extraction that
European colonialists presided over. The political
incentives these structures created led to a style of politics
that reproduced the historical patterns of insecure and
inefficient property rights under states with strong absolutist
tendencies but nonetheless lacking any centralized
authority over their territories.
The Industrial Revolution has still not spread to Africa
because that continent has experienced a long vicious
circle of the persistence and re-creation of extractive
political and economic institutions. Botswana is the
exception. As we will see (this page–this page), in the
nineteenth century, King Khama, the grandfather of
Botswana’s first prime minister at independence, Seretse
Khama, initiated institutional changes to modernize the
political and economic institutions of his tribe. Quite
uniquely, these changes were not destroyed in the colonial
period, partly as a consequence of Khama’s and other
chiefs’ clever challenges to colonial authority. Their
interplay with the critical juncture that independence from
colonial rule created laid the foundations for Botswana’s