economic and political success. It was another case of
small historical differences mattering.
There is a tendency to see historical events as the
inevitable consequences of deep-rooted forces. While we
place great emphasis on how the history of economic and
political institutions creates vicious and virtuous circles,
contingency, as we have emphasized in the context of the
development of English institutions, can always be a factor.
Seretse Khama, studying in England in the 1940s, fell in
love with Ruth Williams, a white woman. As a result, the
racist apartheid regime in South Africa persuaded the
English government to ban him from the protectorate, then
called Bechuanaland (whose administration was under the
High Commissioner of South Africa), and he resigned his
kingship. When he returned to lead the anticolonial
struggle, he did so with the intention not of entrenching the
traditional institutions but of adapting them to the modern
world. Khama was an extraordinary man, uninterested in
personal wealth and dedicated to building his country. Most
other African countries have not been so fortunate. Both
things mattered, the historical development of institutions in
Botswana and contingent factors that led these to be built
on rather than overthrown or distorted as they were
elsewhere in Africa.
I N THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , absolutism not so different from
that in Africa or Eastern Europe was blocking the path of
industrialization in much of Asia. In China, the state was
strongly absolutist, and independent cities, merchants, and
industrialists were either nonexistent or much weaker
politically. China was a major naval power and heavily
involved in long-distance trade centuries before the
Europeans. But it had turned away from the oceans just at
the wrong time, when Ming emperors decided in the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that increased long-
distance trade and the creative destruction that it might
bring would be likely to threaten their rule.
In India, institutional drift worked differently and led to the
development of a uniquely rigid hereditary caste system
that limited the functioning of markets and the allocation of
labor across occupations much more severely than the