K ING S HYAAM’S ACHIEVEMENT illustrates how some limited
degree of economic success can be achieved through
extractive institutions. Creating such growth requires a
centralized state. To centralize the state, a political
revolution is often necessary. Once Shyaam created this
state, he could use its power to reorganize the economy
and boost agricultural productivity, which he could then tax.
Why was it that the Bushong, and not the Lele, had a
political revolution? Couldn’t the Lele have had their own
King Shyaam? What Shyaam accomplished was an
institutional innovation not tied in any deterministic way to
geography, culture, or ignorance. The Lele could have had
such a revolution and similarly transformed their institutions,
but they didn’t. Perhaps this is for reasons that we do not
understand, because of our limited knowledge of their
society today. Most likely it is because of the contingent
nature of history. The same contingency was probably at
work when some of the societies in the Middle East twelve
thousand years ago embarked upon an even more radical
set of institutional innovations leading to settled societies
and then to the domestication of plants and animals, as we
discuss next.
T HE L ONG S UMMER
About 15,000 BC , the Ice Age came to an end as the
Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland
ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as
much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time.
This warming seems to have coincided with rapid
increases in human populations as the global warming led
to expanding animal populations and much greater
availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put
into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC , by a period of
cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC ,
global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius
in less than a decade, and have since stayed high.
Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer. The
warming-up of the climate was a huge critical juncture that
formed the background to the Neolithic Revolution, where
human societies made the transition to sedentary life,