dynamics of societies. We’ll see that the reason that Britain
is richer than Egypt is because in 1688, Britain (or
England, to be exact) had a revolution that transformed the
politics and thus the economics of the nation. People fought
for and won more political rights, and they used them to
expand their economic opportunities. The result was a
fundamentally different political and economic trajectory,
culminating in the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution and the technologies it
unleashed didn’t spread to Egypt, as that country was
under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which treated
Egypt in rather the same way as the Mubarak family later
did. Ottoman rule in Egypt was overthrown by Napoleon
Bonaparte in 1798, but the country then fell under the
control of British colonialism, which had as little interest as
the Ottomans in promoting Egypt’s prosperity. Though the
Egyptians shook off the Ottoman and British empires and,
in 1952, overthrew their monarchy, these were not
revolutions like that of 1688 in England, and rather than
fundamentally transforming politics in Egypt, they brought to
power another elite as disinterested in achieving prosperity
for ordinary Egyptians as the Ottoman and British had
been. In consequence, the basic structure of society did not
change, and Egypt stayed poor.
In this book we’ll study how these patterns reproduce
themselves over time and why sometimes they are altered,
as they were in England in 1688 and in France with the
revolution of 1789. This will help us to understand if the
situation in Egypt has changed today and whether the
revolution that overthrew Mubarak will lead to a new set of
institutions capable of bringing prosperity to ordinary
Egyptians. Egypt has had revolutions in the past that did
not change things, because those who mounted the
revolutions simply took over the reins from those they’d
deposed and re-created a similar system. It is indeed
difficult for ordinary citizens to acquire real political power
and change the way their society works. But it is possible,
and we’ll see how this happened in England, France, and
the United States, and also in Japan, Botswana, and Brazil.
Fundamentally it is a political transformation of this sort that
is required for a poor society to become rich. There is
evidence that this may be happening in Egypt. Reda