that the first truly inclusive society emerged and where the
Industrial Revolution got under way. We argued earlier (this
page–this page) that this was the result of a series of
interactions between small institutional differences and
critical junctures—for example, the Black Death and the
discovery of the Americas. English divergence had
historical roots, but the view from Vindolanda suggests that
these roots were not that deep and certainly not historically
predetermined. They were not planted in the Neolithic
Revolution, or even during the centuries of Roman
hegemony. By AD 450, at the start of what historians used to
call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty
and political chaos. There would be no effective centralized
state in England for hundreds of years.
D IVERGING P ATHS
The rise of inclusive institutions and the subsequent
industrial growth in England did not follow as a direct
legacy of Roman (or earlier) institutions. This does not
mean that nothing significant happened with the fall of the
Western Roman Empire, a major event affecting most of
Europe. Since different parts of Europe shared the same
critical junctures, their institutions would drift in a similar
fashion, perhaps in a distinctively European way. The fall of
the Roman Empire was a crucial part of these common
critical junctures. This European path contrasts with paths
in other parts of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa,
Asia, and the Americas, which developed differently partly
because they did not face the same critical junctures.
Roman England collapsed with a bang. This was less
true in Italy, or Roman Gaul (modern France), or even North
Africa, where many of the old institutions lived on in some
form. Yet there is no doubt that the change from the
dominance of a single Roman state to a plethora of states
run by Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and
Burgundians was significant. The power of these states
was far weaker, and they were buffeted by a long series of
incursions from their peripheries. From the north came the
Vikings and Danes in their longboats. From the east came
the Hunnic horsemen. Finally, the emergence of Islam as a
religion and political force in the century after the death of