which involved a grant of land by the emperor. The
institution is mentioned in thirteenth-century manuscripts,
though it may have originated much earlier. The term gult is
derived from an Amharic word meaning “he assigned a
fief.” It signified that in exchange for the land, the gult holder
had to provide services to the emperor, particularly military
ones. In turn, the gult holder had the right to extract tribute
from those who farmed the land. A variety of historical
sources suggest that gult holders extracted between one-
half and three-quarters of the agricultural output of
peasants. This system was an independent development
with notable similarities to European feudalism, but
probably even more extractive. At the height of feudalism in
England, serfs faced less onerous extraction and lost about
half of their output to their lords in one form or another.
But Ethiopia was not representative of Africa. Elsewhere,
slavery was not replaced by serfdom; African slavery and
the institutions that supported it were to continue for many
more centuries. Even Ethiopia’s ultimate path would be
very different. After the seventh century, Ethiopia remained
isolated in the mountains of East Africa from the processes
that subsequently influenced the institutional path of
Europe, such as the emergence of independent cities, the
nascent constraints on monarchs and the expansion of
Atlantic trade after the discovery of the Americas. In
consequence, its version of absolutist institutions remained
largely unchallenged. The African continent would later
interact in a very different capacity with Europe and Asia.
East Africa became a major supplier of slaves to the Arab
world, and West and Central Africa would be drawn into the
world economy during the European expansion associated
with the Atlantic trade as suppliers of slaves. How the
Atlantic trade led to sharply divergent paths between
Western Europe and Africa is yet another example of
institutional divergence resulting from the interaction
between critical junctures and existing institutional
differences. While in England the profits of the slave trade
helped to enrich those who opposed absolutism, in Africa
they helped to create and strengthen absolutism.
Farther away from Europe, the processes of institutional
drift were obviously even freer to go their own way. In the
Americas, for example, which had been cut off from Europe