around 15,000 BC by the melting of the ice that linked
Alaska to Russia, there were similar institutional
innovations as those of the Natufians, leading to sedentary
life, hierarchy, and inequality—in short, extractive
institutions. These took place first in Mexico and in Andean
Peru and Bolivia, and led to the American Neolithic
Revolution, with the domestication of maize. It was in these
places that early forms of extractive growth took place, as
we have seen in the Maya city-states. But in the same way
that big breakthroughs toward inclusive institutions and
industrial growth in Europe did not come in places where
the Roman world had the strongest hold, inclusive
institutions in the Americas did not develop in the lands of
these early civilizations. In fact, as we saw in chapter 1,
these densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse
way with European colonialism to create a “reversal of
fortune,” making the places that were previously relatively
wealthy in the Americas relatively poor. Today it is the
United States and Canada, which were then far behind the
complex civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bo